Is my office paper-possessed? Drawer your own conclusions.

I assured Max that, even if I were locked in my apartment for the rest of my life, I would not run out of paper or pens. When he walked into my office, he gave it a three-syllable “Wow!” I hope you will enjoy seeing some of what Max and Benji saw, starting with the glass-fronted cabinet (at top) in which I keep my colored pencils, my Florentine paper-covered pencils, my RSVP ballpoint pens, and my little six-drawer file for red-bordered labels. Behind the jars I keep a postcard of the main balcony of the Palau de la Música Catalana, which I didn’t visit when I was in Barcelona. I think the columns look like big bejeweled pencils.

I like to type addresses and titles of things on vintage red bordered labels, even the very small ones (thanks to a proprietary technique I am not quite ready to divulge). See the little box in the upper lefthand drawer, labeled “These labels are on a roll”: It houses a perforated roll of about 200 vintage labels. There were 1000 labels when I bought the roll a decade or so ago, but I gave half of them to Bari Zaki right away. Since then I’ve used more than half of my half.

One day I will write an ode to my workbench. Today, however, you can read about it on deskblogger, the June 6 feature. (Rosebud moment: At the very front of the bottom righthand drawer, you can see my bronzed baby shoe, in which my father used to keep paperclips.)

The top center drawer holds many small items, including some that may have become vintage in the decades since I acquired them. My favorite desk scissors date back to the summer of 1979. The McGill holepunch that looks like nothing special in fact punches a tiny ellipse. It was a gift circa 1980, from my “office supply guy,” along with heart, diamond, spade and club punches. I gave the others away at some point, but I’m still wild for the ellipse. The red plastic key is from Children’s Fairyland at Lakeside Park in Oakland; I’ve had it since my extreme youth.

The bottom center drawer holds my extensive reserves of business cards. As you may have read in my article about them, my cards come in four versions, letterpress printed on four different Strathmore cover stocks. I keep them separated with little dividers I trimmed down from vintage graph-grid dividers I bought at the Porte de Vanves in Paris in 1997. The orange soft plastic box at the far right is my custom travel kit.

On the wall opposite my workbench is my burgundy file cabinet. The middle section has 18 drawers, labelled in Didot on Printer-Friendly Labels from Paper Source (using the Avery 5160 template in Word). Each drawer has two little latches at the back. When they are down, I can open the drawer all the way (16.5 in.); when they are up, I can slide the drawer out and take it into another room or even, on rare occasions, in the car. It’s true.

Alyson Kuhn thanks Bari Zaki for these fab photos, and for featuring my workbench on her blog.