I is for Insects, Ink, and Inspiration

Week I | Friday | Melodies Graphiques

When I visited inspiring Eric de Tugny and his paperie, Melodies Graphiques, in the summer of 2015, I had no idea that by the end of that year he would sell the shop he founded in 1986. I’m outing myself as a stationery obsessive, if you haven’t already guessed; going to his small but rich paper palace was a pilgrimage. This lovely homage to stationery by Angela Murrills describes it as ‘a small temple to the beauty and possibilities of paper and ink.’

Before returning today for the first time since, expecting to see Eric there, I got off the metro at St Paul for the Marais again, but this time stayed on the St Paul side of the street, to eat lunch, appropriately, at Paul. There are Paul outlets in the UK and elsewhere, but they don’t offer my beloved ‘salade Paul’, and their palmiers — my favourite pastry — are at their best in France because they usually almost burn them. I ate outside, getting slightly drizzled on, so I could watch the world go by. Literally.

Then I walked south towards the Seine through still-medieval-in-places streets I love, finding it disturbingly more pee-smelling in places than it used to be. There are noticeably more homeless people in that area of Paris now, too. It’s troubling.

Along the way, I stopped by another sweet favourite, Aux Merveilleux de Fred.

There are three stationery shops on rue du Pont Louis-Philippe. The other two, Calligrane and Papier+, are a little modern for my taste, so I wasn’t troubled that they were closed. Half of Paris leaves for the month of August, so you take a risk expecting your favourite anything to be open if you visit then. The vacuum created by absent Parisians is more than filled by tourists. I only remembered this when I visited the shops connected to the Louvres today to visit another, Japanese, stationery shop, Delfonics. *shudder*

When I say I love stationery, I’m not talking about Swiss austerity, posh monogrammed London paper, or Japanese kawai character-decorated bits. I did fall fully-fledged in love with it in Japan and Korea, when I was living there, but with the sort that is made by illustrators and quite design-y and collage-y: especially stickers, little notebooks, diaries, and post-it-notes. Oh my god, and art supplies. Especially Faber Castell Pitt brush pens, and Pilot G-TEC C4 pens.

I’d go so far as to say that stickers were my gateway drug to becoming a collage artist. And I still collage all my personal organising notebooks with stickers. Perhaps I’ll show you sometime.

Also, just really beautiful paper, especially marbled, and inks. So Venice is a favourite destination, for other reasons too, of course, but my god, the paper. Melodies Graphiques exists to share paper, which I know Eric sourced from Florence. Today I bought two postcards on thick, beautiful card with letterpress illustrations, one with my soul-twin the Eiffel Tower (just go with it, don’t ask questions), and the other with a bird, a sparrow perhaps, saying ‘merci’.

When I chatted with him seven years ago, I learned that Eric was not just a purveyor of paper beauty and magic, but also a highly-skilled, beautiful calligrapher and an illustrator of insects. You can read more about that here and here. I found him so charming, humble, shy, and kind, I really wanted to interview him for a book about stationery I’m pitching. I was going to bring it up today.

But today, instead of Eric, I entered the shop to find Japanese calligrapher Hitomi Takeuchi, who runs it with her husband Giacomo Nottiani and has almost since I was last there. She told me Eric is fine, but pursuing illustration more nowadays. I was sad. But the shop is just the same, in a way. They have rather wonderfully carried it on exactly as Eric had it. She and Giacomo have instead made their own mark by also opening a vintage paper shop right next door *swoon*

And Eric is still on all of the walls. They are covered with decorated envelopes sent to him from around the world by Melodies Graphiques and calligraphy fans. He told me that he just received a few, pinned them up, others saw them and did it too, and so it went on. I always meant to send him one, but ‘never got round to it’. Merde.

🪶