Well-Read Life™

Guy Gear or: How Manly Men Can Carry a Small Bag and Still Be Macho

Okay, guys: I’m going to talk you into carrying a small bag. Or try to.

“No way,” you may be thinking. But hear me out: a small bag is practical, and once you try it, you’ll probably like it.

First, some historical perspective. Women carry bags—purses, handbags, totes. Why? Because dresses and other close-fitting clothes that women tend to wear don’t have usable pockets.

But being every bit as practical as men, women carry bags for their stuff. This is a happy turn of events because women can indulge both their practical side and their aesthetic side and in the process, buy lots of bags. Tens of thousands of people worldwide work in the multi-billion dollar industry of satisfying women’s needs and wants relating to their bags.

Men, on the other hand, carry one bag—either a briefcase or a backpack, or sometimes a messenger bag. And—here’s the crucial difference—we carry our bags only when we’re working.

But what about on weekends, or evenings, or when we’re on vacation and there are things we want to carry? Things like a camera, notebook, book, sunglasses, foldable hat, parts to the kitchen sink we broke while trying to fix it and now have to replace at the hardware store?

Taking stock

Men do have a few options.

If we’re wearing a jacket, we can often make do with its pockets. But, of course, we’re not always wearing jackets.

Or we might be wearing cargo pants. That can work. But most of us wear jeans more often than cargo pants.

Another intriguing possibility—at least to me—is photographer vests. I have two of them in my closet. After wearing them around town and on trips, I found that photo vests did, indeed, let me carry stuff, but they were kind of floppy and ungainly, especially when sitting down or driving. After a while, I concluded that photo vests were probably really useful if you were an actual photographer, but kind of awkward if you weren’t.

So where does that leave us?

Holding a bag

Men in Europe and Asia have carried small bags for at least as long as I’ve been traveling to those parts—some 30 years. Yet American men view such small bags as feminine. An Italian film director can carry one, but not a regular guy.

But hey, aren’t we supposed to be practical? Aren’t we supposed to care more about function than fashion? Shouldn’t we be able to say, “I don’t give a damn what it looks like, it works so I’m carrying it”?

Well, yes, we should be able to say that, but I understand your hesitation. It’s my hesitation, too. For one thing, a small bag would really have to look like it’s a man’s product—if that’s possible.

Turns out, it is.

The first small bag for a man I saw that I actually liked and wouldn’t be embarrassed to carry was one in England. It was made by our leather casemaker there for the British market. You carry it over either shoulder on a single strap.

After trying it out, I fell for its easy practicality.

There was some skepticism at Levenger when we first considered selling the bag. We modified the bag, making it more useful inside with pockets and pen holders, and dubbed it the Saddlebag Sling. It does, after all, look like a saddlebag and it slings over your shoulder. We tried it in catalog and stores, and I’m happy to report that we’ve sold thousands of them over the last few years. 

That success encouraged our second offering: our Bomber Jacket Messenger Bag. It’s the bag I use most often now when not carrying my briefcase. As I write this post, I’m at the end of a trip to China and have been hiking around Beijing with all the stuff I need, totally hands-free—in stores, taxis, packed subways.

Read the reviews on our product page and you’ll see that the Bomber Jacket Messenger is a hit with lots of our guy customers. Women are buying it as well, liking the masculine look and practicality. (I guess they wear our shirts sometimes, too.)

More recently we’ve added another guy bag based on a centuries old angler’s bag design. It’s called the Livingstone Gear Pack.

Via Appia comes to Main Street

It used to be that scooters were what people rode in Europe (think Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday). Now gas-sipping Vespas and their lightweight cousins are commonplace in American cities, and for good reason. They’re practical.

So are small bags for men. And, once we get over our prejudice against them, this is good news indeed for American guys.

So…are you a convert yet, my friend? Let me know. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

And if you already deploy some of our Guy Gear, send us a picture—better yet, a video—of your practical self using our Saddlebag Sling or Bomber Jacket Messenger. You can upload them as part of your product review on our Web pages.

The True Gift of Buying Early

A few Decembers past, I was walking slowly beside Stanley Marcus as we toured a shopping mall. Mr. Stanley, as his many fans called him, was already in his 90s and walked with a cane befitting America’s Merchant Prince. I asked if he had finished his Christmas shopping.

“Yes,” he said. “You see, I shop all year round and put the gifts in the closet. Then, before Christmas, I lay the gifts out on my bed and if the person is still alive, I send theirs to them.”

This made me laugh, of course. As I’ve recounted the story to friends over the years, it’s with the perspective that this must be what life gets to if you’re lucky enough to reach your 90s. And also, that it’s admirable someone could plan ahead so thoughtfully.

Now that I’m older, I wonder if there was another lesson I had missed—the lesson of buying gifts early.

My usual pattern, probably like many people, is to procrastinate so that as the event approaches, I’m increasingly annoyed with myself about not having completed my shopping. A dozen times I might feel the prick of my job undone. What should I buy for these special people in my life?

Occasionally, however, I’ve done things right—the Mr. Stanley way—and purchased a gift quite early that I knew the person would love. What a pleasure this is!

Then I can envision, over and over, how my loved one will adore the gift. A dozen times I can play out in my imagination how delighted the recipient will be when the surprise reveals itself beneath the wrapping. Rather than worrying about the deadline, I look forward to the event.

To actually accomplish this early buying, I’ve had to reprogram myself into always being in the gift-buying mindset—to always have my radar on for matching loved ones with gifts. Not that I always accomplish this, but more and more I do.

As an example, over the summer I was having a beer with one of my brothers-in-law when he mentioned his favorite book and that it was long out of print. I asked about his copy and learned it was a worn paperback. The next day I ordered a nice hardcover, which has been waiting for months in my closet to surprise him this Christmas. (Don’t tell.)  I’m smiling now, just thinking about how much he’ll appreciate it.

If it’s better to give than to receive, then buying early prolongs and amplifies the enjoyment. Could this have been the lesson Mr. Stanley had been offering me?

Alas, I can’t ask him, nor send him a Christmas gift. He passed away a few years ago, vigorous to the end. And his many gifts to me and others still are laid out on the beds of our memories.

 How about you—have you discovered the joys of early or year-round gift shopping? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Behind the Design: Pen Outfitting: The Pen Becomes Your Power Tool

As part of our Behind the Designs series, we’d like to share with you some of our thinking behind the products we create. A couple years ago, we decided to stop merely selling pens and begin outfitting our customers with pens suited to their writing styles and preferences. Doing this would allow customers to gain far more from their writing by hand. We will always want our pens to be instruments of beauty, but now there’s more to the story here at Levenger. I’ve asked Mim Harrison, the editor of Levenger Press, to explain.

—Steve

“May we outfit you with your writing instruments?”

’Scuse me?

If you’ve visited one of our bricks-and-mortar stores recently, you might have had this question put to you by one of our Pen Baristas. Or perhaps you noticed “Pen Outfitting” listed among our store’s offerings. That’s Levenger lexicon for: we’re not merely going to sell you a good pen; we’re going to see how you’d like your pens to perform in the various writing roles you need.

 

We also call it writing from the inside out.

Setting your Preferences

Many of us customize the software on our electronics, the homepage on our computer screens, the music on our iPods. Pen outfitting follows a comparable philosophy for your writing by hand.

Is your handwriting normally small or large? Do you write quickly or slowly? Does your hand favor a lightweight pen or a heavy one? A big barrel or a slender one?

Like setting your Preferences with your digital devices, all these factors make a difference in knowing which pens will work best for your real-life digits.

Reprogrammable DNA

Where all this performance ramps up is in the refills. Nothing sounds quite as pedestrian as the word “refills” (in our offices we also call them cartridges, but if you have a better word, we’d love to hear). And yet these slender tubes of ink are like DNA that you can reprogram—not only with different ink colors but with different writing-point sizes and even different writing modes.

A ballpoint can take on the feel of a liquid ink rollerball, for example, with a rolling ball or Easy Flow refill. A roller ball mode can become a fiber tip mode, for a completely different feel. It’s all in the refills, which turn ballpoints and rollerballs into multi-taskers. (Granted, a fountain pen may be forever a fountain pen, but would you really want it any other way?)

Just like a smart phone, your pen becomes mutli-functional. It’s one argument of several for coming to, or coming back to, pens that are keepers rather than disposable tossers.

The new PC

It just makes sense to be outfitted with a wardrobe of pens. The one you favor for signatures and handwritten notes could well differ from the one that performs the best for longer note-taking. The one that’s best for you when you travel may be different from what you prefer to use at home.

These distinctions are comparable to the laptop-or-smart-phone model. Sometimes it makes more sense to use your laptop; other times it’s more convenient to rely just on your smart phone. Both have a place in your productivity repertoire.

Pens may be old-fashioned in that they’ve been around in one form or another for centuries, but that doesn’t make them obsolete. (The hands that hold them have been around even longer, and they’re still needed.)

As with our advanced Circa notebooks, pen outfitting is another form of PC, Levenger-style. Our PC stands for Productive Coexistence between high-tech and low. It’s based on the belief that power tools come in many forms.

Looks that work
 

What’s so appealing about pens as instruments of productivity is that they’re efficiency with  aesthetics. Ultimately you buy pens because you love the way they write, feel in your hand, and look. We want the beauty of Levenger pens to be more than skin- deep.

So don’t merely buy pens from Levenger. Let us outfit your writing life instead.

—Mim

We know that many customers may not be able to shop our bricks-and-mortar stores for pen outfitting. That’s why we created our refill sampler packs. For ballpoints, rollerballs and fountain pens, these economically-priced sampler kits allow you to try all our different writing modes in your own hand on your own time.

If you like a pen that deploys with a twist or click, choose one of our ballpoint pens—heavy or light, fat or thin, beautifully old fashioned or modern—and then use the ballpoint refill sampler pack to find the refill that’s just what you like.

If you like a pen with a cap, perhaps to use at your desk, choose a rollerball, and order the rollerball refill sampler pack to get the feel for different point sizes of roller balls and fiber tips. These  range from spring-loaded fine points to 2 mm wide broad points—perfect for bold signatures.

All of our refills, by the way, are made in Germany by the Schmidt company, an established and respected name in the world of writing instruments. Before they ship us our refills, their Instrument Technology Division precision-tests them to 1/1,000 of a millimeter and also puts them through a stress test to ensure long-term performance.

And I’d like to know…

How do you view disposable pens versus pens that take refills? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Behind the Design: How two unusual bookends came to be (and how you can help create the next one)

In this series, I take you behind the scenes at Levenger to see how we created some of our new products. I’ve asked Mim Harrison, the editor of Levenger Press, to give us the back story on two unusual bookends you’ll find only at Levenger.

Then I’m going to ask you to weigh in. I’m looking for ideas for our next set of bookends, which I’ll tell you about at the end of this posting.

                        —Steve

Is reading going to the dogs at Levenger?
 
Perhaps to at least one. Meet Minnie, one of two beloved dachshunds that E. B. White owned. (The other was Fred, and as any dachsie owner will tell you, it was more like the dogs owned E. B. White. I know: I’ve been at the beck and call of our mini dachshund, Frankie, for 12 years.)

A dogged search pays off

We first heard of E. B. White’s affection for dachshunds when we published his Notes on Our Times, our collection of some of his marvelous essays from his New Yorker days. Like the breed itself, we found ourselves engaged in a single-minded, nose-to-the-ground quest to sniff out more of White and Minnie/Fred.

True to form, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little did not disappoint. That drawing of Minnie is in fact E. B. White’s handiwork. He sketched it for the family’s Christmas card in 1950. Elsewhere we found a short piece he’d written on Minnie. And in a collection of White’s poems published back in 1928 was a stanza in “Fashions in Dogs” that paid homage to the tiny hound.

As a publisher, we were pleased to have found a way to reprise more of E. B. White’s prose (and poetry). As product designers, we were thrilled to transform a two-dimensional sketch into a three-dimensional object.

We called on the talents of Dean Shipston, the sculptor who’s worked on many of our Featured Creatures, to make the leap from paper to sculpture. Thus did our E. B. White’s Dachshund Bookend come to be.

“Are dogs necessary?”

E. B. White’s dachsie joins the growing Levenger pantheon of famous four-legged creatures, among them James Thurber’s dog.

We found Thurber’s drawing for his lovable canine in—surprise—his book Thurber’s Dogs. The dog had started life as a mere doodle, with legs too long to fit on the page. But Thurber’s drawings were so endearing that they had a way of taking on a life of their own.

And so this doggie, while not quite as demanding as Minnie, did love “serenity and heavy dinners,” according to his master, and hoped both “would go on forever.”

It’s fitting that White and Thurber share virtual shelf space at Levenger. They were contemporaries at The New Yorker and also collaborators. The two concocted a mischievous little book titled Is Sex Necessary? Published in 1929, it was a send-up on…well, check the title. White wrote the even-numbered chapters, Thurber the odd.

We’ll stick to the dogs, thanks. While they won’t fetch your slippers, they will happily uphold your books.

                    —Mim

Now it’s your turn

We’re now working on another literary bookend, and I’d like your help.

If The Great Gatsby were a bookend, what would it be?

Gatsby grabs readers like few other books. Some think it is the Great American Novel, or at least the best candidate so far. Many readers I’ve talked to have read it more than once. One woman told me she reads it every spring. What is the magic that Fitzgerald weaves in his 1925 classic? If it were expressed in a pair of bookends, what would they look like?

We put this question to our good friend and author Les Standiford, who often teaches from Fitzgerald’s classic in his creative-writing classes.

“I’d have some engraved facsimile of the original cover on the upright, and on the horizontal brace, a dock, with a green light at the end,” Les said, and then added: “So much for my design capabilities, eh?”

Do you have an idea? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

                    —Steve