Saturday Gift Post--New Cards, New Banks, New Journals.

I've been doing a checklist of things we need for the store before I go to Book Expo.

1. Cards. We finally are stocked back up on graduation cards, but sadly there aren't that many graduations left to go. We've still got a few major high school celebrations, which often means owls.

Amie likes the pig card from Hello Lucky, that says "Wallow in your success." And speaking of which, I brought in several new designs from them featuring the work so Esther Aarts. I LOVE the "Let's Party" card on the left.Aarts is a one person studio based in the Netherlands. You can see some of her other work here, and yes, the web page is in English and Dutch.

2. Speaking of owls, there's finally a new animal bank from Benjamin, and it's an owl. Two years later, and these animals are still a hit. One does wonder why some obvious animals are not to be found. There's no dog, for example.

3. And finally, we're all stocked up on boxed cards and journals. Halley was particularly excited about the Charley Harper otter cards, which we hadn't brought in previously, and several other designs started selling within days.

And that purple box we mentioned last week from M. Cornell? We sold both in less than a week, which is good for us.

And now, off to BEA, where on top of all the book stuff, we usually find one or two gift lines.

Peter Pauper had some journals on backorder. I don't think we'd had the Byzantine style previously. It's kind of a nice teal.