The School Supplies That Made an 80s Childhood Better

School supplies were the only thing a child got to choose about school. Everything else was decided for you. The stationery was yours.

Which is why the shopping trip in late August carried so much weight. It was ostensibly about equipment and it was actually the one negotiation of the year where a kid had real input, and everybody involved knew it.

The binder was the flagship

Whatever the local version was, there was one folder or binder that carried status, and it was the item the whole trip revolved around.

The good ones had a strong closure, a design on the front that said something about you, and interior organization that would be used properly for about three weeks. After that it became a container for loose paper in no order, which was the fate of every binder ever purchased.

None of that mattered on the first day. On the first day it was clean, it closed properly, and it was visible on a desk, which is the entire function.

Pens had a hierarchy

The multi-colour pen with four levers on the barrel was the top of the range and everybody wanted one. Pressing more than one lever at a time was the universal experiment and it never worked cleanly.

Erasable pens existed and were terrible. The erasing worked for about a day and then stopped, leaving a smear, and the ink itself was thin and faded. Everybody tried them once.

Below that, the pen economy was about which specific pen wrote best. Two pens of the same model would be different, one of them noticeably better, and that one became the good pen. It was defended, lent reluctantly, and mourned when lost.

Erasers were collected rather than used

Novelty erasers were shaped like food, animals, or objects, in colours that suggested they were not intended for erasing anything.

They were not used. Using one would have damaged it. They sat in pencil cases as objects, got traded, and got compared. The eraser people actually used for erasing was a plain one at the end of a pencil, and it left grey smears.

Everybody had at least one eraser shaped like something that smelled faintly of strawberry, worked terribly, and was more valuable than any functional item in the case.

The pencil case as display

A pencil case in the 80s was a public-facing object. It sat on a desk, open, all day, in front of everybody.

Which made it a statement of resources and taste, and everybody read everybody else's. The kid with the two-tier case with a fold-out section was operating at a different level. The kid with a plastic bag was as well, in the other direction, and children being what they are, this was noticed.

It was one of the few visible economic signals in a school with a uniform, which is worth being honest about. Not all of the stationery memories are warm ones.

Covering books

Textbooks were school property and had to be covered, which meant a job at the kitchen table in the first week.

The options were adhesive plastic film, which was a genuine skill to apply without bubbles, or brown paper, or a cut-up paper bag. Everybody did it badly the first time. The bubbles were permanent and you looked at them all year.

Then people wrote on the covers, which was the real point. A covered textbook became a surface, and by June it was covered in names, drawings, band logos, and a running tally of something.

The smell of the shop

Stationery shops in August had a specific smell: new paper, plastic, and rubber. It is a genuinely distinctive combination and it survives, because stationery is still made of the same things.

Walk into one now and it is still there, which makes it one of the few available 80s sensory triggers that has not been discontinued.

Why any of this mattered

Because September was mostly bad news and this was the part that was not.

You were going back to a place with rules, a timetable, and people you had not chosen, after eleven weeks of doing whatever you wanted. Nothing about that was appealing. The stationery was the one piece of it that involved getting something new and getting a say in what it was.

Everybody starts the year intending for it to be different. Neat handwriting, organized folder, everything labeled. It lasted a fortnight, every year, without exception, and everybody bought the good folder again the following August anyway.