As we usually do when we to into New York, my husband (fellow artist Anthony Palumbo) and I went to Kinokuniya for some imported books and art supplies. I am apprehensive about the possibility of tariffs making the price of these kinds of items balloon, but for today at least they were still as expected.

Tony’s main objective was to find the new Cannabis Works 2 by Tatsuyuki Tanaka. Find it we did, and if you are looking for more of what’s in the first Cannabis Works book, you will not be disappointed. It’s a gorgeous book!

I was set on getting some more Midori paper, which is what I’ve been using since Moleskine discontinued most sizes of the Sketch Pad. I’d been irritated with the inconsistent quality of their paper for some time, and asked artist friends to tell me their favorite replacement. The Midori turned out to be just right – thin enough to be very transparent on a lightbox, very smooth, and it has a similar beautiful warm cream color to the Moleskine paper I used to love.

Though I’ll be cutting the pages out, it is really nice that these journals have a lie-flat binding. This would be so helpful for scanning pages!

We also got this interesting-looking academic treatise on the socio-cultural context of Akira, and its impact on Japan and the world. The cover is really cool, with spot gloss on the title and Kaneda and his bike. I am glad I looked up more info about it online before buying, because there are no pictures at all in it. But as a bit of a superfan I’m looking forward to learning more about a formative work of art.

Tony got a new pack of Saji nibs, which were clearly a different metal than the ones we’ve seen before. They seem to be aluminum instead of chrome. His impression of the difference initially was that the ink beaded up on the aluminum surfacel, but that it wrote and drew the same. He says that the metal of these Saji nibs doesn’t clean off as well as the chrome ones, though.

He also got a beautiful clear yellow sparkly nib holder which I am jealous of, even though I don’t really use dip pens so I have no use for it.