10 stationery items you probably used at school in the ‘90s

In the ‘90s, a shopping trip to WHSmith to pick out stationery for the new school term was almost a time honoured tradition.

As it’s World Stationery Day today, we thought we’d take a nostalgic look back at some of the stationery items you’d have found in a ‘90s kid’s school bag. Any we missed?

1. A fountain pen and cartridges

Usually with a scratchy nib, and it would inevitably leak on your hands or in your pencil case. Some lad in your class would think it was hilarious to use his pen to threaten to flick ink at your school shirt.

2. An Ink Eraser pen

The white end erased any mistakes you made with your fountain pen. The blue end was for writing a correction. The blue end rarely matched the fountain pen ink colour though and, if you didn’t let the white end stuff dry properly first, the blue would just go all blotchy. 

3. Tipp-Ex

Most teachers wouldn’t allow this to be used on work so instead it’d be used to graffiti pencil cases and school bags, or for painting our nails when we were bored in double geography.

4. A 10 coloured pen

The brown coloured ink was rarely ever used. Everyone who owned one would try and press all 10 colours down at the same time at least once.

5. Mechanical pencils

Great until the lead snapped and you didn’t have a spare one. Usually snapped because you were hilariously using it to pretend to give yourself an injection.

6. Geometry Set

Faithfully carried it around even though we didn’t use half of it or even know what most of the contents were meant to be used for.

7. Pencil case

Some sort of novelty shape, like a can of fizzy drink or a packet of crisps were highly favoured. Pencil tins were also popular, even though they generally weren’t actually big enough to fit most of your stuff into.

8. Novelty rubbers

Yes, yes, we know that means something totally different in America. 

Looked cute. Smelled great. Were absolutely rubbish at actually rubbing anything out.

9. Troll pencil toppers

We were slightly obsessed with trolls in the ‘90s, to the point where we’d even put small ones on the end of our pencils. Unfortunately, these days, they now remind us of a certain president so have somewhat lost their charm. 

10. Scented gel pens

Looked cool. Made your homework pretty. And smelled like fruit. What more could you ask for in a pen!

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