Many of you may have noticed that while we increasingly sell more and new different types of interesting stationery and things in our stores, we’ve pulled back from selling these kinds of things online.

The reason for this is really that our website is really a very complex beast: unlike most eCommerce sites, it’s custom built from the ground up, designed to sell magazines and to handle all the different vagaries of sending out your subscriptions.

Basically, this means that because or website is so good at selling magazines, it’s never been very good at selling things that aren’t magazines. With that in mind we’ve decided to launch a brand new online store to sell stationery and gifty things and other cool bits and pieces that we love, and stock in our physical stores. It’s called Nation State and we’d love it if you’d take a look!

So, if you’re looking for Lamy pens, designer masking tape, Scrabble mugs, Moleskines, Pantone notebooks or maybe wanna pre-order the 2012 Frankie Diary or check out the incredible Palomino Blackwing Pencil (recently back in production after going for stupid $$$ on eBay for years, this pencil was a favourite of early Disney animators) we reckon we’ve got you covered.

The site is just very new and we’re still ironing out the wrinkles – but we figured that the quickest way for us to fix these glitches was to get the site in the public eye. So, if you see a spelling mistake or a wrong product image or anything of similar ilk, please do let us know and we’ll happily reward your diligence with a $5 voucher. Any feedback, positive, or negative is very welcome. As we’ve mentioned on many previous occasions, we’re still a very small company, and marketing budgets are, well, non-existent. We’d appreciate any help in getting the word out there about our fledgling project. You can follow us on twitter here @nation_state.

And speaking of vouchers: for the next week only (update: extended on the 16/09/11 for another week!), use the code ‘NSTATE2′ at the checkout for a 25% discount on any order. Tell your friends!

If you’ve been to our Elizabeth Street store this week it wouldn’t have escaped your attention that we’re now stocking about fifty three thousand different ceramic Pantone mugs and Scrabble letter mugs and crumple cups and Keep Cups and other assorted re-useable hot beverage vessels.

So, what’s up with all the mugs?

The long and short of it is that simultaneously received orders from a few different suppliers… meaning that, for the moment, we’re rammed to the gills.

We’re working at re-jigging our shelving to consolidate the mug selection into one or two shelving units but for the moment, Mug Nation is the name and mugs are the game. (Interesting fact: 35% of all transactions at our Greville Street store yesterday were mugs. No kidding.)

And for you, dear reader? We’ve got one Pantone mug and one Scrabble mug to give away.

To enter, just tell us in the comments which letter or colour you’d like and why.*

* Entrants need to be able to pick up their mugs from Elizabeth Street, ’cause we’re pretty sure that there’s no way we could post these out to you without ‘em shattering into a trillion tiny pieces.

As of today at our Elizabeth Street store, there’s a massive box of condoms on the counter.

Let me explain…

We’ve long been admirers of the wonderful Melbourne-based store Third Drawer Down, so when they called last week, asking us to take part in The Free Condom Project we gleefully accepted.

Inspired by the Parisian fashion designer Agnés B (who offers free baskets of condoms in all her stores around the world) The Drawer Down have been furnishing their customers with complimentary prophylactics for some time now.

Allegedly, someone working in family planning for the state government noticed this as they dropped by the store to pick up a David Shrigley card and decided that they could work together to ramp up the initiative… and thus, The Free Condom Project was born.

They say:

The Free Condom Project aims to positively change perceptions about condom use, helping to reduce the increasing rate of STIs by making condoms readily accessible to sexually active people in a fun and engaging way that encourages people to take ownership of their health and wellbeing.

The condoms themselves come wonderfully packaged in little boxes designed by David Shrigley, James Gallagher, Anne De Vries and Kill Pixie and will be available in our Melbourne stores for the foreseeable future.

After months of wildly short supply, we finally have some brand new gift vouchers.

The Great Voucher Shortage of ’10 got pretty bad for a while there. Every time a customer asked for one, we’d have to desperately rummage through wads of already used, torn and creased vouchers trying to find one in half decent condition and often failing.

You might be temped to ask “Why didn’t you simply get the old ones re-printed?”

Well, if you saw them, you’d know why.

Run up by our former Managing Director in MS Powerpoint during the very early days of the business, before we had the luxury of a design budget (okay, we still don’t really have a design budget) and had to rely on our non-artistic selves.

For this newest incarnation, we’ve employed the services of our friend Benjamin Hammond. He’s the guy behind the wonderful One Minute Portraits. We loved that hand-drawn, sketchy style, so we asked him to draw us some ‘mag money’ in a similar vein and couldn’t be happier with how they’ve turned out.

In-store now, the perfect gift for all your friends and loved ones, available in denominations of five, ten, twenty and fifty clams.

We’ve written about the dilemma of offering free public wi-fi before, which really amounts to the simple the fact that there’s always a couple of customers who chew up the quota downloading German latex fetish movies or the entire back catalogue of The Fall… and blow it for everyone for the entire month!

The result of this has been an altogether patchy, on-again-off-again wi-fi service within the store. And while we haven’t worked out how to keep the latex fetishists or Mark E. Smith enthusiasts at bay just yet, we have created a dedicated free Wi-Fi zone on The Third Floor in our Elizabeth Street store in Melbourne.

We’ve blocked the necessary ports (so video downloaders won’t chew up all the bandwith) and put in some chairs, so you’ll now be able to Internet to your heart’s content… hallelujah!