Notebook Stories

Weirdest notebook story of the week:

With Japan’s birth rate stuck in low gear, the Abe administration has come up with a new idea to make babies: convince the women to have a child earlier rather than later.

It plans to give out notebooks to all young women – and perhaps also to young men – to get that message across.

The notebooks, to be available from next April, will indicate the most appropriate timeframes for pregnancy and childbirth.

Japan’s low birth rate is said to be partly due to women opting for late marriage and delayed childbirth in recent years. In 2011, it stood at 1.39, far short of the 2.07 needed to stop the population from shrinking.

The “Women’s Notebook”, as it has been dubbed by the media, is the brainchild of a government task force which feels that young Japanese women need to be informed about the importance of not putting off childbirth.

Announcing the proposal earlier this month, Ms Masako Mori, the minister in charge of birth issues, said: “As (a woman) grows older, it becomes harder to become pregnant. The risk to mother and unborn child also increases. We must spread this knowledge among teenage girls and upwards to enable women to make choices and plan their lives.”

But the proposed notebook created an uproar among women, who saw it as the government attempting to blame only the female gender for the low birth rate. They also resented the government’s interference in their private lives.

Read more at Japanese women trash ‘notebook’ idea for having babies.

It’s become quite common for people to customize Moleskines by having a company logo stamped or printed onto the cover. Sometimes there might even be some custom content inside. But it is relatively rare that actual books are published using a Moleskine notebook as the medium.

Here are two that I own:

The first is the ADC Young Guns 6/ Undiscovered Letter set. It’s basically a collection of spreads on different graphic designers, published each year by the Art Director’s Club. A wide variety of work is featured in the book, along with a guide to all the selected designers. It’s a fun book to flip through, lots of inspiring images.

The set also includes a softcover book called The Undiscovered Letter, in which people who had been selected as “Young Guns” in the past were invited to envision a 27th letter of the alphabet, and the results were published in this book, to help raise awareness of the lettera27 non-profit literacy organization.

More info here on Moleskine’s website.

I forget how I heard about this other Moleskine book, 0.00 Night. This one is a project by an independent publisher called Zeropuntozerozero (that’s the 0.00), featuring the photographs of Renato D’Agostin and various people’s musing on what night means to them. More info here.

In both of these books, I just love the way Moleskine’s slightly cream-colored paper takes the color printing and gives photos a soft, slightly retro look. It’s like Instagram on paper! And these books are from a few years ago, when they kept the page edges really tight to the covers, no nasty overhang! Both of these are in the pocket size format, which is especially appealing in the thick, chunky Young Guns book.

I’ve always liked collecting small books that are about the same size as my favorite notebooks, so these Moleskines are the best of both worlds for me!

Aside from notebooks, one of my other great loves is books. So I completely identified with this week’s addict’s linking of the two :

Bookish people tend to like books with words already in them as well as books that are blank and waiting to be filled by their own hands. I know I do. You should see the shelf of notebooks I have collected over the years, oh wait! You can, sort of:

I couldn’t get all of them in the photo, the shelf stretches off to the left out of the frame for almost the same length that is in the photo. The vertical pile on the right are unused notebooks waiting their turn. You are looking up at them because they are on a high shelf in a closet. They are in a closet not because I don’t want them to be seen, but because I don’t have enough shelf space outside of the closet on which they might reside.

You can read the rest of the post, which includes a video of someone comparing Moleskine and Leuchtturm, and a lot of comments discussing notebook brands and usage, at A Ramble on Notebooks | So Many Books. Check out the rest of her posts about books, too!

I’m sure everyone’s seen the news stories about the supposed CIA agent trying to recruit Russian spies in a rather goofy manner. Here’s all his super-secret-agent-y stuff: wigs, cash, weapons… and a notebook!

Read more here.

Wow, there were 195 responses to my random giveaway post! It’s seems a shame to have to pick only one winner… though there will be more to the story, as you’ll see in a minute. First, my random winner is… (drumroll please)…

Charles Hadden, comment #160

Congratulations Charles!

Now as for everyone else who entered, I’m sorry you couldn’t all win, but not all of you lost, either! One of my favorite things about this blog has been discovering the generosity and enthusiasm of other notebook addicts. I’m not the only one who sometimes realizes the collection has gotten a little out of hand and decides to share the wealth. A reader named Lia contacted me offering to pass on some notebooks she wasn’t going to use herself, and she took the initiative to find the PO Box addresses of two people who entered the random giveaway and is sending them some notebooks! So we have a couple more winners after all.

This isn’t Lia’s first act of random kindness towards notebook lovers. She has occasionally planted a notebook in a public place, leaving it to be found by someone who will give it a new home:

“[Above] is a photo of the recent Moleskine notebook I left at my local library. I like leaving nice messages inside, so when someone finds it they can be sure they can take it home with them rather than bring it to the lost and found. I’ve left a few notebooks in libraries before, usually on a stack with my favorite books. This way I have the ease of imagining that someone who likes the same books I do will find the notebook. Perhaps the librarians find them, which is alright too.

I’ve heard interesting stories of people forgetting a notebook on a train, and a stranger was kind enough to chase them down and return it to them. It really takes some careful planning to find a good place to abandon a notebook, and hope someone will find use for it in their lives. I’ve found journals sitting in the garbage on the side of the street before, in usable condition, and I took them and used them for class notes when I was in school. “

I love the library placement, right between Leonard Nimoy and Anaïs Nin! I may try this myself now and then. Maybe I’ll leave a little note in the notebook asking its new owner to submit a photo to this blog or tell us how they’re using the notebook! I would love to hear more stories from anyone else who has set notebooks free in the wild!

Thanks again to everyone who entered the giveaway, and to Lia for making it even more fun!

Wow, this is amazingly cool:

To celebrate the forthcoming Van Gogh at Work exhibition and the 160th anniversary of the great artist’s birth, the Folio Society and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, are producing the first-ever facsimiles of the artist’s sketchbooks, limited to just 1,000 copies. The four intact sketchbooks, which span much of Van Gogh’s life, contain some of his most intimate creations – drawings, sketches, poems and everyday matters such as prescriptions and addresses – that offer fascinating insight into Van Gogh the artist and the man. We have one set of four replica notebooks to give away.

Unfortunately the give away is only for UK residents, but you can buy a set from the Folio Society for only… $845!!

Drool.

Via Observer Magazine Competition: Win a set of Van Gogh sketchbooks! | Life and style | The Observer.

I spotted these colorful notebooks a while back and loved the way they look together:

You can buy them via this UK online shop.

via Grafika Notebook Set — Desk Accessories — Better Living Through Design.

This week’s addict was doing some spring cleaning in her office and guess what she found:

As I was tidying my office and creating space, I started to make a pile of my notebooks. Can anyone have ‘too many’ notebooks?? I love stationery and always find myself buying pretty notebooks and adding them to my collection – some so pretty that I never intend to actually write in them.

I am intrigued by the red notebook with the black elastic. It looks almost like a Handbook Journal, but I don’t think that’s what it is…

Read more at My New Office | Victoria’s Paperie.

By Lee Sankey, amazing futuristic sketches in a notebook,. Via the folks at Doodlers Anonymous, who rightly refer to these as “freaking bad-ass!”

See more at Blog: The Future is Drawn – Doodlers Anonymous.

The folks at Cool Material sent me a nice batch of their recently introduced “Word.” notebooks. These are a staple-bound notebook in the vein of Field Notes and the Moleskine cahiers, but with a unique page format.

First impressions:
I love the cover designs, in cool colors and camouflage patterns. They came packaged very beautifully in a box with brown crinkly paper filler, and I think I actually said “ooh!” when I opened it up!

The covers feed sturdy and the whole notebook seems well-made. The staples are aligned correctly on the spine, and nothing is crooked, except for the corners, which are nicely rounded but cut a bit diagonally in some cases, as if the notebook slipped a bit while the corners were being cut. The corners are rounded to a larger diameter than Field Notes or Moleskine.

Inside the front cover there is space for identifying info, and a guide to how the page layout is meant to be used. The designers of these notebooks meant for them to be used to help manage task lists. Each page has 18 lines with a dotted circle at the left. You can indicate the status and importance of the task by circling or slashing the circle. It’s a pretty simple system, and not original to this notebook (see here for one example) but for those who like to manage their task lists this way, it will be handy to have a preformatted page that makes it easier.
The inside back cover has a list of fun facts, just to fill space, I guess.

The paper feels great to write on, nice and smooth. Most of my usual pens worked beautifully, though the Pilot fountain pen seemed to feather out a bit. Bleed-through was slightly worse than average for most pens, though for some reason, the Super Sharpie, always the worst bleeder of all, bled slightly less than I would have expected. Show-through was about average. The paper is acid-free.

The format on these is a standard 3.5 x 5.5″, shown below next to a pocket hardcover Moleskine.

At $9.99 for a 3-pack, these are priced in line with the competition. If you are a list-maker, check them out– you can buy them at Word. Notebooks | Cool Material.

And of course you can also try your luck in the giveaway. I will select 3 lucky winners from entries received in the following ways:
On Twitter, tweet something containing “@coolmaterial” and “@NotebookStories, and follow “@coolmaterial” and “@NotebookStories.”

On Facebook, “like” the  Notebook Stories page  and the Cool Material page, and post something containing the words “Word Notebook” on the Notebook Stories wall.

On your blog, post something containing the words “Word Notebook” and “Notebook Stories” and link back to this blog.

The deadline for entry is Friday May 10 at 11:59PM, EST. Good luck everyone!
And please remember to check my posts on Facebook and Twitter for an announcement of the winner.