Uniqlo’s Notebook Rule

Check out this quote from an article in New York Magazine about the Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo and their SoHo store: This morning, 30 “advisers” as Uniqlo calls its employees who help customers stand at the bottom of the stairs leading to the lower floor, with notebooks open and pens poised. Each is instructed to [...]

Questions from Readers

I’ve gotten terribly behind in trying to answer emails from some fellow notebook fans with their questions. Please leave a comment if you can point any of these readers in the right direction! From Robert: I am hoping you can help me with my search. I saw someone take out a piece of paper from [...]

Wooden Notebooks

Gary Robbins wrote to me a while back to share some photos of his beautiful handmade wooden notebooks: As the proprietor of my favorite obsessive notebook blog, I though you might enjoy these blank books I’m manufacturing. Xylobooks were designed to marry traditional bookbinding methods with a clean, modern aesthetic that emphasizes the tactile nature [...]

Virginia Heffernan Mourns the Filofax

I enjoyed this article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine: The Demise of Datebooks, by Virginia Heffernan. I miss my Filofax datebook, with its six rings and dark red leather binder. I had a green one first, with a calendar that cast each week across two cream-colored pages. Back then, at age 30, I was [...]

Notebook Addict of the Week: Anne

This week’s addict has quite a stack of super-stuffed Moleskines! One of them has an interesting patterned cover– it’s a Viktor & Rolf limited edition. See more and read the comments at My Moleskine Collection 2006-2010 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Madonna’s Diaries on eBay!

Ooh, juicy gossip item of the week! Madge: Hands off my diaries! Dear Diary: I wonder what would happen if you – my dearest diary – were to fall into the wrong hands. That’s the dilemma Madonna has faced ever since a 12-volume set of notebooks, supposedly the journals she kept between 1987 and 1996, [...]

Fictional Journals

I stumbled upon a blogger who lists her 6 favorite books that feature journals or are told in journal form. Here’s her top pick: 1. I Capture the Castle/ Dodie Smith A delightful English book, set in the 30′s, telling the story of Cassandra Mortmain and her eccentric family. Begins with the classic line “I [...]

Clairefontaine Life.Unplugged. Notebook Elastic Band Hack

I hadn’t seen or heard of these Clairefontaine Life.Unplugged notebooks before reading this post: Ink Nouveau: Clairefontaine Life.Unplugged. Notebook Elastic Band Hack. They seem to be nice little cahier-style notebooks– they don’t come with an elastic, but you can add one if you’re handy with a glue gun! See the original post for further steps. [...]

How to Turn Your Notebook Into a “Mental Swiss-Army Knife”

Here’s an interesting topic on Ask MetaFilter: I have a graph-ruled Moleskine that is begging to be turned into a compendium of obscure, fascinating, and perhaps occasionally useful reference material. Some of the things I want to put in there are Rubik’s Cube algorithms, keys to reading non-Latin alphabets, some simple math formulas (Trachtenberg math, [...]

Moleskine Monday: A Drawing a Day

A fine ambition– I have told myself I’d do this too, but haven’t been as successful in actually DOING it as this blogger: I will begin drawing and submitting one sketch a day from my new Moleskine sketchbook. I will post no matter how awful, haphazard, or incomplete the sketch is. The point is to [...]