Notebook Stories

Artists’ sketchbooks always fascinate me, and this one has a particularly poignant story: Bella Chagall, the great love of Marc Chagall, began to write in a small hardcover sketchbook in 1942, the year after the couple arrived in New York. On the first eight pages, she translated Yiddish poetry into French as a means of [...]

There are lots of people out there who are passionate about organizing their lives using the GTD (Getting Things Done) method with Moleskine notebooks. Here’s one person’s technique:   The first part of my system begins with my weekly tasks page. This is the big rocks I have to get done this week. The two [...]

This week’s addict emailed me a link to her first and second blog posts about her obsession with journals: From Part 1: Yes it is true, I love notebooks. I mean L.O.V.E. I buy them because I like the size. I buy them because I like the shape. I buy them because of the cover. [...]

 Sketchnotes seem to be more and more popular these days. I think Mike Rohde first coined the phrase and the practice of creating beautiful illustrated notes, but lots of others are getting on the bandwagon, so much so that the design website Core77 is introducing a regular feature on their site, focusing on various examples [...]

Have you ever wanted to make your own hand-bound notebook but weren’t quite sure how? There are people out there who will teach you: Simple Handmade Books at Brooklyn Brainery: Inspired by our recent bookbinding class, we’ve been making lots and lots of notebooks lately. So for this month’s Sunday party, we’ll show you the [...]

I bought a cool book a few weeks ago and was planning to blog about it… but then I discovered that there was more to the story– an exhibition at the Morgan Library! Here is a partial list of the kinds of lists included in “Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations,” [...]

One of the fun things about working in publishing is a system called Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks estimated sales of books. They gather data from lots of independent booksellers, chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders, online sellers like Amazon, and other retailers like Target and Costco and grocery stores. They aggregate these numbers and [...]

This week’s addict is such an addict she even calls herself an addict in the title of her blog, Journal Addict. For those of you who don’t already follow Dolly’s blog, it’s well worth reading. She does some notebook reviews but also has lots of great thoughts about how and why we keep journals, as [...]

Here’s a writer who is an enthusiastic advocate for using a pocket notebook, in his case, a Paperblanks. What I’m advocating is having a small notebook (and a mini-pen — those things don’t break when you sit on them, and can fit in a front jeans pocket) ready with you so you can be ready [...]

I picked up this Noteletts notebook last summer in the Art Brown pen shop. It was the first time I’d seen this brand, and I was excited to spot something new, despite being a little disappointed in the sizes available. My favorite notebooks are always a golden rectangle proportion, and usually about 9 x 14 [...]