It’s time yet again to crowdsource some of the “help me find this notebook” pleas I get, as well as some other tidbits from the mailbag: Zachary wonders “is it wrong that I saw the movie Thor over the weekend and left realizing I really wanted to find out what type of notebook Natalie Portman’s [...]
Paul, a former Addict of the Month, sent me a couple of interesting notebook stories: First, a link to some info about the Jesse Owens Exhibit at a library at Ohio State. From Paul: “In Thompson Library on the Ohio State campus, I saw the travel diary of Jesse Owens, for his 1936 trip to [...]
I wish this could have been me: I GOT a real thrill in December 1999 in the Reading Room of the Morgan Library in New York when the librarian, Sylvie Merian, brought me, after I had completed an application with a letter of reference and a photo ID, the first, oldest notebook of Isaac Newton. [...]
Catching up on some more reader correspondence! From Carol: You probably already know about this—the Voynich manuscript—but I was looking at some cool pictures on National Geographic and thinking about how, really, it’s just someone’s very beautiful notebook! And I’ve crossed the line into custom-made—this week Staples is making three wire-o-bound graph paper notebooks in a [...]
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,” [...]
A reader named Colin sent me photos of a fascinating notebook from his collection: I thought you might like to see a notebook that dates back to 1938 when my parents rented a flat in Sliema, Malta. The rent was £3.10.0 per month [£3.50 in modern money] and the ink has survived amazingly well over [...]
Paul, a former Notebook Addict of the Month, sent me these images of Jack Kerouac’s notebooks. I have to say that I read On the Road and it did NOT make me a Kerouac fan at all… but seeing his notebooks might just change my mind! Paul writes “The first picture is the front page [...]
This has to be the coolest notebook I’ve ever bought. I almost had a heart attack when I stumbled across it on eBay, and it only took me a split second to hit the “Buy it Now” button and grab this beauty for about $45 including shipping. When the notebook arrived in the mail, it [...]
Here’s an exhibit I plan on checking out in the near future: “The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives,” at the Morgan Library in New York. The exhibit includes these lovely items: A diary jointly kept by Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: John Ruskin’s chess diary: You can see more images in [...]
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician, who is quite famous if you’re into math, I guess, though his name would have meant nothing to me if I hadn’t read David Leavitt’s novel The Indian Clerk, which tells a fictionalized version of Ramanujan’s time at Cambridge University. Although I’m sure I wouldn’t understand the least bit [...]
