Notebook Stories

The Moleskine mythology of having been the notebook used by Picasso, Hemingway, and Chatwin is, of course, not true, as the Moleskine brand didn’t exist until the late 1990s. But since the Moleskines we know today were modeled after similar notebooks used by these and many other artists and writers in the early 20th century, [...]

Wow, I can’t believe I never heard about this gallery show when it was in New York this past fall: Dylan Stone’s 100 Years project at Ruth Phaneuf Fine Arts. I found out about it via a recent post at Design Observer: The Twentieth Century began on the morning of the 20th of August, 1900, [...]

I love coming across antique notebooks. This was a random find on RobMan170′s Flickr feed: The journal belonged to someone named William Lee who sailed from Hong Kong to England in 1894. There are scans of what seem to be every page of the notebook, including some drawings and the manufacturer’s info on the inside [...]

I am always drawn to old notebooks, even if the notes within aren’t about a subject I’m particularly interested in. I’m tempted whenever I see these stories about notebooks being auctioned, even if they’re way beyond my budget! This one, belonging to Alfred Wainwright, an expert on England’s Lake District, ended up selling for £8,600. [...]

Beautiful… Via A Paper Bear Art Journal Tumblr | Japanese notebook. Found here..

A reader named LC tipped me off to this interesting conference happening this coming weekend at Harvard: “Take Note” brings together scholars from literature, history, media studies, information science, and computer science to explore the past and future roles of note-taking across the university. Panelists will discuss the history of note-taking in different disciplines as [...]

A really interesting find! There is a video at the link below– you can see the notebooks at about 1:30. Three rare handwritten notebooks from the first Indigenous activist to campaign overseas have been given a permanent home in Canberra. Anthony Martin Fernando left Sydney in the 1890s and travelled throughout Europe, publicising the plight [...]

This unique item was a Christmas gift to me from one of the few people who knows I’m obsessed enough with notebooks to write this blog. Of course I was thrilled when I opened the wrapping paper and saw it:   The notebook is about 4×6″, with what appears to be a hand-painted suede cover. [...]

I’d heard about this book called New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 and thought it sounded fabulous: for each day of the year, it gives an excerpt from the diary of a notable New York resident or visitor, including people such as Albert Camus, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Theodore Roosevelt, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Mark Twain, [...]

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 [...]