This notebook is one of the gems of my collection because I’ve never seen anything else quite like it. I must have bought this in the early 80s, at one of the various five-and-ten stores in my area. It’s just a generic mass-produced notebook. But this cover just fascinates me! There is something so weird and trippy about the image, which seems to be a collage of architectural photographs around the photo of a thinking man. Whose idea was it to put this image on the cover of a mass-produced notebook? Other notebooks on the market at this time had plain colored covers, or cutesy images or sunsets or rainbows or Snoopy. The story I’ve invented for myself is that the fuddy-duddy old owner of a printing company was trying to pass on the family business to the next generation and his acid-dropping hippy son begrudgingly involved himself by designing some notebook covers that would look a bit more mod and happening than their other offerings.

Anyway, whatever the real story is, I remember staring at this cover, trying to fathom its mysteries. You can still see where I traced some of the image outlines with a ballpoint pen. As for the back cover, for some reason, I’d taped a piece of notebook paper over it. You can see underneath that it was sold by the Top Scholar company of Columbia, MD, but made in Korea.

Inside the notebook, the pages are covered with the usual things I filled notebooks with in those days: lists of information we were studying in school, and doodles and drawings and diagrams, from some sort of electrical wiring idea to a sketch of a bearded Wonder Woman.

There was even a commentary on the notebook itself:

Ok, there’s a lot more at stake in North Korea than what kind of notebooks Kim Jong-Il’s henchmen are using, but I’m fascinated nonetheless. If this is some home-grown North Korean brand, it could be the most challenging notebook ever to add to my collection… how can I get one without setting off another international crisis?!?

Big thanks to David Bogie for sharing this!

Read more at Pour Your Heart Out In These Battlestar Galactica Notebooks » Geeky Gadgets.

See more at Video Notebook — ACCESSORIES — Better Living Through Design.

The legendary mailbox at the north end of Wrightsville Beach found a new home after Hurricane Irene. Twice.
First installed beside a north end dune in 2003 by Bernie and Sidney Nykanen, the couple inscribed the phrase: “Leave a Note” on the mailbox door. Inside was a journal and a pen. Since then, more than 100 journals have been filled with messages from passersby, ranging from cheerful vacation notes to anguished prayers. The Nykanens have renourished the notebooks as needed, and replaced the mailbox itself twice….

The mailbox had to be relocated after the storm, which caused some controversy. Some local residents wanted to make sure people walking to it wouldn’t disturb the fragile eco-system of the dunes, but in the end, an acceptable location was found, and the Nykanens continue to maintain the journal inside:

“We have really enjoyed being the tenders of the mailbox. I love living vicariously through other people’s writings. And it’s nice that people … are actually putting pens to paper in the old-fashioned way of communicating. To me that’s everything,” said Nykanen. “I’m just a romantic at heart.”

I’d love to try something like this… but I think it works better on a beach than it would in New York City. You might get some interesting notes here, but the journal would probably be stolen before you had a chance to read them!

See more notebook photos and commentary at Dave’s blog, Slow Boat. Thanks for sharing these, Dave!

I knew about some of these, but others were a surprise! Time to go back and study Shakespeare, I guess!
Read more at Things We Say Today And Owe To Shakespeare : The Two-Way : NPR.

Two young women in Cincinnati are testing the fringes of Fabulous Fifties nostalgia by selling reproductions of 1955 police mug shots. And their company, Larken Design, has found such a good response here that it is expanding.

“I definitely think it’s the mystery,” says Tara Finke, 28, one of the owners. “I kind of feel like I’m getting a glimpse of something I’m not supposed to.”

But as the business grows, it raises questions with no clear answers about the legality and propriety of distributing government property like mug shots, which are increasingly popular enticements to Web sites like The Smoking Gun.

Should there be privacy protection for the subjects, as well as safeguards to the way public agencies dispose of potentially embarrassing “hard copies” of records, in an age known for using digital technology to recycle found images into art? And, even when it is not the intent, does finding a new use for material like an old mug shot amount to profiting off someone else’s ancient misfortune?

Read more at Old Mug Shots Fuel Art, and a Debate on Privacy – NYTimes.com.

Do you think their use of these mugshots is problematic? If not, you can buy one on Etsy here!