So here it is another new year, and here I am once again, picking up and cleaning up, getting rid of the old to make way for the new, editing and shredding, filing and piling, giving away and throwing away – all in an effort to tidy up the past to make room for the future.

It’s a daunting task.

I am not a collector, but you live long enough and you end up collecting things. Handprints your kids made when they really were kids. Greeting cards that go back 50 years….

… And notebooks. Dozens and dozens of notebooks.

I started with the notebooks, because boxes full of them are crowding my office: white reporter notebooks, which I have been using for 35 years.

They live in cardboard boxes, 2006 mixed in with 1985 and 1992 and 2001.

The wheat from the chaff. That was my goal. That’s all I had to do. Look inside these notebooks, give them a cursory read and decide what to keep and file, and what to throw way.

But it’s all daunting. Cleaning up and organizing, staying focused and on task – impossible, because here’s the thing. You cannot look through notebooks or greeting cards or books or records or even a drawer full of scarves without losing your direction.

You may be aiming for the future, eyes on a clutter-free tomorrow, heart in the right direction, but then you stumble upon a sentence, or a signature, or remember a song and where you were and who you were when you first heard it. Or you hold a knitted scarf in your hands and see the sweet 11-year-old who knitted it for you, her first real scarf, and all of a sudden you’re not looking at the future anymore, you’re not even in the present. You’ve been hijacked to Memory Lane.

via Is there room for the past in the future? – The Boston Globe.

The Qwerty Journal looks at first like your standard moleskine-type notebook– black hardcover, 3.5 x 5.5″ size, elastic closure, ribbon marker. But you have only to look at it the right way to see what makes it unique. The cover material is smoother than a Moleskine, and it’s etched with a typewriter keyboard design that wraps around the front and back covers and spine. I love the black-on-black design.

When you open the notebook, it gets even better: colorful endpapers with retro typewriter images!

The ribbon marker is red and reads “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Other than these features, the notebook is very similar to others out there. It feels slightly larger and chunkier than a pocket Moleskine (shown for comparison below)– it’s more similar to the heft of a Rhodia Webnotebook.

The binding opens nice and flat. The lined paper feels good with all my usual pens, but my Pilot Varsity fountain pen bled and feathered a bit. In general, bleed-through and show-through were slightly worse than average.

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So this notebook isn’t for the fountain pen stickler, but it would make a great gift, especially if paired with some of the matching accessories, which include bags and pencil cases (at least I’ve seen these in stores– they don’t seem to be available on the company’s website as of this writing).

The other notebook I got was the Rob Ryan “I Am The Notebook Of…” journal. Again, I love the design– no black on black this time, instead it’s a light-hearted whimsical look in turquoise, white and yellow.

The art is based on intricately cut paper– charming and technically impressive! I didn’t test the paper in this one but it’s unlined, with a nice creamy tone to it. The cover is cardboard boards with the colored artwork pasted over it. And there are beautiful endpapers too! The size is a bit larger than a pocket Moleskine.

It’s very lovely and I’m tempted to keep it, but instead I’m going to give it away to some lucky, randomly selected winner who enters in one of the ways below:

On Twitter, tweet something containing “Wild & Wolf” and follow and “@NotebookStories.”

On Facebook, “like” the  Notebook Stories page and post something containing the words “Wild & Wolf” on my wall.

On your blog, post something containing the words “Wild & Wolf” and “NotebookStories” and link back to this post.

The deadline for entry is Friday Jan. 6 at 11:59PM, EST. Good luck everyone!

Many of my notebooks from this time show an interest in science– for want of anything better to write, I’d record data about the weather and astronomy. But in this case, I have no idea how I measured the barometric pressure, humidity, and the wind speed and direction.

One thing I find interesting about my collection is the trend in sizes: when I was little, I liked notebooks that were smaller than what I use now– about 2.5 x 4″ as opposed to 3×5″ or 3.5 x 5.5″. It makes sense, I guess, as my hands were smaller then– my notebooks have grown with me. How about you? Did you use smaller notebooks when you were a kid?

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!

Candice wrote 3 blog posts a few months ago with lots of details about her passion for notebooks and how she uses them as a writer. A few of my readers will be very excited to see that she still has a a “Nifty Notebook” from her childhood– an elusive item that seems to be impossible to find these days, even on eBay! (No relation to my nom de blog, though…I’d never heard of them!)

Some kids in my class carried a fabulous thing called a Nifty notebook. Unlike three-ring canvas binders, the Nifty notebook sported a plastic fold-back cover with magnetic catches, and a built-in pencil and lunch money compartment. Our school store sold Nifty notebooks, but they were too costly. Whenever I bought a new tablet, I hung over the double-door of the closet-sized store, acid with longing for a green Nifty notebook and a pen that wrote turquoise ink.

I loved the pic below as she has one of the brown-covered notebooks that I sometimes used in high school and college.
And check out the quote below explaining one of the other items in the photo:

Above is an assortment of little notebooks I used in high school after I had decided to become a writer of children’s books.  And yes, that is a little book I created on toilet paper.  Desperate writers use anything. 

Toilet paper! That’s a new one!
Read lots more in these posts:
Notebook Week Part I

Notebook Week Part II

Notebook Week Part III

Thanks again, Candice, for sharing your love of notebooks and a peek into your methods as a writer!

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 all these years. I found it when going through my deceased Father’s papers.

It is about 4 x 6 1/2″ with 48 lined pages which are edged in blue. The black, glossy cover has a feint, fine, vertical grooving with a hint of a random watermark pattern when the light hits it at the right angle. The cover feels as if it could be damp proof.

There are no maker’s marks. The pages are held in place with a pair of staples that are rusting. No wonder I am into notebooks as I was born in 1938 !

It’s a neat little notebook, similar to today’s Moleskine Cahiers. I love the handwriting and the stamp! And it’s a wonderful treasure for Colin to have something like this to remember his parents by. Thanks again for sharing it, Colin!

A diary jointly kept by Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne:

John Ruskin’s chess diary:

You can see more images in the slides shows in these reviews:

New York Times: Tales of Lives Richly Lived, but True?
DNA Info: New Midtown Exhibit Peeks at Private Diaries of Writers, Performers.

Being a notebook-obsessed civilian myself, I of course had to go searching around for other examples of cool military notebooks. Check out this Etsy item:

I was heartbroken that it had already been sold. Using the federal supply service code number, I went searching for other examples, but look at today’s version sold here and here, but only to authorized government purchasers:

They kept the retro “Memoranda” logo, but it’s no longer a beautiful little hardcover notebook, just a thinner, flexi-bound one. Sad. But it’s nice to know that our military puts some thought into the notebooks they use… and as a taxpayer, I’m glad to see that they only cost about $10 per dozen!

I love the colors– the outside covers are slightly faded and scuffed compared to the inside front covers. The back covers are just plain cardboard.

You can see below that I stapled all around the edges of one of the front covers. I don’t remember if this was intended to be decorative or to somehow reinforce the cover.

The notebook with the red cover shows off a rather handy modification that I sometimes performed on my spiral notebooks– I’d unwind the spiral, add more paper, and then rethread the spiral back through. I liked having the thickness of the pages be almost equal to the diameter of the wire spiral binding. On this one, I also added the front and back covers of another notebook in order to divide the pages into sections.

The notebook I added must have been a later incarnation of this brand as they added a barcode to the cover, thereby throwing off the pleasing symmetry of the earlier version.

The first page became an index for the 3 sections, but I never bothered to identify them in any particular way.

Throughout all 3 notebooks, I filled the pages with various jottings and doodles and a lot of lists. Below, I was listing tracks from an LP that I wanted to record on cassette tape. (Any ’80s music fans recognize what album this was? The tracks listed here were the more obscure ones, not the hits!)

It’s nice to have nothing more pressing to do than cut out maps and go to the pool! Though I guess I was doing some chores around the house, given the page below:

I also wrote a lot of notes about schoolwork. I like the page below, as you can see what my top school supply priority was!

These old notebooks are always a fun trip down memory lane….