Notebook Stories

The blogger at Palimpsest does us all a great service with a fantastic series of posts about favorite stationery shops around the world, mostly in Europe. Each is well-documented with photos: Evripidis in Athens, Greece: Pen to Paper in Brighton, UK: I love visiting stationery shops when I travel. Even though the major brands like [...]

From an exhibition at Dartmouth College: “James R. Crawford’s notebooks. Crawford was a ship’s engineer on the Canadian Arctic Expedition (1913-1918) organized by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. The notebooks, diaries and logs kept by expedition staff like Crawford provide valuable insight into the weather, ice conditions, and wildlife in the Arctic. Crawford, for example, kept daily detailed [...]

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, [...]

This week’s addict emailed me the photo below, and added these comments: The attached photo is of my notebook collection.  Being in the military I take 2 or 3 pages of notes everyday.  I carry a large rite in the rain. They are very durable in both design and paper quality. I have a moleskine [...]

I bought this notebook almost 3 years ago and only just recently got around to unwrapping it. I almost didn’t buy it– though I immediately coveted it when I saw it at A.I. Friedman in NYC, it was priced at $17.60, discounted from an even more ridiculous $22! It’s just a pretty standard pocket size [...]

This is one of my favorite reader-submitted photos ever– meet Tholakele, a 5-year old from South Africa.  On a trip to Paris, left the toy department at Le Bon Marché empty handed and instead picked out a notebook and pen and ink set for herself, which she tried out the minute she and her mother [...]

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 [...]

This week’s addict emailed me from the Philippines: “Thought that I would send you some of my notebook images over the years. 3 are moleskine while the other 2 are Front Notebook & an old diary. I like the pocket square Moleskine notebooks but as you can see from the images they tend to “decompose” [...]

A reader named Colin tipped me off to this week’s addict: David duChemin is a photographer and writer who has taken his notebooks with him on many travels. Below are 8 years’ worth of Moleskines:   David writes These books have checklists (with little boxes for checking), ideas (little light-bulbs), simple drawings, phone numbers, names [...]

I’ve had my eye on Bound Custom Journals for a while. The company was launched in 2011 after a successful Kickstarter campaign, inspired by founder Joel Sadler’s desire for a customized travel journal. The result is pretty extraordinary: a website where you can build custom notebooks page by page, with all manner of page templates [...]