It’s been a while since I attempted any sort of notebook hack or alteration (except for removing the pen loop from a Taotree notebook), but I recently decided to do a little experiment.

I’ve always like the Moleskine City notebooks because they have a nice thickness, with more pages than the normal pocket size notebooks. They also have 3 ribbon markers. But of course much of the interior is taken up with city info and there isn’t that much space to just write or draw. And the issue with Moleskine notebooks in general, as we all know, is that the paper isn’t great if you want to use certain types of pens. Even their sketchbook paper has issues– the smooth card stock they use can be great for some kinds of drawing, but not so much for watercolors, or fountain pens.

The pocket sketchbooks that have become quite popular are those made by Stillman and Birn. Artists love these because they are available with a variety of good quality paper types, in different weights, textures and colors. Their pocket size is the 3.5 x 5.5″ format, same as Moleskine, but they only come in softcover. S&B also makes hardcover sketchbooks but they have square corners and don’t get any smaller than 4 x 6″.

So I wondered what would happen if I did a little transplant surgery, removing a Moleskine City Notebook interior and filling the cover with Stillman & Birn paper. I had managed to buy an extra Moleskine City notebook very cheaply, so it seemed worth a try!

Taking apart the Moleskine isn’t too hard– you just have to cut very carefully between the endpaper and the first signature to remove the page block. You can then remove the ribbons from the page block spine.

I popped the S&B sketchbook inside the cover and it almost fits perfectly, except that the corners are rounded to a much larger diameter than the Moleskine cover. For me, this made the whole project a non-starter. It’s bad enough to have too wide an overhang, but when it’s wider on the corners than along the sides, that is just ugly.

I also think that even if the corners matched perfectly, it would not quite work to just attach the S&B softcover inside as is. It works well in terms of its thickness–the one I’m using is an Alpha, but some of their other paper types would be too thick to fit. But I don’t think gluing the Moleskine endpapers to the cover of the S&B would make for a strong enough binding, given the stiffness of the S&B spine.

Other people have done this notebook hack by making their own sewn signatures and attached them to the Moleskine endpapers in this way, and it always made me wonder how well it held up to use. In most bookbinding, there is additional material glued to the spine (called the “mull”) that also gets attached to the cover boards underneath the endpapers. The mull is traditionally linen or some kind of loosely woven cloth, but on the Moleskine, it appears to be made of paper. From what I can see in my dissection, it isn’t glued that strongly to the spine, but it must add some reinforcement helping to keep the cover attached.

So now I am trying to figure out if there will be a next stage to this notebook hack. I could try removing the endpapers and back pocket and see if that would give me room to glue in a different, slightly thicker S&B sketchbook, gluing the outside cover of the S&B directly into the Moleskine. But that wouldn’t solve my corner problem. I could buy a larger size S&B and cut it down to match exactly, but that would be a lot of work, and would probably turn out looking all butchered on the edges. And I’d have to be sure the cutting didn’t run into the stitches that hold the signatures together. I could also try folding, cutting and sewing my own paper signatures… and while I’d really love to do my own bookbinding someday, I don’t have all the proper equipment to do it right, and this whole thing is starting to sound like an expensive pain in the ass.

At least for now, I’m going to have to admit that I just don’t have the patience to successfully carry out this particular hack. But if any readers have their own stories of similar projects, I’d love to hear them!