Notebook Stories

Artists’ sketchbooks always fascinate me, and this one has a particularly poignant story: Bella Chagall, the great love of Marc Chagall, began to write in a small hardcover sketchbook in 1942, the year after the couple arrived in New York. On the first eight pages, she translated Yiddish poetry into French as a means of [...]

R. Crumb is someone whose sketchbooks I’d definitely love to see. And it wouldn’t take that big a lottery win to own one: An archive of material pertaining to the famous counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb – including a pair of original hand-drawn personal greeting cards and a 13-page sketchbook – sold for $16,950 at a [...]

There was an auction last week for all kinds of interesting stuff including a “Large Lot of Diaries, Notebooks & Memo Pads.” I wonder who bought them! Antiques and the Arts Auction Listing — Rare Books, Paper & Ephemera Auction Olde Tyme Stuffe, Inc. 54 Suffolk Street Worcester MA 01604 Thursday, October 22, 2009 at [...]

Here’s one for all you hard-rockin’ notebook fans: A pair of handwritten lyric notebooks (see photo below) by late AC/DC frontman Bon Scott, dating from the late 1970s, was among an array of 300 musical items that went under the hammer at a Christie’s pop memorabilia auction on June 22 in New York. A description [...]