“They remind me of my heart’s desire…”

From a lovely essay about using notebooks, by Elaine Fletcher Chapman: Most writers I know work from notebooks. I carry mine with me, as Jason Shinder was known to advise, along with a folder of poems I am currently revising. Even on my shorter commutes, I carry the pair. They remind me of my heart’s [...]

Notebook Addict of the Week: Evan

Evan emailed me to fess up about his addiction: I’m a notebook addict in the worst way-For the past few Christmases I’ve asked for journals for Christmas and received them, hopefully ensuring I won’t run out for awhile. I write everyday, mostly journal entries, but also notes, ideas, story outlines. I’ve found that actually writing [...]

Henry Jones’ Grail Diary Replica

I don’t even remember how I stumbled across this, but it looks pretty cool, even if you’re not a die-hard Indiana Jones fan: The guy who created this also offers similar products for the Hobbit and other films and TV shows, and can rebind journals in real leather, with an aged look and rubbed corners. [...]

Random Notebooks from My Collection

Here’s a few things I pulled out of one of my storage boxes, about half of which is filled with childhood notebooks from the late ’70s to mid-’80s. First, a small orange looseleaf notebook. I was probably in about 6th grade when I decided to devote it to Astronomy and colored the cover with a [...]

Notebook Addict of the Week: DreamerO

This week’s addict also emailed me photos of her excellent notebook collection, with some commentary: I enjoy pocket journals, the saddest part is that they run out of pages so soon and I always feel like I’m abandoning a best friend when I have to start a new one. My pet peeve is that I [...]

Rediscovering Notebooks

I loved this blog post in appreciation of using notebooks. The author talks about how she used notebooks as a kid, but gave them up as she grew older, feeling that it was somehow immature to be scribbling down her thoughts and ideas and the emotions of youth. But fortunately, she came back to the [...]

100 Years of Diaries

Wow, I can’t believe I never heard about this gallery show when it was in New York this past fall: Dylan Stone’s 100 Years project at Ruth Phaneuf Fine Arts. I found out about it via a recent post at Design Observer: The Twentieth Century began on the morning of the 20th of August, 1900, [...]

1940s Diary

These photos were submitted by former notebook addict of the week Paul, who is always a source of interesting tips! These diaries were kept by one of his family members from 1941-1944. The interior of the first one is an earlier version of the western diary I wrote about in this post, both made by [...]

Review: Bound Custom Journals

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 [...]

Spying Journal

I think I have turned my 8-year-old niece into a notebook fan! A couple of years ago, we started playing “spy” a lot when I’d visit. For me, of course, half the fun of playing spy has always been that it’s an excuse to carry a notebook and write things down! So that was always [...]