Notebook Stories

Here’s a few oldies-but-goodies from my collection, three Roaring Spring spiral notebooks that I bought in 1980 and used between then and 1982. 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 [...]

I haven’t updated my “using now” photo in a while– the photo that’s been there was of a Piccadilly graph notebook. After that, I went through a Moleskine graph notebook within a couple of months– this was one of the ones I got for 50 cents and it definitely had some quality issues– some of [...]

Introducing my first (rather amateurish!) notebook video– this is a look at the notebook I just finished using. I’ll try to post more notebook videos in the future, and if any readers want to submit links to their own YouTube videos of notebooks, I’ll share those too.

This is a strange example of my notebook obsession. I took two spiral notebooks, removed the spirals, and then combined the pages into one thicker notebook with a taped spine. I probably coated the edges of the pages with rubber cement under the tape, and they are still held in quite well. The lines of [...]

Here’s a pretty basic notebook from the mid-1980s. I used it for a while in high school to keep track of school assignments and such– I dated each page, and noted each day’s assignments and deadlines. It’s got a nice clean design, but is otherwise quite boring! I’m not sure why I favored it at [...]

Here’s another amusing item from my childhood collection: This started out as a simple plain notepad, the kind with glued-together pages and a cardboard backing. They came as a pack of 3 that were meant to be separated, but I liked the chunky thickness so I left them all together. I decorated the first page [...]

When I was about 8 years old, I went with my grandmother once to the office where she’d worked. One of her friends there took a liking to me, and for several years afterwards, we kept in touch through short cards and letters. A few years ago, the friend, whose name was Lucy, returned some [...]

Here’s a gem from the late ’70s/early ’80s. I love the simple cover design with the 25 cent price at the bottom. I wonder what ever happened to the Eastern Tablet company of Albany, NY. When you google it, not much comes up other than the obituaries of people who worked there at one time. [...]

Here’s a few blank books from my childhood: Remember those Nothing Books? They were all the rage for a while. They sold them at a local bookstore and they became quite a fad at my school– kids mainly used them for autograph books, I think, where you’d just have your friends sign a page and [...]