I lived in Brooklyn for years, but never went to Gage and Tollner, an old-fashioned steakhouse that was an institution there for over 100 years until it closed in 2004. They’re working on reopening soon, and in the process, came across some amazing artifacts. From an article in the New York Times: For an individual, … Continue reading Gage & Tollner Notebooks from the 1960s and 1970s
Ok, maybe it seems a little crazy but this is a serious question: should we be thinking about disinfecting notebooks during this Coronavirus pandemic? (The same question would apply to pens.) Imagine you are sitting in a cafe, writing in your notebook. You set it on the tabletop. What if the person sitting there before … Continue reading Disinfecting Notebooks
The February 29th New York Times has a piece by Tess Taylor, talking about her pilgrimage to California, to visit as many places photographed by Dorothea Lange as she can. She also read Lange’s pocket notebooks, now archived at the Oakland Museum of California. Ms. Lange, best known for her Depression-era photographs of migrant laborers, … Continue reading Dorothea Lange’s Notebooks
Here’s another story found via a reader tip. (Thanks Nicholas!) In a new book called Facebook: The Inside Story, author Steven Levy talks about Mark Zuckerberg’s notebooks, and it turns out that Levy even has some pages from one of the early notebooks. Zuckerberg has supposedly destroyed the rest. THE YEAR IÂ first met Zuckerberg, he … Continue reading Mark Zuckerberg’s Notebooks
Nanami Paper‘s fountain pen friendly Tomoe River paper notebooks seem to be very popular. But I kind of wrote them off because they only seemed to sell larger A5-ish sizes rather than the pocket size I prefer. However, I recently took another look and was glad to see there are a few options that might … Continue reading Pocket Size Notebooks and Planners from Nanami Paper
Here’s another shoebox tour! This box of notebooks, one of the many that hold my collection, contains lined and dot-grid notebooks that I may find a use for someday, or at least like enough to want to keep. As with the previous shoebox tour, I first just looked at the box without taking any of … Continue reading Shoebox Tour: A Box of Dot-Grid and Lined Notebooks
Isn’t that just the best headline ever? It kills me that this story didn’t include a photo of the actual notebooks! It is a story that is, literally, as old as the hills, yet its history can be traced in just eight small notebooks. The accounts ledgers of Victorian bookkeepers in the upper Dales, meticulously … Continue reading “Old notebooks that open a window on lost world of Wensleydale cheese”
I love this collection of notebooks, which have been used to record hundreds or even thousands of haiku. (The original post at Notebookers.jp is in Japanese, so I am relying on Google translate.) I don’t know much about Japanese writing and only know the most basic structure of haiku, but short poems with this kind … Continue reading Haiku Notebooks
I must have missed this Brainpickings article when it was originally published in 2014, but I’m glad I discovered it via Pinterest! Artist John Vernon Lord created amazing illustrations to accompany James Joyce‘s Finnegans Wake in a collectible edition published by the Folio Society (now out of stock, alas). The illustrations are stunning, but of … Continue reading John Vernon Lord’s Notebooks
If you read my recent post about Moleskine’s pocket size sketchbook being discontinued and are freaking out, here’s a slight silver lining to the cloud: Moleskine.com seems to be clearing out their stock with a 50% off sale right now. I would be buying a few myself, except that I already bought a few on … Continue reading Moleskine Pocket Sketchbooks 50% off