Here are some animal sketches from the recent safari trip. A pocket size notebook is a great thing to bring on safari, especially if, like me, you’re not a photography nut. I brought a tiny digital camera (a Casio Exilim, which also happens to be my favorite golden rectangle-ish shape, though much smaller than 3×5) … Continue reading Animal Art→
Here’s someone who is just starting to use a notebook to track food and exercise: First things first, to find out if I can keep track of my eating and exercising, I have started a food and exercise journal. This is nothing fancy right now, it is just a spiral notebook left over from school. … Continue reading Notebook Uses: Food and Exercise Journal→
Here’s a drawing from a safari trip in Africa. Watercolor and brush-tip marker in a HandBook pocket sketchbook. This was the view from our campfire area– as the sun set, the meadow took on twilight shades, and the tall plants in the foreground were silhouetted. The trip was amazing– I’ll put some of the animal … Continue reading Safari Sketchbook→
Black Cover has just reviewed a very promising Moleskine-alternative, the Picadilly Notebook. It only costs $5, which, given recent economic events, will surely be appealing to all the addicts out there who were planning to cash out their 401ks to buy notebooks. Black Cover has even given readers a code for a 15% discount! Less … Continue reading Two New Notebook Reviews at Black Cover: The Picadilly Notebook and the Agawami +1→
Cat Rambo’s thoughts On Writing Process, a guest post at Jeff Vandermeer’s Ecstatic Days. I write in large sketch pads, because I like the space to draw arrows and circles and make marginal notes. I used to write in Moleskin [sic] notebooks, but nowadays they just don’t seem large enough for novel-sized thinking. I save … Continue reading What Kind of Notebook Is Best for Creative Writing?→
These two posts caught my eye today: This morning I’ve been thinking about how last May my literary archives went to Texas. All my papers (letters to and from me, journals, notebooks, drafts and fragment of work both published and unpublished, contracts, bank statements, phone bills, you name it) had lived with me for over … Continue reading To Keep or Not To Keep: Notebooks and Posterity?→
Theme for today’s links: that impulse to buy new notebooks while having an inability to fill them: I have a nasty habit of saving notebooks I like until I have the perfect thing to write in them, and then I never end up writing in them Rule #7: No new notebooks or writing paper. Use … Continue reading We All Have a Problem→
Via CoolHunting, here’s a line of limited-edition notebooks that will appeal to collectors of unique art and design. They’re called Unfinished Notebooks, made by Studio Matador. They look great, but I’d have a hard time actually writing in one of these, I think– when a notebook seems too special, it can be paralyzing! Who wants … Continue reading Unfinished Notebooks→
Here’s a nice image, from a New York Times article yesterday about the history of gin: It’s a recipe book from the 1820s, with some kind of formula, I guess, for making genever, a Dutch ancestor of the gin we drink today. I love all that small elegant handwriting and the way they’ve crammed so … Continue reading Notebooks From the Past: Recipes for Genever→
Notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, diaries: in search of the perfect page…