Today we’ll take a look at another item from my collection of vintage notebooks, a Master-Craft loose leaf binder. At first glance, it looks quite similar to some of the other pocket size loose leaf notebooks I own but there are a couple of interesting differences. This Master-Craft notebook was quite well-used. The exterior is … Continue reading Vintage Master-Craft Loose Leaf Notebook
Here’s a gorgeous little antique notebook that I recently added to my collection. At over a century old, it is still in pretty good shape! The cover seems to be some kind of faux leather wrapped around cardboard, with the year stamped in gold. The pages have gilt edges, rather faded now. Another nice little … Continue reading 1912 Diary from France
I came across a very interesting post on the website of the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre. Their Heritage Education Officer Ruth Butler writes about working on a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, in 2016. She found what she describes as “a treasure-trove of sketchbooks, diaries, letters and photographs … Continue reading Jack Parham’s Notebooks
I just can’t seem to resist a certain kind of vintage notebook on eBay. I have bought several over the years, from various brands, in varying conditions and with various contents. This one is quite adorable. It’s also quite fragile– the cover material (some sort of faux-leather material) is not very flexible, and the edges … Continue reading Another Vintage Marquette Notebook
Half the fun of traveling (for me, at least) is hunting for unusual local notebook brands. It can also be very disappointing when the hunt turns up nothing but the same-old same-old: global brands like Moleskine and Leuchtturm and Rhodia, which seem to have crowded out smaller regional manufacturers. Fortunately, there are intrepid artisans everywhere, … Continue reading Notebooks from Chile
In my post about Denbigh notebooks, I linked to a site that had a photo of a Denbigh notebook from the 1960s: Drew Family Diaries. These diaries are worth a post of their own! Roger Drew created a website to share this amazing collection of diaries kept by members of his family, starting with his … Continue reading The Drew Family Diaries
I forget how I came across this very poignant notebook. It is a diary belonging to Peter Feigl, a 13-year old Austrian Jewish refugee in Vichy France. …Peter wrote about the traumatic events he had just experienced in his diary. His parents were first taken to an internment camp at Le Vernet, and the diary that … Continue reading Peter Feigl’s Diary
This is a really interesting sketchbook, now part of the collection of the National Museum of Australia. It belonged to a young Aboriginal man named Oscar. The article is a bit vague about the circumstances of Oscar’s life– it sounds like he could have been a slave, or indentured servant, or at best an orphan … Continue reading Oscar’s Sketchbook
I recently came across this 2016 Huffington Post article about the auction sale of a Salvador Dali notebook via Pinterest, and thought “How on earth did I miss this?!?” This is one of my favorite glimpses of an artist’s notebook! Here’s A Rare Glimpse Inside Salvador Dali’s Unpublished Diaries Salvador Dali, the great Surrealist painter … Continue reading Salvador Dali Notebook
This World War I notebook found on eBay is a recent addition to my collection of vintage notebooks. I was intrigued by this notebook because I’d never seen one quite like it, and there is no manufacturer’s name or symbol anywhere on it. Unlike the other World War 1 soldier’s diary in my collection, it’s … Continue reading World War I Notebook
