What a cool thing: The Exercise Book Archive is a website that is preserving exercise books, otherwise known as children’s school notebooks, from around the world and over hundreds of years! You can click on each notebook and see larger images of the cover and interior. Here’s the pink one from 1980s China in the … Continue reading The Exercise Book Archive
Here’s some tips from a few artists about how to get yourself going with a sketchbooking (or notebooking) habit: Indian artists offer tips on how to start sketchbooking in 2020. I feel like my own sketchbook has been rather stagnant lately so I need to take some of these insights to heart! Mumbai-based artist Sameer … Continue reading How To Start Sketchbooking
What notebooks would you pack for a year-long road trip? Gary is back home now, I think, but he spent a year traveling around the USA in a camper van and the photos below show the notebooks he brought with him: What does a stationery fanatic and writer do to haul the necessary tools and … Continue reading Notebook Addict of the Week: Gary Varner
Shaunta Grimes at The Every Day Novelist has some interesting posts about notebooking. This one was particularly appealing to me: 10 Books That Will Make You Want to Keep a Notebook I was familiar already with a couple of the notebooking books she recommends. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a classic, and contains the … Continue reading Books to Inspire Notebooking
I really miss the “Book by Its Cover” blog, especially the series of posts about sketchbooks. (The blog has been inactive since 2015 but the archives are still viewable.) Here’s a cool post I’d flagged a few years ago: Book By Its Cover » Sketchbook Series: John Garcia. I love this shot of John’s pile … Continue reading John Garcia’s Sketchbooks
An interesting item from the New York Times: (Some of) the Many Ways Times Journalists Take Notes If news reports make up the first draft of history, a reporter’s notebook is where that draft begins. Whether it’s an iconic quote scribbled in a notepad or a detailed scene describing a moment in time, the notes that … Continue reading How Reporters Take Notes
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 something I came across on the website of the Morgan Library: This is the only surviving personal notebook of the French artist Édouard Manet (1832–1883). He used it in the early 1860s, when he was between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty, documenting aspects of his everyday life and work in the two years … Continue reading Édouard Manet’s Notebook
I loved these images of Octavia Butler’s notebook, with her affirmations about becoming a successful writer. (She eventually did.) The post at Black Cardigan Edit where I found these also shows off some notebook pages by Sylvia Plath and Frida Kahlo! Other posts about writers’ notebooks Other posts about artists notebooks and sketchbooks
A fun Washington Post article by Josephine Wolff (see also this post about her favorite notebooks), about the many books now available on various methods of journaling and how to use notebooks. I cannot stop buying books about how to write in notebooks. It’s not that I require instructions. I’ve been doing it for as … Continue reading Books About How to Use Notebooks