Here’s an interesting article from The Simple Dollar, in which the writer’s notebooks are a key example of something many of us struggle with: I like pocket notebooks. During my years as a young professional who still harbored some little sliver of a dream of someday becoming a writer, I would often pick up a … Continue reading “Creation versus Consumption”
From Continental Op The other day I purchased a $200 fountain pen. It is an extravagant pen. But, I spend so much of my time writing my thoughts down that it actually seems worth the price. Anyway, it occurred to me the other night that I have so many notebooks that I want to destroy. … Continue reading More Thoughts on Notebooks After Death
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 All my papers (letters to and from me, journals, notebooks, drafts and fragment of work both published and unpublished, contracts, bank statements, phone bills, you name it) had lived with me for over … Continue reading To Keep or Not To Keep: Notebooks and Posterity?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
By Joshua Davis, to be available soon. (via Hip. Young. Thing)
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
I got a kick out of this post from Gothamist, about an elderly lawyer who kept a notebook labeled “Tax Journal,” in which he dutifully recorded expenses that he later deducted. Good idea, in theory, but not when those supposedly tax-deductible expenses are, for 2002 alone, “$111,364 for ‘therapeutic sex’ and massages ‘to relieve osteoarthritis … Continue reading Notebooks Can Be Your Downfall