An interesting story about a notebook that has become quite powerful as asylum-seekers try to make their way through a chaotic situation at the US border: All conversations stopped when they saw the notebook. Men, women and children — asylum seekers from Central America, Mexico, Africa and beyond — parted to make way for its … Continue reading The Mysterious Notebook of Tijuana
From Walter Benjamin: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: In 1927, on the occasion of a several-months-long visit to Paris, Walter Benjamin began taking notes on the Parisian Arcades for his most ambitious book project…. With her introduction to a selection of these handwritten notes, Nikola Doll describes how the author attempted “to integrate the principle … Continue reading Walter Benjamin’s Notebook
Earlier this year, actor Douglas Taurel presented a one-man show based on the World War I diary of a soldier named Irving Greenwald, which is part of a collection at the Library of Congress. The diary itself is quite amazing: look at the tiny print squeezing all that text into pocket size pages! Read more … Continue reading Irving Greenwald’s World War I Diary
Black n’ Red is a pretty common brand in many stationery stores, but I haven’t talked about them much on this site, for two reasons. One, that all their notebooks are lined, and I gravitate more towards plain, squared, or dot-grid pages. And two, the Black n’ Red notebooks that I tend to see in … Continue reading Review: Black n’ Red Ruled Notebook and Business Journal
Some very intriguing notebook pages were sent to me by a reader named Khang, with this background information: A friend of mine recently sent me several notebooks entries written by Vietnamese and French soldiers aboard the Kilinski, a Polish cargoship. Following the end of fighting in 1954, the ship made trips between North and South … Continue reading Notebook Entries from French and Vietnamese Soldiers
I’ve been enjoying my cross-country trip so far! It hasn’t involved a whole lot of notebook sightings but here are a few so far. At the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, TN, I bought this Vinylux journal. I’d seen these before at a holiday fair in NYC and didn’t buy one, but … Continue reading Cross-Country Road Trip Notes
On my trips to Paris, I found myself almost too paralyzed to sketch because there was so much to look at. But Juan Carlos Figuera doesn’t have that problem! Here are a couple of my favorites from his Instagram posts: Venezuelan urban sketcher Juan Carlos Figuera documents the streets of Paris with expressive watercolor paintings. … Continue reading Juan Carlos Figuera’s Urban Sketching in Paris
It’s been a while since any new product from Moleskine excited me much. But I was happy to see that they’ve finally introduced some updated versions of the City Notebooks. I have almost all the cities that were released when they first introduced these (in 2008, according to Amazon, even though the maps in some … Continue reading Moleskine Monday: New City Notebooks for 2018!
A great piece at My Modern Met about an expat artist and his sketchbooks: Berlin-based English urban sketching artist Keir Edmonds keeps a visual diary that illustrates his life as an expat in Germany’s capital. Believing that “you have to put in 10,000 hours to get really good at something,†the self-confessed “Englishman lost in … Continue reading Keir Edmonds’ Berlin Sketchbooks
This spring, I’m going to be driving from New York to California and back, with lots of stops along the way. I’m hoping that part of my adventure will be finding some cool independent shops that sell notebooks! What are your favorite retailers in the US that I should visit? Arizona and the Bay Area … Continue reading Help Me Plan My Cross-Country Trip!