A nice little piece in the New York Times about keeping a commonplace book, by Charley Locke:
I’ve never been a journal person, though not for lack of trying. A monogrammed duffel bag in my parents’ basement holds many old diaries — a furry leopard-print one from elementary school, Moleskines with unbroken spines from college — each with an optimistic entry or two. But the habit has never stuck. That’s partly down to a lack of discipline, but I think it’s mostly self-consciousness. I can’t help reading whatever I’m writing as some future-me would, rolling her eyes, condescending from the other side of whatever dilemma I’m going through.
But there is one notebook I’ve kept up regularly for a decade: my commonplace book. The slim red book is filled with quotes, lines from books and songs and poems and conversations that stuck with me. Nothing is my original thought, but all of it struck me as meaningful when I wrote it down.
I’m just the opposite– I’ve always thought I should write down more quotes from my reading, but I usually forget. Or more often, I find books more interesting to think about as whole concepts, rather than being struck by individual quotes. But the article has me wishing I’d collected quotes more often, and kept them all together. It would be a very different record of the past than my own thoughts and logging of events. This is an interesting way to think about it:
Thrumming beneath the pages is a shifting self-image. When I read them, I recognize the past me who saw herself in these quotes, but I don’t roll my eyes at her. With others’ words as intermediaries, the harsh light of hindsight softens. If keeping a journal would be a way to look in the mirror and make an honest appraisal of myself, keeping a commonplace book is more like looking at myself out of the corner of my eye.
A few months ago, I wrote about the launch of Plotter USA, but lamented that they were only selling larger sizes, not including the 6-ring “Mini” pocket size they sell in Japan. Happily, they are now introducing the Mini size Plotter notebook for the US market. And even more happily, I received a free sample from Plotter USA to review!
After salivating over the Plotter notebook from afar, it was pretty exciting to open the box they sent me. Their design aesthetic is so snazzy, and the packaging I received didn’t disappoint. The black Plotter-branded tissue paper! The orange and black box holding the binder! Everything just looks sharp and cool.
Plotter unboxing!
I received a binder in brown Pueblo leather. This leather has a slightly scuffed texture, and is very thick and substantial. It is similar in some ways to the leather of my Travelers Notebook, but a bit stiffer, at least at this point in its life. The Travelers Notebook has a softer exterior texture due to its nubuck finish. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the Pueblo leather reminded me of, but I showed it to a friend who has done a lot of riding, and she said “it’s like a saddle. The smell reminds me of a saddle shop.” She’s exactly right– the leather has the toughness of Western riding gear, which gets smoother and shinier with use.
Plotter Pueblo leather compared to Travelers Notebook
I can’t wait to see how the Plotter notebook’s Pueblo leather ages– in the brief time I’ve had it, I rubbed at part of the cover and could begin to see how skin oils will be absorbed, making the surface softer and a little shinier. This is the type of leather that will get better and better with time. In the short term, it’s going to feel a little stiff– the cover springs open now, but I’m sure it will lie closed once the leather relaxes a bit more. (I would imagine that in the larger size Plotter notebooks, the leather’s own weight would keep it closed, even before it’s totally broken in.)
The brown cover is complemented nicely by the distinctive Plotter-branded metal strip on the outside, in a matte gold color. (Other Plotter leather types are paired with different types of metal.) It’s nice that the metal strip is narrow and allows the binder to remain rounded on either side of it, rather than having a squared-off, wider spine. I’m not sure exactly how everything is held together underneath the metal strip– all you can see on the inside is the usual little tabs that grip the ring assembly at each end.
The rings, which are a gold color to match the spine, snap open and shut very solidly. The bundle I received included a leather protector to be slipped around the rings, to prevent them from making dents in the binder. This seems to only come in black– it would have been nice to have a brown option to match the binder.
I really like Plotter’s plastic ruler/protractor page, which has a tab that extends at the top so you can use it as a bookmark. The holes are open so it can be moved without opening the rings. I’m not sure how much people use the font size and line thickness guides on it, but it certainly looks cool!
I’m also not sure how I’ll use the Project Manager inserts, but I love the way they look. The idea is that you can use them to isolate a few pages that relate to a particular topic, and archive those pages in the folder when you take them out of the binder. The colors and texture of the folders are just gorgeous.
The other refills I received are a grid pad and to-do list pad. The tiny 2mm grid is very light and subtle. A fine red line runs along the top, and there’s a slash in the corner that you could use for page numbers or dates. They glue-bind the refill pads so it’s tempting to just use them as stand-alone notebooks! I’m torn (pun intended) as to whether to tear out refill sheets or just leave the booklet intact as is. I did rip out a couple pages of the to-do list refill to stick inside the project folder.
The paper is super smooth and lovely to write on. Everything about it seems so sharp and precise, I almost hated to defile it with my Super Sharpie. There were some teensy specks of bleed through in a couple spots with my fountain pens but spots where I bore down to flex the nib were fine. There was also some feathering with a few pens, including rollerball pens. On the whole, I would say the paper is very fountain pen friendly, and about average in terms of show-through. But it will depend on what your favorite pens are.
Plotter notebooks are expensive: $98-145 for the mini size binders. If you aren’t sure about committing to the leather binder, you might want to try the refills first. At 5″ high by 3 1/8″ wide, they will fit almost any standard 6-ring pocket size looseleaf notebook. My tiny DaVinci notebook, which has smaller rings than the Plotter, will hold the inserts, but the page edges stick out beyond the edge of the binder. Plotter may be one of the only options for fountain pen friendly inserts for refillable notebooks in this size– DaVinci/Raymay inserts are surprisingly not fountain pen friendly, in my limited experience. Nolty has some under their Bindex and Pagem brands, but I haven’t tested them to see if the paper is as good as what’s used in their planners. Filofax says some of their inserts are fountain pen friendly but I haven’t tried any Filofax paper made in the past decade, maybe even longer!
Plotter notebook and some of my other favorite pocket looseleaf notebooks.
For me, the only drawbacks to this Plotter notebook relate to my personal preferences for slightly different proportions– I like a somewhat narrower binder size, and wish the Plotter didn’t have such a big overhang beyond the pages. If they made a “slim” Mini size, I’d be head over heels. Another matter of personal preference is how minimal the binder is. I love the simplicity, but sometimes it’s nice to have pockets. The Plotter notebook can’t be used as a wallet the way a Filofax can. (Unless you add some non-Plotter inserts.)
I still want to find a way to use my Plotter notebook, though. I may look into getting one of the inserts that adds an elastic that you can use to close the notebook, which would allow me to stuff more pages into it. I love the look of Plotter binders (and Travelers Notebooks) when they are broken in and fat with lots of inserts. I gave up on my Travelers Notebook before it got to that point, but maybe I can stick it out with the Plotter! A couple of Field Notes tucked in, and an elastic from a Smartwool socks package, and I’m already loving this chubby bundle!
Many thanks to the folks at Plotter USA for providing me with this sample to review!
I may tend to use a lot of Moleskines and similar pocket hardcover notebooks, but I’m still a sucker for a nice wire-o binding on a notebook, especially one with some interesting design details. I was very happy when Goldspot Pens gave me the opportunity to review a free sample of the Nebula Casual Note, made in Korea by Colorverse.
I chose the dotted paper with an orange cover. The color is great, and I love the subtle space motif: there’s a cute little astronaut on the label, and there are tiny stars stamped in silver foil on the cover. When you remove the labeled shrinkwrap, you’re left with a very minimalist design. Just those stars on the front, subtle branding and specs on the back cover, and the company web address on each page right near the rings.
Size is a pretty true A5, 145 x 208mm, with 120 pages (60 sheets). It’s about 8mm thick.
The pages inside are all perforated so they can be easily detached. (It’s nice that the brand name is left on the strip that remains with the rings.) The dots are all perfectly aligned on every page, which adds to the overall impression of attention to detail. The paper feels a little more toothy than I was expecting– it’s not the silky smoothness of a Clairefontaine or Rhodia, or the fine, thin Tomoe River paper. It didn’t feel especially thick either, though the packaging says it is 90gsm.
I worried that it might not do well with some of my pens… but I was very wrong! This paper has some of the best performance I’ve encountered in terms of avoiding bleed-through, and it’s better than average on show-through. Fountain pens worked great, with no feathering, and the bright white color allowed my colored inks to look vibrant.
I’m trying to find something not to like about this notebook, but there isn’t much! It would have been nice if they’d used a slightly heavier cardboard for the covers, to make the notebook a little sturdier and more durable. And it would be nice if they offered a broader range of sizes.
I’ll definitely be using this notebook on my desk for work notes. A wire-o binding that I can flip over works really well for that purpose, and while the size is a bit smaller than what I’ve tended to use for work notes in the past, I think it will work fine for me.
Goldspot Pens offers the Nebula Casual Note in lined, dotted and plain versions, in several colors. (They also sell hardcover Nebula notebooks with an elastic closure if you prefer that format. I haven’t tried one but it sounds like it has the same 90 gsm paper.) At $15, the Nebula Casual Note may be a little higher in price than some of the competition– Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks in this size can be quite a bit less. But if you prefer a more subtle design and a different paper texture, the Nebula Casual Note may be a great pick for you!
Thanks again to Goldspot Pens for offering this sample for review. I have not received any other compensation for this post and all opinions are my own.
I found this week’s addict via a link at The Cramped, and there’s just so much to love!
First, 96 notebooks all in a row! I am always impressed by this level of commitment to a single notebook type/brand.
Then there’s the red dots on the spines so you can see at a glance how many notebooks were used per year– great trick!
There are additional photos showing how the notebooks are stored and used. They’re even labeled using a vintage typewriter!
The post goes into a lot of detail about Dave’s system of life-logging and note-taking, talking about pens and pencils, as well as paper vs. digital note-taking and archiving. I could never attempt his level of detailed logging, let alone the way he transcribes things to an indexed, searchable digital archive, but I did find myself feeling inspired by his one-notebook capture system. There are some similarities to a minimalist bullet journaling structure, and it just seems so simple. Dave also has this very wise thought about journaling:
I think the journaling habit is more of an enabler of other activities than an actual end goal of its own. It can boost and support everything else you want to do.
Writing down good ideas boosts the generation of good ideas. Writing down goals and todos clears those from the mind so you don’t have to worry about them (for a while).
I need to remind myself of this more often– to focus less on filling notebooks just for the fun of using notebooks, and focus more on what goals my notebooks are being used to support.
These Harvard Coop diaries mark the beginnings of my serious obsession with little black notebooks. I started using them at around the age of 9. Before that, I’d had some 3 x 5″ spiral notebooks, and I liked to get the little Hallmark month-to-a-page planners that drugstores would give out for free, but I barely knew how to write, let alone what to write in them. The Harvard coop notebooks came along at a point when I could control my own handwriting pretty well, so I could use them for more than just scribbling. But I think I would have fallen in love with them even if I had been younger– they awakened a deep love for little black notebooks which has evolved over the years, but never fundamentally changed.
I don’t remember the exact circumstances of getting my first “Coop book,” as I used to call them (one syllable and rhymes with “loop”). I had a childless great-aunt who worked for Harvard, and as a member of the Coop (the campus store for books, records, and other items, which still exists, though it is now operated by Barnes & Noble), she got these diaries for free every year. I guess she noticed my interest in notebooks and since she didn’t use the diaries, thought I might like to have one. I was so thrilled with this gift that she went looking through her desk drawers and found me another diary from a prior year. And then, over the next couple of years, she gave me the new ones as they came along.
I’m an aunt myself now, and can appreciate how much she must have enjoyed giving me these notebooks. I’m not sure I’ve ever succeeded in giving my own niece and nephew such an exciting gift, but I know how good it feels to make a kid happy with something simple. My great-aunt saw me using these notebooks constantly, and often carrying them in a little pocketbook she’d also given me. Everyone in my large extended family probably remembers me always having one of these Harvard Coop diaries in my hand at that age, and when I have pulled out other notebooks in more recent years, sometimes people say “you always liked little black notebooks…”
Like other promotional diaries, these notebooks have pages with for phone numbers and expense records, as well as other extra information in them. Rather than lists of city populations or area codes, the info pages relate to the academic calendar at Harvard and MIT, and the products and services of the Coop, which were extensive. The 1979-1980 diary is the first to mention “computers” as part of the office equipment category, which up to that point had only noted calculators and typewriters. Compact discs join records and tapes in 1985-1986. VCRs are first mentioned in 1986-1987. I underlined the departments I thought I’d like to shop in.
1973-19741987-19881973-1974
The Harvard Coop diaries run from July through July to accommodate academic schedules. It’s interesting to note the changes in how they were made– the 1973 version had a nice textured cover, and other variations in texture occurred in later years. In 1980, they started adding “The Coop” in a logo font on the cover. Until 1980-1981, the cover was removable, so you could tuck things in the pockets, but afterwards, the cover was glued on. The plastic covers on the oldest diaries are stuck on now, but they were obviously meant to have the notebook only tucked into the back pocket. I preferred to have the cover tucked on both sides, even if it obscured the yearly calendar.
1979-19801980-19811987-19881987-19881979-1980
I used the Harvard Coop diaries very intensely in the first few years, but by 1981-1982 the entries are more sporadic. I seem to have stopped using them in the fall of 1983 as everything after that point is blank. The last 3 diaries are completely unused. (I had started buying other slightly larger diaries in 1981 and was using those exclusively as of 1984.) I never use notebooks this small anymore, but I suppose it’s because I myself am bigger. The Coop books look tiny next to my pocket Moleskine and Nolty diary, but proportionally, I think they fit my childhood hands about the way my favorite 3.5 x 5.5″ size does now.
I love having these notebooks in my collection as they are the first true diaries I ever kept. I didn’t always write entries in each day, but I did during certain periods, and I’ve found things that I wouldn’t have remembered otherwise. In 1979, I noted that I was staying with my grandmother, and that my great aunt came and took me to play mini golf and go bowling, and that I went to stay at her apartment for a couple of days. At the end of the week, there is a note dated 1981, saying I couldn’t believe I hadn’t mentioned my grandmother’s illness during those days in 1979. My 2-years-older self noted that it had been very scary and that I felt bad being there while she was sick. She must have been feverish and delirious for a while, and I wrote that she’d told me about some weird dreams she’d been having, including something about a fish made of carrots!
Today, more than 40 years later, I vividly remember many details about the times I stayed at my grandmother’s house, so it was surprising to discover a memory I’d lost. With my Coop books, I was already learning to record my life; already revisiting and reflecting on what I had recorded, and what I hadn’t. These habits continue to this day.
I love it when my wishes come true! I was thrilled when the Nolty Daily Book was announced for 2020 to celebrate their 70th anniversary but then crushed when they decided not to add it to their regular line-up. But thanks to Instagram, I recently spotted a sneaky late addition to their new products: an undated Nolty Daily book! This is a great compromise for people who wanted a daily page layout, and I think some users will even prefer it to the original dated model (see my review of the original one here).
The new Daily Book aka Dailybook comes in two colors: black with black edges, and a sort of greige/taupe, with maroon edges. The taupe color didn’t look quite as nice in person as I’d hoped, but the edges are fun. I might swap a black cover onto the red-edged notebook to see how it looks! The exterior cover is plastic and removable, just like the previous daily book, though the fit seems somewhat looser. If this becomes a successful product, I can envision a secondary market of custom covers made of leather or other materials, for those who want something a little more exciting. I’m definitely tempted to see what else I could use for that purpose– I have a gutted Moleskine City Notebook that is a very close fit but not quite big enough, as I left its original endsheets and back pocket attached. Without those it would probably work.
2020 Dailybook is in the middle
Inside, you get one page of a planner list format, but other than that, it’s all the page-per-day layout of the original daily book, with a blank space to write the date. Day of the week abbreviations at the top of each page can be circled or checked. The original Dailybook had a yearly spread and a section of monthly spreads at the beginning, and at the back there were a a couple notes pages and assorted other info and subway maps, similar to what is in the Nolty Efficiency Notebook. All that has now been eliminated, so the notebook is about 13mm thick instead of 14mm. Some people might miss those extra pages, but to me, it’s fine. I didn’t use them when I had the original Daily Book anyway. And the undated Nolty Daily Book has 414 total pages, so there is some leeway if you need to jot some extra notes outside of keeping to a strict page per day.
When I bought the 2020 Nolty Daily Book, it was announced rather late, and then I dithered about how/where to order it and didn’t end up getting it until early February, so I wasn’t able to use the entire notebook. The undated notebook was also announced late in relation to the rest of Nolty’s 2022 line-up, but since it can be started on any day and doesn’t have to be used for every consecutive day, it doesn’t even matter! I still felt a little anxious to get one before the beginning of the year and was happy when mine shipped fairly quickly from Japan. I originally emailed JMAM an inquiry in mid-December. They responded quickly, I dithered for a few days after hearing how much shipping would cost, and then from the time I confirmed my payment on December 22, it seemed like an amazingly quick turnaround to having the notebooks in my hand on December 31.
The other advantage to the undated format is that you can buy several at once, which is exactly what I did to save on shipping. “Save” is relative here, as the minimum shipping cost from JMAM is about $45 USD! It used to be half that, but the global supply chain issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic have made international shipping much more expensive. I bought 4 daily books, (1980 yen each, which is just over $17 USD) plus one other new Nolty product that I was curious about, and the total came to about $123 USD including shipping. But it is still a lot cheaper than the Hobonichi Techo, which is usually close to $40 not counting shipping. There is a lot to love about the Hobonichi Techo, but I prefer the size of the Nolty Dailybook.
There are a couple of downsides when you compare the undated Nolty Daily Book to the original. I kind of miss the big red color pops on Sundays and extra blocks of green with the month numbers, just as design elements. The “S” for Sundays in the header is still red but it’s so small you almost don’t notice. I also miss the slight extra thickness of the 2020 model, but maybe I just need to tuck or paste some tidbits into the notebook to bulk it up. And the cover does bother me a bit– there’s nothing on it to identify the year, obviously, and my usual method of writing dates on the page edges when I archived finished notebooks gets tricky because of the black color. I miss the embossed year on the spine of Nolty’s dated diaries. I’d really like to cover the undated Dailybook with something else and will continue to play around with other options.
So I had my Nolty Daily Book all ready to use starting January 1, 2022, but did I? Actually, no! I stared at it for a couple of days because I hadn’t yet decided how I want to use it, but on the 3rd, I decided to dive in. In 2020, I felt like I had too many notebooks going at once and couldn’t come up with a good way to separate what I was writing in each one. I love the idea of keeping a daily log, but I already use my Efficiency Notebook for a lot of that. Then I’m usually using a Moleskine or Bindewerk notebook for journaling. I need to think more about what I want to keep some of this separate in the Daily Book, or whether I’d want to try using the undated Nolty Daily Book as a journal– that would mean I’d often use more than one page per day, but that would be fine too. For now, I’m using it as a daily log and allowing myself to doodle it in with my fountain pens. We’ll see if that pattern changes, but I know I will use the 4 I bought in one way or another!
EDITED: as of 2024, the ordering information below is no longer valid. You can order directly from the JMAM website by using the Worldshopping tab that pops up automatically for overseas shoppers. This is a proxy service that buys and ships products to international addresses.
For those who want to order, at the moment it seems this item is available only directly via JMAM, not via Kinokuniya, which is where I have been ordering my other Nolty diaries. Hopefully that will change but in the meantime, here’s how to order, at least for US residents. (In the past, I believe they have not shipped to Europe but I don’t know the current details on where they do and don’t deliver.)
Gather the item numbers for products you want from the JMAM website (for the black Dailybook, it is NTBND1230. For the beige Dailybook is is NTBND1231.) then send an email to e-shop@jmam.co.jp with this information:
(Customer Information)
Name :
Zip code :
Address :
E-Mail :
Phone :
(Order Items)
Item No. :
Item Name :
Quantity :
They will respond to you with a link where you can securely enter your credit card for payment. The shipping cost is 5250 yen for up to 2kg “within 60 cm.” I’m not sure exactly how they calculate the 60cm but presume it is a combination of the package length, width and height. The package is shipped by Yamato Transport. My delivery was then made by UPS.
Do you ever feel like there is a sad and lonely notebook and you might be its only savior? If so, you’re not alone in your desire to do a notebook rescue!
I recently performed a selfless, heroic act of notebook rescue. I went back to Jerry’s to see if they had any more of the Reflexions Pocket Journal that I recently reviewed. (They didn’t, but they had some other Reflexions brand sketchbooks.) I was trying to be really ruthless about not buying anything else I didn’t need, so all I picked up was one eraser for myself. (I was with a friend who was buying pottery tools.) But then when we were in line at the register, I saw one of the old Pen & Ink sketchbooks. This product , from Art Alternatives, has been changed to a different design that I don’t like as much, and I always wish I’d bought more of the old ones, so I picked it up, hoping it was the heavyweight paper version. It wasn’t. So I almost put it back down. But it was the only one sitting there. It seemed kind of forlorn. The last of its kind. Who knows how long it had been knocking around in that store. It was like it was on the island of unloved toys.
So I decided to buy it! Notebook rescue. I’ll be able to use it at some point, so my altruism is not as pure as it seems.
This all made me think of another occasion where I saw a notebook that I thought I might need to rescue. I was at a local bookshop where I’d previously bought a few of the Bindewerk Linen Flex-Cover Journals I like. I noticed they only had one left, a purple one with dotted pages. I was in another one of these moods where I thought I’d better stop buying notebooks I really didn’t need, and I thought “eh, purple is not really my color,” and managed to resist temptation. I think I even saw it a second time, and still resisted the temptation. Then the pandemic hit, and I didn’t set foot in that bookstore for about a year (though I did call them and order some books to be shipped to me. Gotta support the indies or they’ll disappear).
As things started to open up again after the worst of the shut down, I wondered what had happened to that purple notebook. I kept thinking it had probably been sitting on the same shelf for months, forgotten and ignored. I got quite worried about its welfare, and decided that if it was still there the next time I visited the store, I would ask it to forgive me for having been so cold and make things right by buying it. But when I finally went to the store in person, that little purple notebook– MY little purple notebook– was gone. No notebook rescue needed.
I can’t help wondering what happened to it. I hope someone else bought it and has been lovingly using it, even if they’d never appreciate it as much as I would have. But what if the store hadn’t been able to sell it for a long time? What if they marked its price down? (Which would really have been a shame to miss given how expensive those notebooks are.) What if they finally decided it was never going to move and they donated it? Or worse, put it outside in a sidewalk sale, and it got rained on, and had to be thrown out??? I’LL NEVER KNOW!
I think I may have just identified a new syndrome. Forget FOMO, I’ve got FOMAGNOS: Fear of Missing a Good Notebook On Sale.
The Reflexions Pocket Journal is the last notebook I bought before the pandemic! Which tells you a little something about the backlog of items I have for reviews…
I bought the Reflexions Pocket Journal at a Jerry’s Artarama store in February of 2020. I had never seen this brand before, and haven’t noticed it anywhere since. The label shows it as being made by Creative Mark Artist Products, manufactured in China. In doing some research now, it looks like Creative Mark is a proprietary brand for Jerry’s.
At first glance, the Reflexions Pocket Journal looks just like a MoleskineCahier or Field Notes or any other slim pocket notebook, but there are some important differences. The Reflexions notebook is not staple-bound, and it actually has four sewn signatures inside. The construction is more like a hardcover or softcover notebook where the outer cover attaches to endsheets, and the first and last page are glued down near the spine so they don’t open as wide as the rest of the pages.
Once you remove the paper band, there is no branding on the outside or inside of the notebook. The tan cardboard cover seems like a nice strudy weight. The endsheets are a creamy white paper, slightly thicker than the inside pages. The inside back cover has a little corner pocket.
The notebook has 28 sheets/56 pages of “guide dot” paper. The marks are crosses rather than dots, and they are spaced at 8mm, which will appeal to people who find the standard 5mm spacing in other notebooks too small.
The paper is said to be 80 gram, but to me it seemed heavier. The surface is nice and smooth and worked well with most pens. Show-through is about average, but bleed-through is better than average. Some wetter/wider fountain pens feathered and bled, but I was quite impressed by how the TWSBI Eco and Pilot Falcon did, even when applying pressure to flex the soft Falcon nib.
If I had the opportunity to buy more of these notebooks with unlined paper, I happily would. I love have something very slim and portable that still feels substantial enough to use as a sketchbook. But alas, I don’t see these listed on the Jerry’s website! They have some other Reflexions sketchbooks, and I found a review of a similar Reflexions Pocket Journal with a black cover and unlined paper, but the link there is broken and these lovely little notebooks seem to be gone. I haven’t been back to the store where I found mine, but I doubt I’ll have much luck almost 2 years later. The only other online listing I found was at Walmart, which shows Jerry’s as the 3rd party seller, with a $12.99 price. I would guess this is an error.
I don’t have the receipt from when I bought the Reflexions Pocket Journal, but I think it was $4.99. At the time, I thought it would probably just be a cheapo little jotter that might not even be worth that price, I now think the price seems quite reasonable for the quality. Perhaps the recent increases in paper prices made it impossible to keep stocking these, but I hope they’ll be back someday!
Back in 2017, I posted about artist Stanley Whitney and his sketchbooks. I hadn’t heard of him before reading about an exhibition and book featuring his sketchbooks, but I remembered him well when I saw his name on the front page of the NY Times Arts section this past weekend.
Stanley Whitney starts every painting the same way. Like a bricklayer, the 74-year-old artist paints a horizontal band along the top edge of the canvas, then lays down blocks of saturated color, from left to right, across and down, in a vibrant, wobbly, improvisational grid.
“It’s like call and response — the paintings tell me what to do,†said Whitney, who can move right through the paces in one blast, or jump backward or forward as the canvas requires.Â
The article mainly focuses on his paintings, but includes a couple gilmpses of his sketchbooks:
Stanley Whitney’s paintings will be on view at the Lisson Gallery, November 2 – December 18, 2021. Apparently, the same gallery did a show of his drawings last year-:
Last year, a show of Whitney’s sketchbook drawings at Lisson titled “No to Prison Life,†to benefit the philanthropist Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Fund, “made overt the political statement in the works that one wouldn’t think of as being political,†said Logsdail, the artist’s dealer. Framed by the subject of incarceration, “suddenly the primordial grids and abstract shapes were transformed into a claustrophobic and locked cell,†Gund wrote in a statement about the show. (Whitney’s 2004 canvas “By the Love of Those Unloved†hangs prominently in Gund’s apartment, in place of the Roy Lichtenstein painting she sold to start her fund to help reform the criminal justice system.)
I’m sorry I missed that! I love Stanley Whitney’s bright and energetic colors, both on the large canvases and on his sketchbook pages.
Plotter is an intriguing Japanese planner system I’ve been salivating over since at least 2018– apparently without ever having actually written a blog post about it! I was always frustrated that I couldn’t figure out how to order one of these notebooks for US delivery, so I was thrilled to see that the brand is now launching stateside as Plotter USA. Various influencers in the pen and paper community have been enlisted to promote the launch– I, alas, was not among them so I had to sign up to be notified like a mere mortal!
I recently got an email announcing that that the Plotter USA website was open for a limited soft launch. I was excited! But also a bit dismayed, thinking “oh no, I’m going to spend way too much money on yet another leather looseleaf notebook that I’ll never use.”
Once I viewed the offerings, I continued to be excited and dismayed: dismayed that they aren’t offering their full range of sizes (at least not yet), and excited that I could hang onto a little more of my hard-earned money. (Or at least relieved.)
The Plotter USA launch, so far, offers binders in 3 types of leather, and 3 sizes: A5, Bible, and Narrow.
I was almost tempted to try the Bible or Narrow size, but with prices starting at $110 for just the binder, I just can’t do it. If I can’t fit my favorite size leather binders into my notebooking lifestyle, then I doubt I will start making use of a larger size that I’ve never used otherwise. I started to think that maybe I could surprise myself– since I’ve used some notebooks for work that didn’t fit my usual preferences, I wondered if I could use the A5 size as a work notebook. But those binders start at $155, and since I now work from home with my work notebook sitting open on the monitor stand part of my desk, it really wouldn’t fit my needs.
In Japan, Plotter sells binders in 5 sizes. The two smallest ones are “Mini 6 hole,” at 10x14cm, and “Mini 5 hole,” at 8x12cm. The Mini 6 hole size is pretty standard, with rings spaced the same as in looseleaf notebooks I already own from Filofax, DaVinci, and many other brands. The binder is wider than my favorites, but because the leather is flexible, it would probably take well to being overstuffed. (Or maybe I’d have to embarrass myself going to a tailor or leathersmith for notebook alterations again…)
I also noticed that Plotter offers an additional two styles of leather in Japan. In the US, they are offering “Liscio,” “Pueblo,” and “Shrink.” In Japan, “Horsehair” is another option, with a beautiful texture. And they sell the Mini 5-hole in “Bridle,” which has a waxy finish.
So I feel like I’m off the hook on buying a Plotter binder for now… but I still think their stuff is really gorgeous and will covet it from afar. I’d love to hear from any readers who have taken the plunge and are using a Plotter notebook!
Notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, diaries: in search of the perfect page…
