My Collection, Nostalgia, Personal, Vernon McMillan

Mid-1980s Vernon McMillan Notebook

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Here’s an oldie but goodie, which I used during my freshman year of college:
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It was made by the Vernon McMillan company, based in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The “Memo Book” typography is pretty cool… and check out that snazzy, wave-like VM logo! I love the mottled orange cover– I don’t know if there’s a name for this kind of cardboard, but you used to see it used a lot more for the covers of notebooks and looseleaf binders. It doesn’t seem to be as common nowadays, but I think someone needs to bring it back into favor!

The back is a nice plain cardboard, quite thick.

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One thing I love about this notebook is the ratio of the thickness of the paper to the diameter of the wire spiral. I really hate it when spirals stick way out beyond the paper, but this one is nice and tight.

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The spiral is in surprisingly good shape considering that this knocked around in my bag for quite a while. I guess I’m so fond of notebooks that I unconsciously take good care of them.

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As always, I find random things jotted down on pages. I’ve yet to answer the question below:

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I must have started this notebook right at the beginning of the school year, as I was writing down course materials I had to buy and notes about classes.

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There were also a lot of notes about how much money I had and was spending, homework assignments, and other random anxieties of a college student, plus several pages that a friend scribbled all over when one of my roommates let her into my room to wait for me while I was out. At the time I was rather annoyed that she’d wasted all these pages of my nice notebook, but it’s a funny thing to look back at now.

I never use spiral notebooks like this any more, but I do love looking at all the old ones I’ve saved. You just can’t buy them like this any more…

Links, Moleskine, Organization, Other People's Notebooks, productivity

Moleskine Monday: Tear It Up!?!

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Here’s an interesting post on notebook usage at a blog called Always Learning. I have to admit that the thought of ripping out lots of Moleskine pages did make me cringe a bit. I think I tore a page out of one of mine for the first time the other day, but it was just the back notes page from one of the Color-a-Month booklets, and it was to give a 5-year-old a drawing of a unicorn named Fred that she’d requested I create for her! But here’s someone who tears out lots of pages– perhaps even ALL the pages?!? He doesn’t specify, but he may even throw the whole notebook away when it’s finished!

I’ve been conducting an experiment that may seem like heresy to those who swear by the Moleskine brand of pocket notebooks.

I rip the pages out.

Now before you organize an angry mob of townspeople with torches and pitchforks, let me explain why I’m doing such a thing, and how I use my Mokeskine 3.5″ x 5.5″ ruled pocket notebook with my GTD system.

As I wrote in my previous post on Capture and Focus, it’s important to have a notePAD not a noteBOOK as a capture tool, so you can toss loose sheets, 1 per idea, into your In Box for later processing. I don’t use the Moleskine as a journal; I have another solution for that, so permanence is not an issue as it would be if I were using the sketchbook like my son does. (Yes, he keeps them.)

The durability of the Mokeskine stitched binding actually put me off from buying it for a while. I looked in all the office supply stores for a nice cover with a refillable notepad and a pocket for loose papers, without success. Finally, I decided to try the Moleskine — and I’m glad I did. It’s just the right size, and the unfolding pocket in the back is perfect for collecting ATM and debit card receipts.

I was mesmerized by the beautiful binding at first, so I just wrote my notes and checked them off as I processed them into my GTD system. Except that it was too easy to forget.

Then one day I figured what the heck, and the next time I got back home I grabbed hold of the three sheets I had used that day, and slowly ripped them asunder from that oh-so-perfect binding. I was surprised to find that the skies did not open and smite me with lightning, the earth didn’t shake, and most important, the book seemed unfazed by it all.

Read more Tear Up Your Moleskine – Always Learning.

creativity, Diary, Journal, Notebook Addict of the Week, Other People's Notebooks, Writing Notebooks

Notebook Addict of the Week: Laura Marcella

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This week’s addict blogs at Wavy Lines and shares this photo of a stack of journals:

I’ve kept diaries or journals ever since I learned to print words. Locked diaries were a favorite until my pre-teen years when I switched to the more mature journals. I have several fancy leather and hardcover journals (see pictures) that I absolutely loved writing in. It was luxurious! Then in college I journaled in a notebook…

Notebooks don’t have any expectations. Illegible penmanship, mundane details, endless complaints, poor grammar, and run-on or incomplete sentences are totally okay in a notebook. Fancy journals, though, expect something profound. They want to be awed by your revelations and they demand legible handwriting….

Read more at Wavy Lines: Journals and Notebooks.

Art, creativity, HandBook, Links, Other People's Notebooks, Sketchbook

Sketchbook Tuesday at Alla Prima

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alla prima is the art blog of R Chunn of Portland, Oregon. (“Alla prima” is a term for a method of painting.) On Tuesdays, R posts sketchbook images like these, which seem to have been done in a HandBook Journal, from what I can see of the red edge and orange ribbon marker peeking out in one of the photos.

Gorgeous!

Boorum & Pease, creativity, Links, Mead, Other People's Notebooks, Writing Notebooks

Thoughts About Notebooks at Roaming By Design

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Saxon Henry shares some thoughts about notebooks and writing, including these nice images:


My first writer’s notebook was a steno pad, and as you’ll see if you read today’s post on The Road to Promise, I “graduated” to a loose-leaf binder in 1986. It was made by Boorum & Pease, and I filled seven of these notebooks with ramblings about whatever caught my eye during a seventeen-year stretch that took me from Belize and Costa Rica to a handful of Native American reservations. Since 2003, I’ve been using a Moleskine notebook—preferred by authors like Ernest Hemingway and André Breton. I love the creaminess of the paper in these books over any others I’ve ever found. My pen just seems to glide along the surface effortlessly.

Read more at A Notebook Of One’s Own « Roaming By Design.

creativity, Links, Moleskine, Organization, productivity, record-keeping, Writing Notebooks

Moleskine Monday: “Tactile Aesthetic Technology”

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Daniel DiGriz has decided that “the Moleskine is the perfect notebook.” From his blog, The Rules of Work:

When I look at a moleskine, the miser in me says ‘too expensive, decadent, not sustainable’. But then I haven’t looked for knock offs. The moleskine is flexible in its cover. That’s huge. You get a kind of subtle portability off of a soft, flexible cover that doesn’t come from a hardback lined blank book, which is cheaper. The ribbon marker is hugely important. You might think it wouldn’t be, but it just is. The size is crazy important. The smallest bit too big, and it’s not going with you just when you need it. The smallest bit too small, and you won’t use it. Moleskine size variations are wonderful. It’s not that you might not find a blackberry useful, for instance, but it’s not useful for every kind of writing activity. The moleskine is very netbook like, as a paper object. It says ‘write in me’, not ‘play games on me, set me to vibrate, play with me on a subway’. Also, I could throw 10 moleskines into a manila envelope if I needed to move them – a moleskine doesn’t beg to be offloaded/scanned – it’s made to keep a record of your thoughts in between its covers and nowhere else. The kind of thoughts that either become something else in a different venue (like a book or blog) or aren’t meant to be shared – only used.

Read more at Moleskine – Tactile Aesthetic Technology : Rules of Work.

Diary, Journal, Notebook Addict of the Week, Other People's Notebooks, Writing Notebooks

Notebook Addict of the Week: Waterfall

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Waterfall blogs at “A Sort of Notebook.” You know a blogger likes notebooks when she names her blog after them… and she obviously knows that a mere online journal can’t compare to paper ones.  Here’s a photo of all her journals kept since 1980, when she was 10:

This is the largest and most consistent collection of spiral notebooks I’ve seen yet!

Read more at A Sort of Notebook: Putting Away Childish Things?.

Links, Organization, productivity, record-keeping

The Simple Dollar on How to Keep an “Idea Notebook”

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Another post about notebooks from The Simple Dollar, a blog about personal finance, self-improvement and frugal living. (Featured before in this post.) Trent talks about how he uses his “Idea Notebook,” including these tips, which he expands upon in the original post:

  • I simply keep a small pocket notebook in my pocket at all times.
  • I also keep a reliable pen in my pocket.
  • It’s a bad idea to try to keep bits of information in your head.
  • I write ideas and information down as soon as possible.
  • I don’t organize these jottings at all.
  • I separate jottings with a slash or a page break.
  • Once a day — or more often — I review all of the jottings and deal with them.
  • If a jotting is dealt with, I cross it out.
  • If all jottings on a page are dealt with, I tear out the page.

It’s a good, straight-forward system, but I personally can’t deal with the part about tearing out the page. I really like keeping old to-do lists, and using notebooks that don’t have removable pages.

Read more at The Simple Dollar: A Look at My “Idea Notebook”, and don’t miss his other post, How to Use a Pocket Notebook.

Art, creativity, Links, Moleskine, Other People's Notebooks, Sketchbook, Travel Notebooks

Urban Sketchers

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I’m a longtime fan of the Urban Sketchers website. Small notebooks aren’t necessarily the only way to do urban sketches, but they’re probably the most practical and frequent tool, so the site offers lots of notebook eye-candy, as well as some great art. Here are a few recent favorites:

The site has also organized an Urban Sketchers Symposium, to be held in Portland, OR, on July 29-31, 2010, with a custom Moleskine to commemorate the event.

Notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, diaries: in search of the perfect page…