Mead, Other People's Notebooks, Places to Buy Notebooks, Sketchbook

Questions from Readers

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I’ve gotten terribly behind in trying to answer emails from some fellow notebook fans with their questions. Please leave a comment if you can point any of these readers in the right direction!

From Robert:

I am hoping you can help me with my search. I saw someone take out a piece of paper from what looked like a spiral A4 notebook (didn’t catch the brand) and it had, with gray lines, a box around all margins which the horizontal lines connected to. At the top was a thin horizontal box so you could write in a heading. In the top right-hand corner, within the heading box, were three slashes (/) for the date.

Do you have any idea what brand this might be? That is exactly the kind of notebook I am dying for!

I thought I’d seen something like this in a store, maybe by Clairefontaine or Miquelrius, but I haven’t found it again.

From Brett:

Regrettably, I watched the end of the movie “Wanted” with Morgan Freeman.  During his last speech he is holding a folder / binder that looks like a Mead composition book (it’s much larger and doesn’t have the info bubble, just the black & white pattern).  Do you have any insight as to where I can find a similar item? It’s about 9 x 12″.

I wondered if this might be some sort of art portfolio rather than a notebook, but I haven’t seen anything like it.

From Nita:

I was in an A.C. Moore hobby/crafts store in November in NH. I found a black 5.5×8.3, padded cover, blank paper “sketch book” lying loose among the art supplies.

The paper is very like that in the Hand Book artist journal line. (I use them a lot.) This book had a dark blue paper band wrapped vertically around the notebook. It was on sale for $7!

I found a clerk and asked if she knew if there more more somewhere in the store, as there were none in the art supply aisles. She said they were a special purchase and waved vaguely at the rest of the store, saying “They’re in a special display, I guess.”

Agh! I bought the one I’d found and LOVE the paper. The Hand Book journals are my favorite, and this one is so much like them for less cost, I’d buy more if I could.

I’ve searched online and cannot find any mention of a Crescendo Sketch Book (two words on the label).

The rest of the text on the label says, in this layout:

Hand-crafted
Artist quality
Elastic band for closure
Acid-free paper, 110 gsm
80 sheets; 160 pages

Recommended for pen and ink,
colored pencil, drawing chalks,
pastels, graphite and other dry
media and light watercolor.

—
Have you ever heard of or seen these Crescendo books? Any ideas of where I might find more?

Thanks so much for helping me in this notebook treasure hunt!

I’m totally stumped on this one!

From Andrew:

I am an artist and art teacher, and have always kept all kinds of sketchbooks. I recently became addicted to the small Mead notebooks. They look kind of like the Moleskine, but I think the pages are a little thicker.  I find brown and black at Walmart, but wish they had other colors. They do have bright pink and green, but those are too garish for me.
I keep one in my pocket at all times. One has been lasting me about two months. The first few pages are to do lists, but I use the rest mostly for taking notes, and writing down things that inspire me or that I want to meditate on.

He then adds

After a little more research, I learned that the Mead Moleskine knockoff is made only for Walmart and sold only in stores.  Here is some info:http://www.nathan-miller.com/the-moleskine-saga/

I don’t have a Wal-Mart anywhere near where I usually shop and haven’t had a chance to go and see if these are available. Has anyone else tried them, and do you know of WalMart locations still stocking them?

Thanks to all these readers and others who have sent in questions, and sorry it’s taken me so long to post them! I wish I was enough of a notebook guru to be able to answer everything, but hopefully the collective wisdom of other notebook freaks will provide some solutions.

creativity, Journal, new products, Places to Buy Notebooks

Wooden Notebooks

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Gary Robbins wrote to me a while back to share some photos of his beautiful handmade wooden notebooks:

As the proprietor of my favorite obsessive notebook blog, I though you might enjoy these blank books I’m manufacturing. Xylobooks were designed to marry traditional bookbinding methods with a clean, modern aesthetic that emphasizes the tactile nature of the materials and the connection between wood and paper. High-quality, recycled archival paper, cotton twill tape, and tiny iron nails create a sturdy, simple, natural object. The wooden planks provide a portable writing surface and the cotton bands create a place to hold cards and other bits of ephemera.
The books take advantage of a waste stream, scrap wood cutoff produced at a furniture studio here in Portland, Oregon. The species include beautiful Northwest woods like Oregon bigleaf maple, madrone, western walnut, juniper, and cherry. Each book is handmade and unique, with variations in grain, color, and knotholes. They’re available from my website, www.containercorps.com


These may not be the best thing to throw in your bag for on the go jotting, but they’d be wonderful to keep on a desk or shelf at home for the kind of journaling you want to cherish for a long time.

Diary, Filofax, Links, Organization, record-keeping

Virginia Heffernan Mourns the Filofax

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I enjoyed this article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine: The Demise of Datebooks, by Virginia Heffernan.

I miss my Filofax datebook, with its six rings and dark red leather binder. I had a green one first, with a calendar that cast each week across two cream-colored pages. Back then, at age 30, I was not busy enough to need a whole page per day, which some Filofax calendars provide, but far too busy, or so I liked to imagine, to fit a week’s activities on a single page. I left that green one in a taxi and replaced it with a red one. Old reddie is still around, with my life during half of 2007 memorialized. Even when I started half-heartedly to use iCal, Apple’s personal-calendar program for the Mac, I lugged around the Filofax in case I needed — I don’t know — the address book? The dry-measure equivalent for “bushel”? The dialing code for Saudi Arabia? The size conversions for tailors (“Glove sizes are the same in every country”)? The centigrade temperature in Accra in May?

Something, surely. Carrying a Filofax, with all the inserts that came standard with it, made me feel substantial, cliquish and secretive. British. Like a person who keeps close at hand many bankers’ private lines and Mandarin phrases and measurements for handmade shoes. The apparatus of the Filofax circumscribed and elevated my identity. It also liberated my imagination by allowing for such elegant expression of it; various sketches and coded notes-to-self, in blue ink, pervade the pages of the 2007 book. When I had time on a train or at Starbucks, I used to make lists, often plans for self-improvement…

I feel the same way. When I was younger, I wished I had more things to put in my datebooks. Now that I’m older, I have at least 15 meetings a week to keep track of, plus social plans and other appointments and tasks– I’d go insane if I couldn’t keep them in an electronic calendar, but something is definitely lost.

When I used Palm OS handhelds to stay organized, my favorite app was a calendar replacement called DateBk6, because it allowed you to vary the fonts, show things as crossed out, highlight text with background colors, and add customizable icons to appointments. For a few years, I used a Sony Clie, which offered the ability to overlay freehand drawings and jottings on the calendar, though the feature didn’t work well enough to be truly useful. These little things helped make an electronic calendar feel a bit more paper-like, and I really miss that about using an iPhone now– the calendar app has a lot of flaws.

I’ve seen some people print out their electronic calendars into sheets formatted to fit in a Filofax– this seems a bit cumbersome, but it’s probably the best solution for people who need the best of both worlds. And it allows a hard-copy archive to be saved. Heffernan’s article concludes with her realizing “that another year is passing without my building up the compact book of a year’s worth of Filofax pages that, every December, I used to wrap in a rubber band and put on a shelf, just as my new refills came in the mail.… You never know what you’re going to miss.”

Diary, Fun & Weird

Madonna’s Diaries on eBay!

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Ooh, juicy gossip item of the week!

Madge: Hands off my diaries!

Dear Diary: I wonder what would happen if you – my dearest diary – were to fall into the wrong hands. That’s the dilemma Madonna has faced ever since a 12-volume set of notebooks, supposedly the journals she kept between 1987 and 1996, went on sale on eBay last month – with a starting bid of $2.5 mil.

Madge isn’t afraid anymore: TMZ says her reps have persuaded eBay to pull the diaries, arguing that the singer is the rightful owner.

via Sideshow: LiLo: I don’t abuse drugs | Philadelphia Inquirer | 05/06/2010.

books, creativity, Diary, Journal, Links, Writing Notebooks

Fictional Journals

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I stumbled upon a blogger who lists her 6 favorite books that feature journals or are told in journal form. Here’s her top pick:

1. I Capture the Castle/ Dodie Smith

A delightful English book, set in the 30’s, telling the story of Cassandra Mortmain and her eccentric family. Begins with the classic line “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” Art, eccentricity, Americans and true love…

The rest are:
Doctor Glas: A Novel
Diary of a Nobody (Penguin Classics)
The Golden Notebook: A Novel
Mable Riley: A Reliable Record of Humdrum, Peril, and Romance
A Prairie as Wide as the Sea

I was sort of surprised her list didn’t include classics like The Diary of Anne Frank or Harriet the Spy, but it’s an interesting list nonetheless and I’m glad it’s provided me with some unfamiliar titles to add to my reading list.

Read more at The Indextrious Reader: Booklist: Fictional Journals & Journaling News.

Clairefontaine, creativity, Links, Moleskine, new products, Places to Buy Notebooks

Clairefontaine Life.Unplugged. Notebook Elastic Band Hack

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I hadn’t seen or heard of these Clairefontaine Life.Unplugged notebooks before reading this post: Ink Nouveau: Clairefontaine Life.Unplugged. Notebook Elastic Band Hack. They seem to be nice little cahier-style notebooks– they don’t come with an elastic, but you can add one if you’re handy with a glue gun!

See the original post for further steps.

The post also mentions a new style called “Roadbook.” These may be a bit more like Moleskine’s Volants, with a glued spine, though these offer the elastic closure the Volants lack.

You can see these in the latest Clairefontaine catalog here. Has anyone spotted these in stores yet? (They are available through Goulet Pens, the retailer associated with the Ink Nouveau blog.) I haven’t seen them in my usual NYC haunts, but I’ll be keeping an eye out!

Fun & Weird, Links, Organization, productivity, Travel Notebooks

How to Turn Your Notebook Into a “Mental Swiss-Army Knife”

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Here’s an interesting topic on Ask MetaFilter:

I have a graph-ruled Moleskine that is begging to be turned into a compendium of obscure, fascinating, and perhaps occasionally useful reference material. Some of the things I want to put in there are Rubik’s Cube algorithms, keys to reading non-Latin alphabets, some simple math formulas (Trachtenberg math, e.g.), rules of thumb for estimating distance/altitude, and whatever else. I’m imagining the user would bust it out of his/her bag and use the knowledge within to solve a wide range of MacGyver/James Bond/bar bet problems. An intellectual “Swiss army knife”, if you will. Any and all ideas are welcome!

There are a wide variety of responses:

Pi to a thousand places
Resistor color codes
PID loop tuning hints and tricks
BIOS entry keys for a large number of brands of computers
Nomographs for: F to C and temp/humidity to dew point
Look up tables for Sine, Cosine and Tangent
Common Op-amp designs like inverting, integrating, etc
Common transistor designs like Common Emitter, Common collector, etc
Integral and Derivative tables
Trig Identities
Since others are pointing out that pocket compendia exist already, perhaps you could tailor the Moleskine to have knowledge specific to you. How about a scale diagram of your home, so that if you’re buying furniture/planning repairs/etc. you will have the right dimensions handy?
Time zones
zip and area codes
square root by hand
most common famous quotes
doing math with Roman numerals
commonly misspelled words
some words that start with each letter of the alphabet
Hebrew vowels
Historical periods
top 100 books/films
Instructions for identifying, cultivating, and refining penicillin.
standard factory admin passwords to routers and bios, etc.
adhere a super thin mirror (maybe mylar) to one of the inside covers
phone numbers to global car rental, travel agencies, hotels and concierge services
Dance steps
The catalogue of Messier objects
In addition to edible plants, I’d include section with details and sketches of local poisonous/toxic plants, with info on how to immediately deal with exposure.
On the practical side you should put down your medical history and any prescriptions you’re taking. If you get sent to the hospital it would be very helpful not to have to remember all the names of the meds you’re taking. Especially if you’re bleeding profusely or just had a blow to the head. If you wear glasses or contacts, put that prescription in too.
Draw some game boards across double page spreads, and keep paper playing pieces in the back pouch. My travel notebook now has boards and pieces for chess or draughts, backgammon and go. These pages get much more use (on flights, etc) than the foreign phrases, unit conversion tables (weight, volume, temperature, distance), time zone lookups, etc that I wrote in there.
How about a sundial with notes on its use? You just need the dial, use a pen, matchstick or finger as a gnomon. Only useful if you know where north is, of course.

And so many more… I love the variety, from techno-geekery to first aid, to arts and literature to sports to astronomy to clothing sizes and on and on…
I love this idea because each person’s list will be different– so many diaries come with time zones and conversion charts and national holidays, but undated notebooks almost never do… and wouldn’t you rather have lists of the specific things that are important to you? And what does it tell you about a person to know what sorts of information they think they’d need in an emergency?

Here are some bits of information that I’ve carried around in notebooks at various times:

  • Maps of NYC subways and buses
  • Maps of Central Park and Prospect Park
  • World map
  • My measurements and clothing sizes
  • Phone numbers and birthdays of family and close friends
  • Conversion charts
  • A cheat sheet of information (dates, sales figures, etc) pertaining to my job
  • Passwords
  • Lists of Pulitzer Prize and Booker Prize-winning books
  • Phone numbers of local restaurants
  • The sign language alphabet
  • A band-aid

What information would you keep in your mental swiss-army notebook?

Read more at Mental Swiss-Army Knife (in a Moleskine) | Ask MetaFilter.

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

Moleskine Monday: A Drawing a Day

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A fine ambition– I have told myself I’d do this too, but haven’t been as successful in actually DOING it as this blogger:

I will begin drawing and submitting one sketch a day from my new Moleskine sketchbook. I will post no matter how awful, haphazard, or incomplete the sketch is. The point is to keep me drawing EVERY DAY.

Here’s a couple of days’ worth:

See more at 365 Moleskine Drawings: Week Dump.

Clairefontaine, Moleskine, Notebook Addict of the Week, Other People's Notebooks, Rhodia

Notebook Addict of the Week: Freen707

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Flickr is such a great source of notebook addicts! Here’s the latest one, and I’d say he/she REALLY has a problem! All of these are as yet unused:

I’m pretty sure I see Moleskines, maybe Rhodia and Clairefontaine, and I’m not sure what else. There’s a lot of variety there! The owner seems to be in Italy, so I would guess many of these are European brands that might not be sold in the US. How very tantalizing!
See more at Notebooks and journals (all unused yet) on Flickr

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