Notebook Addict of the Week, Other People's Notebooks

Notebook Addict of the Week: Millie

October 22, 2009 Nifty Notebook 2 Comments

This week’s Addict is another reader who submitted a photo of her collection, as well as these thoughts:

Some of these notebooks have been used, some of them are waiting for a
use to present itself, and some of them I bought simply to look
pretty. I don’t consider myself a notebook connoisseur, and quite a
few of the notebooks in the photo were very cheap (or free, thanks to
my high school – I think they probably lock stationery cupboards there
now!). Although I’m now getting more interested in paper quality and
bindings, my primary reason for buying a notebook is the thrill you
get when you buy a new one, and have a whole book of blank pages
waiting for you. What will you fill it with? The possibilities at
that moment are endless (even if you know deep down you’re just going
to take it to work and use it to jot down phone messages, write lists,
etc.,). As you can see, I mostly like A5-sized notebooks.

She also confesses to being a notebook-blog addict! She’s currently following 19 notebook related blogs! I’m glad I’m one of them, so thank you to Millie for reading, and for sharing your addiction!

Diary, new products, Places to Buy Notebooks

Little Blue Notebook? International Herald Tribune Diary.

October 21, 2009 Nifty Notebook 3 Comments

I spotted this ad on the New York Times home page and got all excited– yes, this is how big a geek I am, that a mere image like this makes me say “ooh, ooh, what’s that little blue notebook?!?!”

But it turned out not to be all that exciting after all. The ad was for an International Herald Tribune Diary, one of those typical blue paged, leather covered ones– though the pocket version is a nice size: 3 1/8 x 5 1/8″.

I was even less excited when I discovered that it costs $69.95 with delivery outside Europe!

The New York Times Store > The International Herald Tribune 2010 Pocket Diary.

creativity, Links, new products

Astier de Villate Notebooks

October 20, 2009 Nifty Notebook Leave a comment

You might recognize these as one of the “7 Not-Boring Notebooks” I linked to a while back. They were featured at Jayson Home & Garden as “Bleeker Notebooks”, but they’re also sold by, and perhaps made by a French company called Astier de Villate. It’s probably easier and cheaper to buy them from Jayson, but you must check out the Astier de Villate website anyway, just for the experience! It’s very cool.

The notebooks themselves are at this page.

Thanks to Black White Yellow for the tip: {BLACK. WHITE. YELLOW.}: Astier de Villate Notebooks.

Moleskine

Moleskine Monday: A Pyramid!

October 19, 2009 Nifty Notebook 1 Comment

moleskine stack

I love the caption: “they look like square oreos.”

moleskine pyramid on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Links, Moleskine, new products, Organization, productivity, record-keeping

New Products Including Ring Binder Coming from Moleskine!

October 16, 2009 Nifty Notebook Leave a comment

Breaking news from the Frankfurt Bookfair, via Moleskiners:

New Moleskine products coming in 2010 will include some sort of refillable ring binder! That is a real departure for Moleskine, but one that should please a lot of people. They’re also introducing printable Moleskine paper in A4 size, which finally makes the MSK widget make some sense. There are also going to be some themed journals, which doesn’t excite me all that much, as I think more people might prefer using a free-form blank notebook to keep track of books or wine or movies, but it sounds like they’ll have some fun features like themed stickers included.

Here’s some excerpts from the full announcement from Moleskine:

The New Moleskine Passions and Six New Pieces in the Folio Collection

Press release
15 October 2009
Download PDF
A 2010 preview at Frankfurter Buchmesse: The New Moleskine Passions: Journals for the loves of your life.

Moleskine Passions is a collection of six different journals to record and recall memories, thoughts and notes about six different passions: Recipes, Wine, Book, Film, Music and Wellness.

Moleskine lovers can use them to collect information and reviews about books they read, restaurants they visited, concerts they attended, dishes they tasted. And to share these information with others.

Each journal is a personal archive to fill in according to different needs and feelings:

Pages divided by printed tabs, with a themed layout for supporting you in taking notes.

Pages divided by blank tabs, that the user can personalize with the enclosed adhesive labels.

Blank pages for freedom of expression.

Enclosed adhesive labels, with words and icons.

Themed charts, calendars, glossaries, listings.

The black cover, one of the icons of the Moleskine brand, for the fi[rst] time in the brand’s history is fully embossed with a tight texture of themed images and writings. Moleskine Passions will be available in bookshops around the world starting from February 2010.

You will soon be able to test the layouts with MSK, the online tool that allows you to print out different page layouts and paste them on your Moleskine notebooks. www.moleskine.com/msk….

A 2010 preview at Frankfurter Buchmesse:
Six New Pieces in the Moleskine Folio Collection.
Tools For Creative Professionals and Contemporary Nomads.

…Folio is a collection of top quality large Moleskine formats, A4 and A3. Now 6 new items have been added, conceived for professionals who love to personalize their own desks and give value to them, in functional and aesthetic terms. It is also a set of tools Moleskine lovers can use to build their own “portable offi ce”, to represent themselves in all occasions and
meetings.

Closely connected to the digital world through a network of websites, blogs, online groups and virtual archives, Moleskine brand creates always new connections between analogue and digital, paper and pixel.

With MSK, the online cut and paste tool, you can transfer digital content into Moleskine pages or print out different page layouts to paste them on your Moleskine notebooks to personalize the page layout of you notebook. See www.moleskine.com/msk

Now with the Folio collection you can also print on A4 Moleskine paper, with the typical cream color The paper of the Folio Collection is FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified.
The new items in the Moleskine Folio Collection will be available in selected bookshop, design stores, art supply and stationary stores around the world starting from July 2010.

Six New Pieces in the Moleskine Folio Collection

Post-it pocket (ruled and plain in one pack)

Card pocket (20 pcs in one pack)

Soft document holder

Moleskine printable A4 paper

Ring binder

Ring binder organizing Set
Expandable inner pocket
Dividers (6)
Adhesives for personalization

I’m very curious to see how these will look, (beyond the images above, which are from the linked PDF) but I guess we have quite a few months to wait!

Links, Organization, record-keeping

Household Organizer Notebooks

October 16, 2009 Nifty Notebook Leave a comment

Shelterpop suggests 4 household organizer notebooks, for those who like having a nicely designed binder with pockets, tabs and pre-formatted lists to help you organize household things like emergency contact numbers, medications, or appliance warranties.
Here’s their picks:
The Handy Household Helper: An Organizer for Receipts, Warranties, & Odds and Ends
Knock Knock Home Maintenance Organizer
Life.doc: Your Life Buttoned Up
The Ultimate Home Journal & Organizer

For those who prefer the DIY method, there are also some helpful hints and printable forms to use to make your own organizer.

Our Fave Organizer Notebooks – Shelterpop.

Art, Cachet, creativity, Places to Buy Notebooks, Sketchbook

Discounted Sketchbooks at Blick

October 15, 2009 Nifty Notebook Leave a comment

Spotted some nice-looking sketchbooks on clearance sale:

The lined Cachet Sketchbooks are 56% off, at $4.00 for the 4×6″ and $5.80 for the 5.25×8.25″.

The 6×9″ watercolor books are half off at $12.99 in blue, brown and green. You can also get an 8.5×11″ one in green for $12.99.

Ciak, Notebook Addict of the Week, Noted, Paperblanks, Pentalic

Notebook Addict of the Week: Jonel

October 15, 2009 Nifty Notebook 3 Comments

A reader named Jonel sent me a link to her Flickr page, where she has some great photos of her prodigious notebook collection:

This photo only captures about half the spread– it was too big to fit in one shot! (The Flickr shots are tagged with notes.) And it doesn’t end there, as Jonel added in her email:

These were taken over the summer and since then I’ve added these:

Stack of “noted” notebooks in 5×8 size

Several Notebooks from the company that makes the Traveler’s notebook

and several pentalic a la modeskin notebooks in a small sketch size (this picture was taken in-store).

I also got some free field notes a while back.

She has even more office supply photos on Flickr, and you can follow her on Twitter at JonelB. I loved seeing all these notebooks. Thank you for this great submission, Jonel! You are indeed a true notebook addict!

Filofax, My Collection, Personal

Pocket Filofax, Early 1990s

October 14, 2009 Nifty Notebook 4 Comments

This is the first Filofax I ever bought, sometime in the early 1990s. I had not been out of college long and Filofaxes still seemed like the kind of expensive yuppie status symbol that I’d scoffed at… but then I got a job in a store that sold them, and I discovered that this pocket sized, thin, no-pen-loop version was available… I fell in love. Fortunately, no one else seems to have felt that way about it, as it had been sitting in the store for long enough that I was able to convince the manager to mark it down enough that I could finally justify spending a chunk of my meager paycheck on it– I forget how much I paid, but I think it may have been around $50-60. But that turned out to be just the beginning.
Have you noticed already that the shape of this Filofax seems a bit atypical? A normal pocket Filofax is a more squarish shape, not that lovely 3×5-ish golden rectangle that I adore. That squarish shape is what this Filofax had when I bought it, but it drove me crazy. Since there was no snap closure on this Filofax, I thought it might be possible to alter it.

I have probably never felt more embarrassed about my notebook fetish than when I walked into a tailor shop and asked them to cut a quarter of an inch off the width of my Filofax. The tailor didn’t want to do it at first– he said more or less “this is a nice little notebook, why do you want to mess around with it?” I couldn’t admit that it was just because it was not quite the perfect shape, so I made up what probably sounded like an even stupider reason, which was that it belonged to my father and he wanted it to fit in a particular pocket of his briefcase. In the end, the guy rolled his eyes, decided he could do it, and charged me about $25.

The result was pretty good– there was a slight flaw on one edge where the tailor may have cut a little too far, but otherwise, it turned out just as I wanted it. I used it as my wallet for a long time, as I could fit a couple of credit cards in the back and tuck a little cash in the front. As you’ll see in the photos below, I tucked lots of other things in the pockets, including a bandaid! Because the rings are quite small, I used a week-per-page calendar. I also kept some graph and plain paper in it for notes, and had a few other sheets with phone lists and to-dos. At times, I also kept a couple of maps in this notebook, but by the time I stopped using it the only other insert I had in there was a clear plastic pocket.

I loved this notebook– the leather is gorgeous and supple, and it really was the perfect size, so it just felt great in my hand. It still just begs to be fondled. I’ve used other Filofaxes since, but never one with such nice leather. I think the only reason I stopped using this notebook was that I fell in love with the Palm Pilot. Once all my appointments and addresses and even little memos and jottings had gone electronic, I didn’t really need a Filofax as much. I used paper only for journal entries and drawing, neither of which I wanted to do on loose-leaf paper. For the first few years of my love affair with Palm PDAs, my notebook obsession was in hibernation, and I felt no need to buy anything other than the occasional Moleskine sketchbook.

Every once in a while, I think about using a Filofax again– there are many things for which a loose-leaf notebook makes more sense than a bound one. In the end, I think I prefer the permanence of a bound notebook. I have stacks of old Filofax pages wrapped in rubber bands– even if I bought those little storage binders that Filofax sells, they would never be as pleasing to look back through as a stack of old Moleskines. But I’ll never forget this Filofax– it may not be quite right for how I use notebooks now, but it served me well for many years.

creativity, Doane Paper, new products, Places to Buy Notebooks

The Scout Book from Pinball Publishing

October 13, 2009 Nifty Notebook 1 Comment

Have you ever wanted a customized notebook with your own design on the cover, to give away or sell or just write lots of notes in? You can do it for less than you might think!

Pinball Publishing is the Portland, Oregon-based company that makes the Doane Paper Utility notebooks. They also offer a similar small notebook called the Scout Book. On their website, you can choose paper, different colored covers, and upload a logo for printing. The minimum order for a basic notebook is $150 for 50 unlined notebooks with black printing on the cover. Other paper styles and ink colors cost a bit more. If you go through a lot of notebooks, or want to give something unique as gifts, these would be a great option.

PINBALL PUBLISHING : The Original Scout Book.

Notebook Stories