The Pen Addict has posted the second monthly Carnival of Pen, Pencil and Paper. It’s another great collection of posts about the wonderful stationery and office supplies we all love. I particularly enjoyed Cynthia’s comparison of the Cartesio and Moleskine planners and Opted Magazine’s post about making the cover of your notebook a visual representation of your life’s priorities and goals.
The monthly carnivals will continue, with the next edition hosted by Office Supply Geek on October 6th. You can submit an article to the next edition using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page and more details about the carnival are found at the carnival home page. Hosts have been assigned through December, but January and beyond are open– if you are a blogger who would like to host a future edition, please contact me at nifty [at] notebookstories [dot] com.
Review & Giveaway: Book Factory Notebooks
When I wrote about my Engineer’s Field Notebook, I mentioned that I would love to have a pocket sized version. Well, here’s something that’s sort of close: a pocket size lab notebook from The Book Factory. I’ve written about this company before— they’re based in the US, which is a rarity for notebook makers these days. They make all sorts of hardcover and softcover notebooks for various purposes, many of which are more for business or educational uses, but they also offer many items of interest to the general public, and anyone can order from their online store. The Book Factory was kind enough to send me 3 sample notebooks: a pocket lab notebook, a blank notebook with numbered pages, and a lined notebook.
The closest comparison to these notebooks would be a softcover pocket Moleskine. As you’ll see below, the Book Factory versions are slightly smaller and thinner at 3 1/2 x 5 1/4″ and 96 pages. (One of the samples I received, shown below, was actually slightly wider at 3 5/8″.)
The Book Factory notebooks are very basic: no logo stamped anywhere, no elastic to hold them shut, no ribbon marker or pocket in the back. They aren’t made to the most exacting quality standards– the spines are slightly rounded, and the edges can have slight imperfections– they are just a faux-leather/oilcloth material adhered to a paper backing, like the softcover Moleskine, but the Moleskine seems to be trimmed a bit more sharply. I worried that the slightly loose threads at the edge could start to unravel further with more use.
When you open the notebook, the inside cover has spaces for writing your personal information. The lab notebook also has a couple of pages of instructions for properly documenting research findings or inventions, etc., and has index pages you can use to create a table of contents for the notebook.
These notebooks are very flexible– you can almost roll them into a tube without harming them. They’ll stay bent for a while afterwards, but if you bend them back in the opposite direction, they’ll flatten out again. They also open perfectly flat.
The binding is attached to the paper signatures by a sort of cloth tape, which is visible on the inside covers. I think most notebooks probably glue an inner page down to cover this. The signatures are sewn into a slightly rounded spine, not squared off like a Moleskine (again, there was some variation in the samples I received as to how round/square the spine was).
The paper inside is pretty basic. The lined version has a space at the top. The lab notebook has a block of gridded space, with a header and footer for additional information such as signatures of the researcher and a witness.
As for the texture, it doesn’t give the ecstatic writing experience of the smooth, fine paper used in a Moleskine or Rhodia or Clairefontaine notebook– it’s more comparable to the standard white paper you’d find in any spiral notebook at Staples, but perhaps a bit thicker. Some pens feathered a bit, but it performed fairly well in terms of show-through.
What I like about these notebooks is that they seem so scrappy and hardworking. They are nice and flexible for sticking in a back pocket, and they don’t seem too precious to be knocked around. The covers have a soft, pleasing feel to them, and the pages open as flat as can be. They are just unpretentious and functional, which is fine with me. The design of a notebook should fade into the background like one of those black-clad puppeteers–the notebook should leave the spotlight on what the user writes in it. It shouldn’t just be a self-conscious fashion statement (someday I’ll rant about Field Notes being way too “twee,” as the Brits might say). Sometimes the definition of good design is that you just don’t notice it.
However, my inner aesthete may wish the Book Factory notebooks were just a bit more polished in a few details, and most days, my inner aesthete will win. I can’t help caring about how a pen feels on paper as I write, and if I wasn’t obsessive about the exact size and shape and thickness and texture and symmetry and blemishes of my notebooks, well, none of us would be at this website, would we?
But any concerns about quality have to be weighed against the price. The pocket size notebooks are only $6.99, with volume discounts starting at 25 units. There may still be comparable notebooks available for somewhat less, but none that I know of are available in lab notebook formats, or made here in the U.S.A. The Book Factory has several options for imprinting the cover (“Research Notebook,” “Log Book,” etc. a they can also make custom notebooks for large orders.
If you want a nice, basic, flexible little notebook, these are a great option, expecially if you have a use for pre-numbered or lab format pages. If you want something more substantial, you can also check out the Book Factory‘s other hardcover notebooks, which come in a variety of specialized formats for different purposes, such as “balance calibration” and “animal maintenance.” And if you want to try one of the pocket notebooks for free, I’m giving one away! You can win the small lined journal with the brown cover by posting a link to www.notebookstories.com at your blog and emaling me at nifty [at] notebookstories [dot] com with the location of the link– that counts as two entries. If you don’t have a blog, you can just send me an email saying you want the notebook– that counts as one entry. The deadline for entry is Friday September 11 at 5pm Eastern time. Good luck everyone!
Annie Leibovitz’s Financial Meltdown: Notebooks Partially to Blame
You’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard the news that celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz is broke. But here’s a new detail: she spent a lot of money on expensive notebooks!
When [Leibovitz’s daughter] Sarah started eating solid food, a rigorous journaling policy was instituted, in which every bite and bowel movement was to be committed to an unlined black notebook purchased from the Swedish stationer Ordning & Reda. [Leibovitz’s assistant] regularly ordered replacement books from Stockholm so that the journaling could easily continue from one book to another. Once, when an order got lost in customs, Leibovitz insisted on having two notebooks sent from Stockholm via a special type of courier service called “quicking.†It was essentially like buying a seat for a parcel on the next plane. The shipping cost alone came to $800.
From New York Magazine: How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz
Another notable user of Ordning and Reda Notebooks: former British poet laureate Andrew Motion.
Moleskine Color-a-Month Planner CHEAP!
I’ve been wanting one of these ever since I heard about them, but I kept balking at the $40.00 price. Well, not any more! After searching in vain on Amazon, I finally found it listed there as the “12 Volant Daily Pocket
(Price is accurate as of this writing on 9/3/09, but Amazon could change it.)
Carnival of Pen, Pencil and Paper 2nd Edition!
Don’t forget there’s another Carnival next week! On September 8th, The Pen Addict will host this month’s collection of the best blog posts about notebooks, pens, pencils, art and office supplies and other good stuff. Details about what the carnival is and how it works are found here. You can submit a post at this link. Deadline is Sunday September 6 at 5pm EST. Pass the word!
Notebook Addict of the Week: A Teenage Novelist
Here’s a notebook addict who used her collection to accomplish something amazing:
A Wisconsin teenager named Cayla Kluver kept notebooks, lots of them. These colorful spiral notebooks are the kind you get at the local pharmacy or supermarket. Nothing fancy, but the perfect canvas for personalizing, or maybe writing a narrative. On those pages, Cayla set down story lines, kept lists of characters’ names and attributes, established bloodlines, and mapped an entire kingdom named Hytanica. Her notes evolved into Legacy
, a five-hundred page YA novel that she published at the tender age of fourteen.
More details and photos at the Shelfari blog.
Notebooks in Good Times and Bad
Do you go through notebooks faster when you’re living through difficult, stressful times? I know I do. I just went through about a quarter of my current notebook in less than a week due to a very sad event. And I know that in other times, I’ve always tended to write more journal entries when I’m worried or upset about something than I do when life is just smooth sailing. Someday I’ll actually get scientific about this and graph the number of pages used per month, or something like that, to see all the ups and downs of my life without even having to re-read the journals…
Paper + Electronic: The Livescribe Pulse Pen & Journal
I’d been noticing ads for Livescribe products but I hadn’t really paid attention until seeing this article by James Fallows: My new favorite gadget: Livescribe Pulse pen.
It actually sounds pretty cool– the pen is an audio recorder, which you use with special paper. As you write, the pen keeps track of where you are on the page at any given point in the audio recording, so it’s great for reporters who would want to go back and check their notes against the audio of an interview. To do so, you just point the pen at the relevant note on the page, which makes it play back the audio recorded at the moment you wrote that note. You can also buy an add-on program that will convert what you write into digital text– so far, I don’t think there’s anything that converts the recorded audio into text, which would really put this over the top in the coolness factor!
The paper is available in various formats, from spiral notebooks to a very Moleskine-like journal:
For those who struggle to reconcile their love of notebooks with their need for information in a digital form, could Livescribe be the answer? It sure seems like a step in the right direction. Please leave a comment if you’ve tried one– I’d love to know how the product measures up in terms of the pen and paper writing experience.
Amazon
On Etsy: Celestefrittata Magical Notebooks
Another Etsy seller with some cool stationery products: Celestefrittata. These notebooks have a lovely aged look to them, almost like an old children’s book with a decorated binding.
Via Paper Crave: Celestefrittata Magical Notebooks.
Notebook Addict of the Week: Patriots and Peoples
This week’s notebook addict blogs about history at Patriots and Peoples.
He says:
A bit more than twenty years ago I started carrying a spiral notebook with me almost constantly. I usually wrote in it while reading—taking notes, jotting titles and authors of other texts that I planned to examine, proposing theses, writing initial drafts of key paragraphs, outlining course syllabi, composing poems, …
Alas, it seems he is a notebook addict no more:
The habit of always having a spiral notebook with me has ceased since computers have become ubiquitous. These days I’m more likely to carry a notebook manufactured by Gateway than one made by Mead.
But he hasn’t totally given up on notebooks, and still appreciates the qualities of paper:
As created text morphs from rough notes to polished prose, much is lost. Some of the loss is beneficial, but not all. My initial condemnation of some book or article may give way to cautious acceptance of another scholar’s perspective, or exuberance for a fresh approach may become the jaded recognition that notions discredited long ago might be resurrected once their refutations have been forgotten. My spiral notebooks preserve a record of these journeys. Those saved as files, even when new drafts have new names, are quickly lost. I’ll never again see the notes I saved just a few years ago on 5 ¼ inch floppies, for example.