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.)
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!
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
Here’s another neat little item purchased on EBay:
This is a sub-category of notebooks that I could happily collect: small promotional diaries given out to the employees or business partners of various corporations. I have ones in my collection from Sandoz, GE, and the Harvard Coop, and this Westinghouse one was a great addition. First of all, it’s from 1945! I can’t believe it’s still in such pristine condition. It measures about 2.5 x 4.5″. The cover seems to be real leather, and the pages are gilt-edged. And it also has a lot of fun extras inside, as you’ll see…
It starts off with a pretty standard inside front cover: a 12-month calendar and a title page with the company logo and slogan: “Plants in 25 Cities… Offices Everywhere.”
Then there’s a page for identification, which a certain Mr. or Ms. Newhouse filled out with Social Security number, address, and the wonderful phone number “Ridley Park 17828.” Then we get into the diary portion with a week to each page:
I suspect that these cryptic notes may relate to some sort of mechanical or engineering work, but I’m really not sure. The whole month of January then seems to track mileage and hours worked, which make it look like the person worked without a single day off for an entire month. They also traveled 11 miles most days and noted expenses of one dollar a day.
After February, there are no more diary entries. After the calendar pages, there are a few for telephone numbers and addresses, with only one name jotted down: Joe Rice, Signal Detachment, Signal Depot, Baltimore -19-.
The end of the calendar and address pages brings us to this point about halfway through the notebook:
Then begins the fun stuff! First we have a directory of all Westinghouse offices and plants, coded by type as “sales office,” “manufacturing and repair shop,” “warehouse,” etc. Then you have a listing of other electrical supply companies that acted as Westinghouse agents. Then you have a few pages of 1940 census data by city, weights and measures, and “handy formulas” along the lines of those found in my engineer’s field book. You even get a table of “Approximate Amperes per Terminal for Squirrel-Cage Induction Motors,” whatever those are! (I can’t help imagining a squirrel whizzing around in some sort of motorized cage!)
Best of all, at the end you get several lovely full-color maps– a pretty standard set of United States and continent maps, plus the baffling addition of a full page devoted to the Philippines. Of course there are lots of interesting differences from today’s world maps, especially in Africa.
At the end of the diary, there’s a nice little index that tells you where to find all the various bits of info. Helpful, since there’s so much data packed in!
What a great little notebook… Westinghouse still exists today, but I’ll bet they don’t give out promo items like this anymore.
Notebooks made out of old record album covers!
They’re even refillable. Find out more at Reware Vintage notebooks | Design Hole Online.
Now here’s a cool and unusual way to use a notebook! Not for writing notes in, but as a desk organizer for stray odds and ends:
Feldnotizbücher* in Deutschland via the Field Notes Blog