After news of President Lincoln’s assassination reached New York, in all arteries and capillaries of the city, shopkeepers designed makeshift shrines to the martyred president. An anonymous diarist walked for miles, drawing sketches of as many storefronts as he could (evidence suggests, but does not confirm, that the diarist was a man). Through his relentless activity this nameless reporter made the news a bit more comprehensible. Here are selections from the diary entries. Click on the yellow icons for annotations by Ted Widmer. (McLellan Lincoln Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University)
I like the covers on these, and am tempted to try to make something similar: apparently they’re held together with just a hair elastic and a bamboo stick. At Screen Prints Blog.
At From the Living Room, some musings on “My Notebook“:
It used to be that my notebook was the most important thing in my handbag. It used to be that I would get through a notebook in a matter of months. I have a box full of used notebooks, each with the date they were started on scribbled inside the front cover. My current notebook started in… October 2006. I shocked myself looking that one up.
Up until I started writing online, I kept a journal of sorts in my notebook but it petered out when I started using Live Journal. So it’s not surprising that my notebooks fill up less quickly than they used to. But somehow, the less I use my notebook for every thought I feel, the less I use my notebook for every thought I think. I seem to be paying less attention to my ideas than I used to.
I still write down phrases that catch me unawares, and if I’m waiting somewhere, I nearly always free-write in my notebook. But I don’t have the same relationship with it as I used to. Sometimes I find myself writing ideas down on the back of a receipt when my notebook is sitting in my bag. And sometimes I don’t write my ideas down at all. What has changed?
Have your notebook usage habits changed over the years? What has affected them: electronic devices? Blogging? Other things?
I’ve gone back and forth about what information I keep electronically, and for a while, I only used paper notebooks for sketches and journal entries after switching to keeping all my to-do’s, calendars, and lists in a Palm PDA. But now I’ve gone back to keeping a lot of lists and to-do’s in a notebook. How about you?
The new extra-large Moleskine Folio line is now in stock at Amazon. Listing for all the 2010 planners and new City guides are also showing up, though they’re not in stock yet. You can see all the new items here. There are several pages to scroll through, so use these links if you are just interested in the Folio line:
This is very cool, a bookworm’s dream! I wonder if Amazon realized that their re-design of the Kindle would make it the same size as the larger Moleskines!
According to the measurements on Amazon, the Kindle2 is 5.3 x 8 x.36 inches. A large Moleskine is 5.2 x 8.2 x .7 inches. So you’d have to take out about half the paper, and the edge of the Kindle might stick out ever so slightly, but it’s pretty close to a perfect fit. Another idea might be to try it with the large Moleskine Memo Pockets or a Japanese Album (but hey, do they really not make a large Japanese Album???), if you don’t want to make as much of a mess removing the paper.
The only problem with this is that now I really want Amazon to make a POCKET Moleskine-sized Kindle!
I snapped these photos during a recent trip to Philadelphia, where we stopped in to check out the Betsy Ross house. I have no idea what this notebook really has to do with Betsy Ross, but it was on display in a case there. It belonged to an artist/inventor named Charles Weisgerber. I have a particular weak spot for notebooks belonging to inventors and engineers, they’re often full of such interesting diagrams and ideas– this one was for some sort of ship that could both fly and float!
I noticed the other day that I seemed to be rampaging through my latest notebook at a faster than usual pace. Have I just had more to write about? More to draw? More things to do and ideas to jot? I’m not sure, but part of the reason is definitely that I copied several pages of stuff over from my last notebook. The stuff I copied was long-term to-do list notes, mainly a “books to read” list and ideas for blog posts. Some of the blog ideas might be kind of stale by now, but a lot of them are still things I’d like to keep active. This is where pen and paper can seem a little inefficient. In some ways, it’s nice to rewrite a list and freshen it up, but in other ways it seems like a waste of time. Should I just keep these long-term lists electronically and print them out occasionally when they’ve been updated? Or should I just keep a page in the new notebook referring back to lists in the old notebook, and keep it by my desk somewhere accessible? (I have to say that idea doesn’t appeal to me– I want my lists all in my current notebook.)
This dilemma makes me think about trying to go back to a Filofax for a while instead of using a Moleskine or similar notebook without removable pages. Another idea might be to use a Cahier or Volant-type notebook and keep these lists on the perforated pages, so they could then be torn out and moved over, but I’m not sure that would work very well.
The green-covered CVS-brand notebook sits deep in Daniel Murphy’s locker at the Mets’ spring training site, Tradition Field.
The notebook has been places, though. And like the Mets’ 23-year-old leftfielder, it seems to be going places, too.
Murphy bought the notebook in October in Arizona when he played in the Arizona Fall League. He took it home with him to Jacksonville, Fla., and brought it down I-95 to Port St. Lucie when spring training opened.
It follows him to the bench when he plays and to the locker room when his day’s work is done. It will go with him to New York when the Mets play exhibition games at Citi Field on April 3 and 4, and will fly with him to Cincinnati for the season opener April 6.
Murphy’s notebook contains a record of his at-bats – just like the one his teammate Carlos Delgado has kept for years. Murphy got the idea from Delgado. Well, not directly from him, but from watching a tape of Delgado, a year and a half before they became teammates.
You can read more about how Murphy uses his notebook here.
Notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, diaries: in search of the perfect page…
. There are several pages to scroll through, so use these links if you are just interested in the Folio line:
. The measurements are 12.8 x 9.3 x 0.9 inches, so it should hold letter-size papers nicely. I also ordered an 
, which measures 16.6 x 11.8 x 0.6 inches. It will be fun to try the heavier sketchbook paper in this jumbo size!
or a 
(but hey, do they really not make a large Japanese Album???), if you don’t want to make as much of a mess removing the paper.