I like the look of these Canteo notebooks, featured at Notebookism. Too bad they only seem to be available in Switzerland!
Best Pens for Moleskines
There’s lots of discussion amongst Moleskine fans about which pens are best for use on Moleskine paper. Here’s the most exhaustive list of pen reviews I’ve found, at a blog called Sandscribbler. The author’s favorites:
- Uni-ball Signo RT 0.38
The best Moleskine pen that I’ve found so far. - Pilot G-2 05 and the
Uni-ball Signo 207 Micro 0.5
Very nice alternative pens, if a .38 feels too “scratchy†to you. You can’t go wrong with either one. - Uni-ball Signo 207
The tip on this pen is a bit wide for me for everyday use, but I love using this pen when writing my signature.
I picked up a Pilot G-2 05 and a Uniball Signo 207 Micro. Of the two, I personally prefer the Uniball by far. I found that the Pilot would often skip in my Moleskine, unless I was pressing down harder than I usually do when writing. But I don’t think either of these pens beats my longtime favorite, the Uniball Onyx Micro.
Matchbook Notebooks
An Etsy seller is making little matchbook-like notebooks as samples to promote her line of journals– very cute!
Quotable Quotes
At Megaquotes, there’s quite a list of quotes about writing. The ones below made me think about my own notebooks:
So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948 (All those nice fresh notebooks that didn’t seem as beautifully-filled as I wanted them to be!)
The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. ~Norbet Platt
Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. ~Emme Woodhull-Bäche (Look at how much time people spend figuring out which pen is best for a Moleskine!)
It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. ~Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989
Let me walk through the fields of paper
touching with my wand
dry stems and stunted
butterflies….
~Denise Levertov, “A Walk through the Notebooksâ€
An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts. ~Juvenal, Satires
I keep little notepads all over the place to write down ideas as soon as they strike, but the ones that fill up the quickest are always the ones at my nightstand. ~Emily Logan Decens
Notebook Sighting
David Patrick Columbia, writer of the New York Social Diary, pocketing a notebook:
From The New York Times
Last Night I Dreamed…
… about notebooks.
I was in some kind of Home Depot-like store, and saw that they were selling the kind of diary I used to use in the mid-80s, when I was in high school. They were exactly 3×5, with a black faux-leather cover. In the front, they had pages with measurement conversions, city populations, a mini-Farmer’s Almanac, and other useful tidbits of information.
Then each page was split over two days, so you had 4 days to a spread. I tended to fill each day with things like “Debbie called. I helped Jeff with the physics homework. Read another Tintin book.” At the back of the diary, there were pages to write addresses and telephone numbers, and pages for recording expenses. They really tried to squeeze a lot into these little diaries, almost like a Filofax but without the option to pick and choose what you’d actually use.
In my dream, the diaries were packaged in those plastic things that hang on a hook and are impossible to cut open once you get them home. I was all excited to be able to buy this kind of diary again, even though I wouldn’t really have much use for it now. I started to look around the store to see what other kinds of notebooks they had, and I could see that there were many other interesting ones to look at… but then I woke up.
Originally posted at 3x5life
Picadilly Version of the Muji Chronotebook
Which came first? The Muji Chronotebook, which seems to have been around since at least May 2008?
Or the “new” Picadilly Sundial Agenda, which looks almost identical?
“Creation versus Consumption”
Here’s an interesting article from The Simple Dollar, in which the writer’s notebooks are a key example of something many of us struggle with:
I like pocket notebooks. During my years as a young professional who still harbored some little sliver of a dream of someday becoming a writer, I would often pick up a wonderful, shiny, expensive new Moleskine pocket notebook. I’d keep it with me for a while, sitting down at coffee shop tables and opening it up before me, dreaming little dreams of being a great writer. On occasion, I might even write something down in that notebook.
But, after a while, I’d put it aside somewhere – in a dresser drawer or somewhere else – and then a few months later, the bug would strike me again. So I’d buy another nice, shiny, new notebook and fill up a few pages with jottings, only to eventually add it to my ever-growing pile of journals and pads here and there around the house.
Skip forward to today. Today, I keep a tiny, dirt-cheap Mead memo notebook in my pocket at all times. And I use it and abuse it. I fill that thing from top to bottom with notes, and it’s often a race with time as to whether I beat the notebook to death before I fill it with my notes….
What good is a notebook if it’s not collecting your thoughts? What good is a pair of running shoes if you’re not out running? What good is a keyboard if you’re not practicing your music?
A lot of us want to accomplish something great. We want to read the great works of Western literature. We want to train for and run in a 5K. We want to write the “Great American Novel.†We want to have the perfect home for our family.
The truth is that no product on earth will ever make these things happen…. You can have all the slick notebooks in the world, but if they’re just filled with empty pages, they’re useless.
Do you agree? Is a notebook obsession sometimes a symptom of creative paralysis, and of throwing money at a problem to try to solve it? Or does a nice notebook stimulate creativity in a way that a beat-up Mead memo pad wouldn’t, making the money spent on expensive journals a good investment?
More Thoughts on Notebooks After Death
From Continental Op
The other day I purchased a $200 fountain pen. It is an extravagant pen. But, I spend so much of my time writing my thoughts down that it actually seems worth the price. Anyway, it occurred to me the other night that I have so many notebooks that I want to destroy. They are notebooks to me…not journals. To call them journals would imply that there is a perseverance of thought to the things I write. There is none. In fact, most of my writings would make sense only to me. None of these notebooks are anything I want to leave behind when I am no longer alive. In fact, I dread the fact that someone would go through them after my death and try to make sense of them…
Thus, out of necessity, I dreamed up the RAD Journal. More precisely the Read After Death Journal.
Moleskine’s Colored Paper Bands
Do you ever leave the colored wraparound strip on your notebook? Or you’ve at least thought it looks kind of nice, and missed it a little after you took it off and your Moleskine was back to just being all black?