What a cool thing: The Exercise Book Archive is a website that is preserving exercise books, otherwise known as children’s school notebooks, from around the world and over hundreds of years!
You can click on each notebook and see larger images of the cover and interior. Here’s the pink one from 1980s China in the middle of the above image:
From their “About” page:
The Exercise Book Archive is an ever-growing, participatory archive of old exercise books that allows everyone to discover the history, education, and daily life of children and youth of the past through this unique material. The Archive includes hundreds of exercise books from more than 30 different countries and dated from the late 1700s to the early 2000s. It is preserved and managed by the Milan-based NPO Quaderni Aperti (literally, Open Exercise Books). Everybody is invited to contribute to the growth of the collection by lending or donating old exercise books, diaries, and letters, and by volunteering to transcribe and translate their contents.
OUR MISSION
Our main goal consists in the preservation and enhancement of the Archive through the digitisation, transcription, and translation of the contents of the exercise books. We also work to bring these testimonies to life through social media, exhibitions, seminars, and other activities.
OUR VISION
Exercise books are the main historical source produced by the children of the past. The books preserve their voices, thus they are powerful tools for research about children’s everyday life and about schooling in different countries. But we are not just interested in the past. We would like the contents of the exercise books to stimulate debate about education and the relationship between adults and children, inviting perspectives from teachers, educators, pedagogues, and historians, but also artists, writers, intellectuals, and general public.
Here’s some tips from a few artists about how to get yourself going with a sketchbooking (or notebooking) habit: Indian artists offer tips on how to start sketchbooking in 2020. I feel like my own sketchbook has been rather stagnant lately so I need to take some of these insights to heart!
Sketchbook page by Sameer Kulavoor
Mumbai-based artist Sameer Kulavoor uses his sketchbook to jot down ideas, and as a means to slow down. “Drawing and writing in a sketchbook is therapeutic. It gives me those moments when I can just focus on a page,†he says. For inspiration, he observes people, their features, gestures and behaviour, and uses a solid marker to sketch in his notebook.
Sketchbook page by Indu Karikumar
Artist and illustrator Indu Harikumar, best known for crowd-sourced art projects like 100 Indian Tinder Tales, says she often looks inward for inspiration. “Sketching and drawing my thoughts and feelings help me accept and engage with them. Often, we run away from thoughts that make us uncomfortable. But if you don’t listen to what’s in your head, who will?†she says.
As mentioned in a recent post about my daily carry notebooks, I’ve been using an extra Nolty diary to keep a scrapbook of interesting images, often artworks seen in the newspaper or a magazine, or sometimes just random clippings and bits of washi tape. A couple people have asked if I print out online images, but I generally don’t, other than when I was putting miniature NY Times front pages in a notebook. (In 2018, the NYT printed mini pages in the newspaper. For 2019, I saved a bunch as PDFS but I haven’t yet actually printed them out, as it seemed like it would be rather tedious!)
Anyway, below is the video I posted on Instagram, giving you a bit of a peek at the contents!
I have started another image diary for 2020, this time using a regular size Nolty diary (95 x 144 mm) to give me a little more room. I’ve been using a glue stick from Muji to paste the images in– after trying various other glue sticks, the ones from Muji are my favorite.
What notebooks would you pack for a year-long road trip? Gary is back home now, I think, but he spent a year traveling around the USA in a camper van and the photos below show the notebooks he brought with him:
What does a stationery fanatic and writer do to haul the necessary tools and paper for a year-long sojourn? Many have asked, so here’s the lowdown on the what and how…
The original post linked below has more photos of his various supplies Gary also did some notebook shopping along the way, and of course saw some fabulous sights– check out his photos on Instagram @Inkmuser.
I’m so jealous of his amazing road trip! I did a 5-week cross country drive and wished it could have lasted longer. I brought a few extra notebooks with me on that trip, but nowhere near as many as Gary did! But I was in a car, not a van. With more space, who knows??
Here’s an interesting reader question about productivity planners:
Hi I wonder if you have reviewed (productivity) Planners or if your readers can recommend some. Semi-business types with annual goals to help track goals break down tasks and monitor progress. Something like these type of planners: – http://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-undated-planners-productivity.html
Of the undated planners mentioned in the linked article, I have reviewed the Stalogy 365 notebook. I liked it a lot, but it’s basically just a notebook that gives you some very subtle guidelines along the top and sides of the page to indicate dates and times so you can turn it into a planner. But the print is hard to read!
I haven’t reviewed too many other formatted productivity planners, but here are a few.
I think the Archer Planner has an interesting design, but some users may find it is pre-formatted for too many life-logging micro details, like the state of your hair each day. It also comes in monthly booklets, which can be inconvenient if you need to keep more long-range plans in a yearly book. And unfortunately, as of this writing, the Archer Planner may not be an active product anymore. Looks like it is not currently available, with no news on re-stocking.
The Life Journal Infinite is an undated hardcover A5 size planner. The layout is somewhat free-form and versatile, giving you a way to organize monthly and weekly layouts with out too much pre-formatting. It seems targeted towards Bullet Journaling and logging more than tracking goals and task lists, but can be easily adapted to multiple purposes. Quo Vadis also offers many other dated planner designs that are more business or academic oriented. I used their Sapa X for several years back in the ’80s.
I continue to be a big fan of Nolty planners from Japan, though these fall into the annual/dated category. They have great paper and a wide variety of layouts. The only problem is that they are not that easy to find in the US, though you can order via Kinokuniya if you don’t live near one of their stores. The other downside is that some of the content is in Japanese, rendering most of the backmatter useless for English speakers. But I find their Efficiency Notebook layout really handy for planning and tracking. The week on the left has little time markers that you can use to block out appointments. The open page on the right can be used for notes or to-do lists. The monthly Gantt charts at the beginning of the planner are great for habit tracking but can also be used for project planning. (This review of my first 2018 Nolty has a lot of details.) Their Japanese website can be a little hard to navigate, but it does have photos of the various page layouts for different models.
At-A-Glance
This one might surprise people, as I’ve never reviewed an At-A-Glance planner. But I had to throw this in as I used to use the desktop weekly planners a lot at work in the mid-1990s and they still have a weird appeal for me every time I walk down that aisle at Staples! The wire-o binding and black faux-leather flexible covers seem kind of cheesy and retro compared to all the upscale hardcover planners that are out there these days, but they also offer some updated and more decorative designs. They are relatively inexpensive, and if you want a dated planner with lots of space to schedule tasks, they’re an option worth considering.
Of course it’s hard to recommend a planner because everyone uses them differently. It can depend on what kind of business or personal plans you need to track. Sometimes the best planner is one you design yourself, to suit your exact needs. (Some of the books mentioned in this post might give you some ideas!) I have actually been thinking a lot lately about ways to use refillable binders– partially because I have so many in my collection that I feel guilty about not using! I love bound notebooks, but sometimes a Filofax or similar notebook where you can add, remove or move pages is the most practical thing for productivity planning. You can use various pre-formatted inserts or make your own.
Readers, please chime in with your own ideas about favorite productivity planners!
Ireland is a fun place to visit. But I didn’t find it a wholly satisfying place for notebook shopping, which is always on my agenda when traveling. A few months ago, I was in Dublin and a few other towns, but most of the time, the pickings seemed slim. It was hard to even find places to look at notebooks: I wandered around looking for a stationery store I’d Googled, but it turned out to have moved or gone out of business. Despite all this I did end up buying a couple of notebooks from Ireland.
This Aisling notebook is not the sort of thing I would normally get all excited about, but I quite like it. It is a very basic school notebook from what seems to be a very common Irish brand that you see in basic office supply stores and bookstores. I bought this one in an Eason’s store, for €0.30. As a bonus, the bilingual cover teaches you a few words in Irish! I love finding notebooks like this that are very much a home grown product and not something you’d find elsewhere.
Here’s some of the other notebooks Eason’s had on display:
The other notebook I purchased is a total tourist item, but I guess quite representative of Ireland in its own way.
I had almost given up on buying any other notebooks from Ireland but found this Guinness notebook in a highway rest stop store towards the end of my trip. It’s my favorite size and format, and it has cool retro Guinness advertising art on the cover and front endpapers! Inside, the pages are lined in red, with a somewhat too large Guinness logo on every page. I think it only cost about €6 or maybe €8, and surprisingly, the paper is pretty fountain pen friendly, at least with some pens.
The only other notebooks that I remember noticing were in museum shops. Below are some leather notebooks with Celtic designs, spotted at the National Museum of Ireland– Archaeology in Dublin:
These were at the Hugh Lane Gallery:
And I think these were at the EPIC Irish Emigration Museum. They’re from Duffy Bookbinders, who claim to be the oldest bookbindery in Ireland:
Finally, I just had to throw in this shot of a really adorable little school supply shop. They did have some notebooks, though nothing particularly exciting or unusual enough to photograph. But it was the kind of little shop I would have been crazy about as a kid, with little bins of erasers and toys and things. It was fun to browse in, even though I didn’t end up buying anything there! I wish every town still had a little corner shop.
A reader tipped me off to what looks like a really interesting book:
In this richly illustrated book, readers will for the first time experience the diaries David Sedaris has kept for nearly 40 years in the elaborate, three-dimensional, collaged style of the originals. A celebration of the unexpected in the everyday, the beautiful and the grotesque, this visual compendium offers unique insight into the author’s view of the world and stands as a striking and collectible volume in itself.
The diaries seem almost like scrapbooks, with lots of stuff pasted in, and typewritten entries. Sedaris binds them together with plastic comb spines or wire spirals.
I really miss the “Book by Its Cover” blog, especially the series of posts about sketchbooks. (The blog has been inactive since 2015 but the archives are still viewable.) Here’s a cool post I’d flagged a few years ago:
If news reports make up the first draft of history, a reporter’s notebook is where that draft begins. Whether it’s an iconic quote scribbled in a notepad or a detailed scene describing a moment in time, the notes that reporters take are an early, but crucial, step in the process of Times journalism.
The means of note-taking have evolved, and reporters each have their own process for recording the details that make up their report, which can vary widely depending on their beat. But the goal remains the same: to document the truth.
This got me thinking about the specific style of notebooks that reporters use. A company called Portage makes quite a few versions, as well as notebooks for other professional uses, such as medicine and law enforcement. I like this one because it has graph paper:
I also noticed this reporter’s notebook by Juvale, which is nice because it has a wire-o binding instead of a regular spiral (at least in the images it looks that way– the description uses the word “spiral.”)
Of course, if you want to spend 10 times as much money and look like an amateur, you can use one of these:
Notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, diaries: in search of the perfect page…
