Fabulous page from the diary of artist Duncan Hannah, as featured in the Paris Review:
Source: Diaries, 1970–73
In a separate article, the Paris Review also featured this photo of all Hannah’s diaries:
Source: Duncan Hannah’s New York
Found via Austin Kleon’s Inspiring Diaries
This week’s addict displays this lovely scattered pile of completed notebooks on Instagram:
I love all those raggedy edges and stuffed covers! And I want to see the pile of blank notebooks too!
Check out Mara’s Instagram feed for even more, including sketchbooks she has handbound and the beautiful art she creates inside them: @mararhum
I’d never heard this term before until reading a post at The London Parchment:
I am SABLE (Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy) on almost all stationery products, particularly with Field Notes.
What a handy abbreviation! I myself am probably not SABLE on notebooks, though I may need to reassess since I’ve lost track of where things stand after this past year’s acquisitions. As noted in this post and this post, I do make calculations about how long my notebook stash will last vs. my typical usage rate:
56 sketchbooks divided by 3 a year is a little less than 19 years, and I’ll only be about 67 years old at that point. The squared ones, if extended with the plain and ruled notebooks, will last up to 32 years, when I’ll be 81. I can probably ease off buying any more of those (unless I spot any really good cheap ones!) but I think I’m allowed to buy some more sketchbooks. Yay!
But I have to note that all but one of my grandparents lived well into their 90s, so it would seem that longevity is in my genes. I’m very healthy and hoping I stay that way for many years to come, thus I feel it’s only prudent to make sure I have enough notebooks to last me until the age of 95, or maybe 100.
I am unable to count all my spare notebooks right now because many of them are in a storage unit. So to be on the safe side, I probably shouldn’t stop buying more until I have a fully accurate grasp of the situation. Right?
And what if the singularity really is near? Radical life extension could really mess up my plans. The safest thing is to be prepared… by buying more notebooks.
I found this image on the School of Visual Arts website, as part of a feature on artists’ journals. Carl Titolo teaches at SVA and has been keeping sketchbooks for over 50 years. I love the dense pages full of patterns and details. It’s also interesting to see that at least in this case, he used a sketchbook where pens bled through to the back of the paper, adding another version of each page with a different tone and texture. There is a video in the linked article where you can see a flip-through of this entire sketchbook.
If you were to open a flat-file drawer in the Manhattan studio of Carl Titolo (G 1967), you should pull up a chair—you’re probably going to want to stay a while. The drawers are filled with layer upon layer of sketchbooks; each opens to a spread carpeted with minute, jewel-toned paintings, delicate pen drawings and jottings about art, food and architecture. Titolo calls these sketchbooks, which he has been keeping for more than 50 years, “appetizers.” For any visually minded person, they amount to a feast.
Read more about Carl Titolo and two other SVA alumni sketchbook keepers at: Bookkeeping: The Art of Artists’ Journals [Video]
When I first heard about the Endeavor Notebooks Kickstarter campaign last year, I was excited enough to take the plunge and pledge almost $50 as an early bird. I loved the aesthetics of the notebook, and the unusual method of attaching a refill notebook that could stand alone to a simple leather cover. So did the finished product live up to expectations? Let’s take a look.
I ordered a black leather pocket size cover, with a grey plain paper refill notebook, plus one extra refill in brown with dot grid paper. Each comes packaged with a paper belly band with branding info. The design is elegant and simple. When I unwrapped the leather notebook cover, I found it a little softer than I had expected. It’s not the most luxurious leather I’ve ever encountered, but it’s supple and smooth and without flaws, other than slight unevenness in the sealing of the edges, which really didn’t bother me. The screws that show on the spine give it a bit of industrial detail. There is a subtle logo on the back. The cover is about 4 x 6″ so it overhangs the refill notebook more than I’d wish. (Shown with a pocket size hardcover Moleskine for comparison below.) Otherwise, the cover is fine– not exciting like “ooh I love this luscious leather notebook,” but fine.
But what bugged me is that for some reason, the way it attaches to the refill causes it to go a bit askew. I can’t quite figure out why it’s happening, but I think it is that the spine of the refill is a bit off square. Since the cover attaches via screws to a metal strip that you slide into the spine of the refill, the crookedness of the refill throws off the whole thing. It’s not off by a huge amount, and it doesn’t affect the function of the notebook, but I do get annoyed by things like this.
When you open the notebook, you see the front cover of the refill. Unlike most refillable notebook covers, the attachment at the spine means the refill covers aren’t tucked in a pocket. I love the color scheme of the refills, especially the charcoal grey with black spine. The cover cardboard has a nice texture to it as well.
Unfortunately, I think the refill design has some flaws. The endpapers are glued to the single sheet of cardboard that forms the cover. I think these two different papers absorb humidity differently, which makes the cover curl, and you can see some wrinkling of the endpapers. I guess they’ve gotten a lot of complaints about this, as they now have a disclaimer about “dry climates” on their website. For what it’s worth, my notebook curled up during a fairly humid summer when I had no A/C, and is still curled over a winter with forced air heating.
There is a ribbon marker, and the refill opens nice and flat. Its flexibility makes it a nice stand-alone pocket notebook, but when it’s not in the cover, the extra room in the spine looks a bit odd, and of course you see the holes for the screws.
Then there is the paper. Oh dear. Endeavor Notebooks are claimed to have 80 GSM fountain friendly paper, but this paper is not very fountain pen friendly. It’s a bright white with a smooth texture, not so very different from standard printer paper. It works fine with pencils or fine gel ink pens, but some of my fountain pens and other wet pens bled through, and several fountain pens were also feathery. Very fine nibs and certain inks were ok, but the paper performance is definitely disappointing. I did not test the dot grid paper, but it feels the same. I also found the dots a bit too big and bold for my taste.
“Disappointing” is the word I’d have to use for this notebook overall. It’s not a terrible notebook– a lot of things about it are quite nice, but it doesn’t really live up to what it was promised to be, and doesn’t seem worth its rather high price. I guess that is the risk you take with Kickstarter projects. I do like the concept, and I’m curious to see how I might be able to adapt the cover, perhaps finding a way to insert the metal spine bracket into some other notebook with a looser spine. (I recently noticed another notebook maker is offering this same concept: Murdy Creative’s No. 2 leather notebook cover attached via a metal bracket and screws on the spine, and comes with a Piccadilly notebook inside. They say it can be used with any other A5 Moleskine-type notebook, but you do have to punch holes in the notebook spine for it to work.)
Endeavor Notebooks are still available via their website, in large and small sizes, and 3 colors. The current price for the basic starter kit of a cover with one refill is $49 for this pocket size, and $69 for the 5.5 x 8.5″ larger size. Additional refills are $9 for pocket size and $12 for large. I try to factor in the value of supporting independent small businesses, but I still feel like those prices are just too high for what you get. I’m not sure if they plan to produce any other products, and I wonder if they will be successful enough to go on producing their refills, given that they’ve marketed their notebook as a buy-for-life, “heirloom quality” product. I do hope they are able to address the problems with their initial run in terms of paper quality and the binding of the refills, but until then I can’t really recommend it.
Happy Phantom is a notebook addict with a happy dilemma: which of these beauties to use next?
I spy Moleskine, Leuchtturm, Paperblanks, maybe Midori, and some other brands I don’t recognize.
See more of Happy Phantom’s notebooks (and fountain pens!) on Instagram.
Today’s review is another foray into the world of school and business oriented notebooks. I think it’s also the first time I’ve reviewed a notebook that is designed to work with a digitizing app.
Hamelin is a French company that owns various brands including Oxford and Black n Red (though Black n Red is distributed by Mead in the US). Their notebooks are designed to appeal to a variety of users, from students to businesspeople to everyday journalers and jotters. The samples they kindly provided to me for review are wire-bound notebooks offering some upscale features that go beyond anything I used in my own student days.
The Hamelin notebooks have bright primary colored covers with a glossy surface. The glossy material wraps around a sturdy board, so they should be quite durable compared to a standard wire-bound notebook with a thin cardboard cover. A half sheet contains product and brand info, and can be removed so you have a nice minimal cover front and back.
Inside the notebook, there is another half sheet containing stickers you can use as tabs to create sections within the notebook, as well as a couple of labels you can use to add your contact information. Then there is a front page with another space for contact information, backed by information about Hamelin’s app, Scribzee. (More on Scribzee below.) Then you get a two-sided pocket where you can tuck loose sheets.
Then we come to the body of the notebook, 150 pages (75 sheets) of college ruled paper. These are Optik paper, Hamelin’s trademark paper used in other Oxford and Black n’ Red notebooks I’ve reviewed. The pages are perforated for easy removal, leaving you a full 8 1/2 x 11″ page when it’s torn out. (The perforation and wire binding add about an inch to the width.) As expected for Optik paper, fountain pens perform very well with no feathering or bleeding, and show-through is less than average.
At the corner of each page, you’ll notice some small icons– these work with the Scribzee app to enable it to capture a photo of the page and crop it to the 8 1/2 x 11″ dimensions. No rings or background shows around the edges, although the 3 holes in the margin do show. The app also has handwriting recognition capabilities, but only for what’s written in the top margin of the page. I did not find this very successful– most of my block capitals are pretty legible, I think, and yet it didn’t come close to recognizing the word “HANDWRITING.” My lower case letters are not as clear, so I’m not surprised it didn’t get those. (The handwriting recognition is supposed to use machine learning, so presumably it will learn to recognize individual handwriting better over time after you correct it, but that is not something I could test within the scope of this review.)
Other than the handwriting recognition, the app does what it does pretty well, though I did not always find the icons intuitive. Also, if you write a title on the top, it doesn’t automatically give the note that title– you have to go through a couple of clicks to switch to the recognized text, and then correct it, most likely. If you don’t want to use the Scribzee app as your main note storage site, you can also set it up to sync with your Evernote account. I would guess that most Evernote users would just capture notes using the camera within Evernote rather than using a separate app, but the Evernote app doesn’t strip out the background around the page. (Evernote’s handwriting recognition was good enough to read my block capitals when I searched “handwriting” and even picked up the word “recognition.”)
The app has a few typos, probably from being translated into English by native French speakers. And there are a few other things about it that I just find odd– why is the gear icon used with the “Pending” button? To me, gears mean “Settings.” I’m also not sure why you’d have a separate place for Pending, as in offline and unsynchronized, notes (I guess that is what it means), rather than just having one overall list of notes with some sort of color or icon to show which ones haven’t uploaded to the cloud. The cloud icon on the home page didn’t seem to do anything when I clicked on it.
There are other functions to the app like adding photos to notes or rearranging their pages that I didn’t test. Ultimately, I am not really the audience for an app like this. I tried to get into Evernote several years ago and even though it has some useful features, especially character recognition and searchability, it still seemed like more trouble than it was worth for my purposes. I use Google docs, Simplenote, and occasionally the iPhone’s built-in “Notes” app to save notes I want to access from my phone and computer. And sometimes I just snap a photo of a page in my paper notebook if I think I’ll need to refer to it. I’ve never had a need for anything more sophisticated in my work or personal life. But that’s just me.
I’m sure other users will have different systems for merging their paper and digital lives, and if automatic cropping of pages is important to you, you may find Scribzee a good solution. I haven’t tried any other paper/digital solutions like the Evernote Moleskine, or Livescribe notebooks, so I can’t compare the functions of those apps to Scribzee. But I can say that Optik paper is better than Moleskine paper if you like using fountain pens. And these Hamelin notebooks should be durable and stylish enough for any school or office situation. I expect to put this one to good use, even if only in the old-fashioned, non-digital way!
If you haven’t spotted Hamelin products in your local office supply shop, the notebook reviewed here is available on Amazon for $9.99 plus shipping. Various other Hamelin notebooks in a variety of colors and sizes are also available.
You can also try your luck in my giveaway! Three winners will each receive one Hamelin notebook. Winners will be randomly selected from entries received in any of these ways:
On Twitter, tweet something containing “Hamelin Scribzee Notebook @NotebookStories @Hamelin_notesâ€, and follow @NotebookStories and @Hamelin_notes
On Facebook, “like†the Notebook Stories page and the Hamelin page, and post something containing the words “Hamelin Scribzee Notebook†on the Notebook Stories page.
On your blog, post something containing the words “Hamelin Scribzee Notebook†and “Notebook Stories†and link back to this post, also leaving a comment below with the link in case the trackback doesn’t work.
On Instagram, follow @Notebook.Stories and @Hamelin.be_noteworthy and comment on my Hamelin notebooks post, tagging a friend and adding a hashtag of your favorite adjective describing the Hamelin notebook. (Example: “@myfriendsally #fountainpenfriendlyâ€)
The deadline for entry is Friday May 17, 2019 at 11:59PM, EST. Good luck everyone!
I don’t remember how I came across the website of Macha Selbach. She has posted lots of images from her travel sketchbooks, as well as other artworks. Some are bright and colorful, and others are simple monochromatic ink sketches that nevertheless capture beautiful light. Lots of different styles, and all beautiful!
See more at: books – macha.selbach.overblog.com. Make sure you click through to individual posts to view the full photo galleries.
Forbes recently published a round-up of notebooks suggested as Mother’s Day gifts, though these choices would work just as well for non-moms. A few of their recommendations were Moleskines that will be familiar to everyone, but I was intrigued by these brands I hadn’t heard of:
Stimulate your creativity with the first blueprint paper notebook, complete with white gel pen, from BLU. Made in Canada, these innovative journals pay tribute to a time when creation was a tactile experience. Blueprints have been an essential tool in building some of the world’s most important projects, and may continue to be, thanks to these hands-on beauties.
It’s a fun idea, even though nowadays I’m not sure how many architects still print “blueprints” in this color scheme. And maybe after a while it would be tiresome having to always use a white pen? But their website says they are “Designed to inspire innovation,” and the unusual paper might do just that.
These heirloom-quality notebooks are hand-stitched and bound with full grain leather and filled with Tomoe River paper, which is renowned for its thinness and resistance to ink bleeding and feathering. Available in two sizes and half a dozen rich colors, they slip into any bag and turn list-making into a sophisticated activity. Price: From $32
These look quite cool– sort of a cross between a Field Notes and a Travelers Notebook, made in the USA with top-notch materials. But at $32 for a 128 page pocket notebook (and $65 for the 5.25 x 7.75″ medium size), Ezra Arthur notebooks are not cheap. Their website notes that they can re-bind/re-fill the leather cover for $12, but that is also pretty pricy and inconvenient vs. just slipping a new refill into a Travelers Notebook or other leather covers. But I still want one!
You can see the rest of the Forbes article here.
The geek girl pop culture site The Mary Sue talks about a Twitter post that went viral, revealing some very widespread notebook addiction amongst their staff and commenters:
A few days ago, a Tweet went by that made me smile: “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you already have six blank notebooks at home,†Twitter user @TraceOddity wrote. Actually, that smile was more of a grimace, because six notebooks? Try thirty-six. I am a repository of mostly-unused notebooks. And apparently, I’m far from alone.
The Tweet struck a chord, garnering a staggering 181k “likes,†41k retweets, and thousands of replies. I think I’m a little surprised by this result because I’m a collector by nature, so I rather thought this bottomless notebook hoarding was just another thing I did.
I know a lot of writers, and writers love a good notebook, but I assumed that they were getting more mileage out of them. Yet as soon as the Tweet was dropped in our Mary Sue chat, every staff member said that they felt called out.
The rest of the article and the comments are basically a big therapy session amongst notebook addicts!
Read more at: All of Us Are Out Here Endlessly Buying New Notebooks