I recently read the book The Catcher Was a Spy, a fascinating account of the life of Morris “Moe” Berg. Berg was a catcher for several major league baseball teams from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. While his record as a player wasn’t that great, he was one of the most quirky and … Continue reading Moe Berg’s Notebooks
I usually think of artists who draw and paint as having the most beautiful notebooks and sketchbooks, but photographers keep some intriguing notebooks too: my latest “other people’s notebooks” fascination is with Diane Arbus. I’ve always found her quite interesting, since discovering her photographs when I was in high school, to more recently reading Patricia … Continue reading Diane Arbus Notebooks
Here is a very cute eBay find: a 3 x 5″ Collegiate notebook that I would guess is maybe from the 1940s-1950s or maybe earlier given that the price is only 10 cents. Cool cover design and excellent brown pressboard cover. For sale on eBay as of this writing for $9.99 or best offer. After … Continue reading Vintage Collegiate Notebook
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 … Continue reading The Exercise Book Archive
The National Library in Jerusalem, Israel has just revealed to the public for the first time a collection of Franz Kafka’s papers, including some notebooks. The writings themselves have been published before, but without access to the original papers, people couldn’t see how he wrote, and doodled and sketched, as in the example below! Trove … Continue reading Franz Kafka’s Notebook
I always love seeing articles about writers’ archives. I’d love to go through some of those boxes and see all the notebooks within, even if I haven’t read that writer’s work! Saul Bellow is an example… I haven’t read his books, but he left an extensive archive including lots of notebooks, one of which is … Continue reading Saul Bellow’s Notebook
Father Thomas Lawrason Riggs was the first Catholic chaplain at Yale. He was a member of Yale’s class of 1910, where he met Cole Porter, the composer. He later attended graduate school at Harvard, where he roomed with Porter and Dean Acheson, a future secretary of state. During World War I, Riggs returned to Yale … Continue reading Thomas Lawrason Riggs’s Notebook
On my recent post about adding NY Times front pages to my Nolty diary, a commenter asked how she might be able to do this herself. Mine were clipped from a special section in the print edition of the paper, and those miniature front page images didn’t seem to appear in the online edition. But … Continue reading How to Add Replica NY Times Front Pages to a Pocket Size Notebook
The New York Times did something rather neat in their last weekend paper of the year. They reproduced in miniature some of the front pages with the biggest stories of the year. I was excited to see that these mini front pages were just the right size to fit in a notebook! I carefully cut … Continue reading Nolty Diary and New York Times
I love this image of the artist Richard Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks. Such an interesting variety, and they’re all digitally archived at Stanford. “The Cantor Art Center completed the digitization of all twenty-nine books, making them accessible in the exhibition on touchscreens and here on the museum’s website. With these, one may now leaf through the books … Continue reading Richard Diebenkorn’s Sketchbooks