Here’s a gem from the late ’70s/early ’80s. I love the simple cover design with the 25 cent price at the bottom. I wonder what ever happened to the Eastern Tablet company of Albany, NY. When you google it, not much comes up other than the obituaries of people who worked there at one time. I think notebooks are a perfect example of the decline of American manufacturing– they used to be made by a variety of small local companies, as recently as the 1980s, but then factories started shutting down and companies consolidated and shipped their business off to China. Now we have lots of varieties of fancy journals, but when it comes to simple notebooks like this, you get one or two generic brands that are offered by Staples and that’s about it.

But back to the appreciation of this old beauty– I also love the double wire binding– not “spiral,” exactly. This kind doubles back on itself and allows the notebook to fold over while still keeping the top and bottom edges of the pages aligned, which I have always appreciated.

And 25 cents! What a bargain. I loved this notebook so much I would have bought ten of them at once, except that my weekly allowance at the time was only about 50 cents, and I also had to budget for candy.

At this age, many of my notebooks were focused on spying and clubs– or to combine the two, a secret spy club!

It’s also another amusing example of self-referential notebook use. If I didn’t have anything better to write about, I’d write about how much I liked the notebook and draw a picture of it! It’s as if I was preordained to become a notebook blogger, well before anyone had heard of the internet, or, for that matter, a “personal computer!”

Hopefully the commentary I’m providing on this site 30-odd years later is more insightful!