Here’s a few oldies-but-goodies from my collection, three Roaring Spring spiral notebooks that I bought in 1980 and used between then and 1982.

I love the colors– the outside covers are slightly faded and scuffed compared to the inside front covers. The back covers are just plain cardboard.

You can see below that I stapled all around the edges of one of the front covers. I don’t remember if this was intended to be decorative or to somehow reinforce the cover.

The notebook with the red cover shows off a rather handy modification that I sometimes performed on my spiral notebooks– I’d unwind the spiral, add more paper, and then rethread the spiral back through. I liked having the thickness of the pages be almost equal to the diameter of the wire spiral binding. On this one, I also added the front and back covers of another notebook in order to divide the pages into sections.

The notebook I added must have been a later incarnation of this brand as they added a barcode to the cover, thereby throwing off the pleasing symmetry of the earlier version.

The first page became an index for the 3 sections, but I never bothered to identify them in any particular way.

Throughout all 3 notebooks, I filled the pages with various jottings and doodles and a lot of lists. Below, I was listing tracks from an LP that I wanted to record on cassette tape. (Any ’80s music fans recognize what album this was? The tracks listed here were the more obscure ones, not the hits!)

It’s nice to have nothing more pressing to do than cut out maps and go to the pool! Though I guess I was doing some chores around the house, given the page below:

I also wrote a lot of notes about schoolwork. I like the page below, as you can see what my top school supply priority was!

These old notebooks are always a fun trip down memory lane….