Here’s a notebook that I liked so much, I had to buy three of them.

I still love the concept of these: the look of a composition book in a different size. I’ve always loved the black and white patterned covers of the traditional composition book, but I have not usually wanted to use something that size. They make pocket size notebooks that look like composition books, but it always drove me crazy that they kept the same squarish format rather than the 3 x 5″ rectangle I preferred. (That didn’t stop me from buying a few, and in at least one case, I trimmed the cover and pages down to the appropriate golden rectangle proportions!)

So whoever came up with these (the brand is only identified as “A.D.I. Inc.”)was brilliant: the black and white pattern and the space for writing your name, but in a lovely 3 x 5″ spiral notebook.

The pattern carries over to the back cover too, which shows nice attention to detail. And on the back cover, you notice an interesting discrepancy: two of these were made in Taiwan, but one was made in Korea. The only differences between the Korean notebook and the others are that it has a metal spiral, and a slightly different color paper. The Taiwanese notebooks have plastic spirals that are doubled back into the same hole at each end to keep them from unraveling.

As with my other 1980s notebooks, I filled these with some notes for junior high school class work (some of which seems to be in someone else’s handwriting) as well as random doodling, including a pretty good copy of a character from the Tintin books and a not-very-good sketch of the cover of my favorite B-52s album at the time.

At this age, I remember wanting to fill the pages of notebooks but feeling like I didn’t know what to write– I rarely kept an actual diary or a real sketchbook, I just fiddled around and scribbled things like these. In some ways, I wish I’d written more details about my life at that time, but nevertheless, I find these old notebooks a lot of fun to flip through.