I came across an interesting story a while back about Huldra Press, owned by Marianne Dages. She makes letterpress cards and prints, as well as bound journals using recycled papers.

“I started making books like this because I was always kind of afraid of starting a perfectly white, blank book,” she said. “So, my idea was to make it a little bit more welcoming to start with, and already kind of started with different paper to inspire you to use it in whatever way you wanted to.”
Dages’s notebooks are unique creations with interiors sourced from vintage paper. The pages don’t always match and they’re not always blank. One page might be graph paper. The next might bear the crisp blue-lined grid of an accountant’s ledger or library check-out card. Occasionally, there’s a page with a photo or illustration taken from science, natural history or even vintage children’s books, to fill in an otherwise intimidating blank.

The elegant leather-bound and hardcover journals have an artistic quality that customers are sometimes reluctant disrupt with writing and sketches, but Dages encourages them to do just that.

“It’s a little handmade thing in your life, but that doesn’t mean it has to be treated preciously,” she said. “People say, ‘I don’t know what to write in my book. I feel like I have to think of something amazing,’ but I encourage people to use them for anything. I mean, I use them for grocery lists.”

Read more at Huldra Press helps conquer the fear of blank books — NewsWorks and make sure you look at the accompanying slideshow of her printshop in action.