I quite sympathize with this person– it’s nice to get notebooks as gifts, but on the other hand they are very personal and what do you do if someone gives you one and you don’t know what to do with it?

“When your family knows you’re a writer you get notebooks for presents, especially when you are goddamn impossible to buy gifts for because you don’t really want anything, except maybe books, but you work at a bookstore so it is folly to try to buy books for you. I still start a lot of projects by hand even though my penmanship is awful, so, it’s pretty handy to get new notebooks roughly biannually. But notebooks are also very personal items. A notebook could be with me for years. I could be in physical contact with it for hundreds of hours over that time. When I’m writing in it, it is the most important object in my life. And if I think I have lost a particular notebook, the lexicon of my panic is equal parts “Ahhhhhhh! The words I have written!” and “Ahhhhh! The thing I have written my words in!” I’ve also been doing this long enough to develop habits, idiosyncrasies, and preferences, so that, though I always appreciate gifted notebooks, sometimes I get one and think “What the hell am I going to use this for?” (More on that later.)

But sometimes the opposite is just as difficult. When I get a really good notebook, I feel pressure to write something that uniquely fits into the physics of that notebook….”

In this case, the writer received a few customized Moleskines that were given to attendees of an annual independent booksellers’ conference:

Read more at In Order of Importance: The Pressures of a Really Good Notebook.