Continuing to celebrate this blog’s 10th anniversary, here’s another blast from the past– the past of this blog, and my own past as a notebook addict! The post below is just one of many I’ve written about my own collection of notebooks saved from throughout my life. (See My Collection) The 1970s and 1980s ones fascinate me for a few reasons. (See 1970s, 1980s) First of all, these are just crappy dime-store notebooks. I didn’t write anything very interesting in them. There’s nothing “collectible” about them. And yet I’ve saved so many, even ones I didn’t especially love.

Today they seem like a microcosm of America’s economic changes. There were so many local manufacturers of paper products in those days, and in these notebooks you can trace the way many of these companies were bought up and absorbed into big conglomerates, and how overseas manufacturing started to become more common. Decades later, you can buy a wider variety of notebooks in the average stationery shop, but they aren’t necessarily cheaper, even when you adjust for inflation. And who knows how many jobs were lost. I can’t help feeling nostalgic for the stationery of the past…

You can see the original post and comments here.

Here’s a pretty basic notebook from the mid-1980s. I used it for a while in high school to keep track of school assignments and such– I dated each page, and noted each day’s assignments and deadlines. It’s got a nice clean design, but is otherwise quite boring! I’m not sure why I favored it at the time, other than just wanting something cheap and simple to write in.

I got a kick out of the page below– a very exciting thing at the time, driving lessons!

I used lots of simple spiral notebooks like this, many of which I still have. This particular one was made by Roaring Spring/Top Scholar, of Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania. I have another notebook made by Top Scholar– it appears to have been a separate company based in Columbia, MD, so I guess Roaring Spring must have bought them out. I can’t find any information on the companies, but I’m sure it was yet another link in the chain of notebook manufacturing companies consolidating and then sending their operations overseas… this always makes me feel sad!