Only the biggest stationery geek in the world goes around saying things like “I LOVE MOTTLED PRESSBOARD!” Only the biggest stationery geeks probably even know what it is… in fact, I myself didn’t know what it was until just recently. Or rather, I knew what it was but I didn’t know what it was called. I always thought of it as “that cool, kind of smooth, not-too-thick cardboard that has a blotchy look to it, that they used to use on report folders and notebook covers.” This is the kind of report cover I’m talking about, which I’m glad to see you can still buy:

I also associate it with this kind of lab notebook, which I used in college:

I guess technically the material is just called pressboard. Clairefontaine may be the only notebook maker who specifically refers to it as “mottled pressboard,” though I’ve found a few places online that also use that adjective, or “marbled” to describe the variation in color. Clairefontaine is how I happened to come across the term, as I was browsing their website looking at versions of my favorite “Age Bag” notebooks that use a similar cover material. The ones I’m referring to are small cloth bound notebooks with squared paper, which are hard to get/expensive for US delivery (via Amazon). I bought mine in Paris— the notebooks themselves are pretty cheap.

The Age Bag notebooks I bought have a sort of wrinkled, leather-like texture to their pressboard. (Similar notebooks are sometimes branded “Life Unplugged” or “Essentials” in the US.) Other Clairefontaine notebooks in the Europa series seem to have a more traditional smooth texture, though it’s hard to be totally sure from online images.

Here’s some Roaring Spring notebooks from the 1980s in my own collection that use this cover material.

I also posted about this notebook made by Vernon McMillan, also from the 1980s, and was talking about how I didn’t know what the cover material was called! (The artist Lee Lozano also used both these types of notebooks in the 1970s.)