Some of my earliest notebook obsessions were spiral and wire-o binding notebooks. Back when I was a kid, other kinds of notebook were not as easy to find, or were prohibitively expensive for a kid to buy with her allowance. Nowadays, I rarely find myself using a wire bound notebook, but I thought I’d take a look at some favorites from my collection. (I found myself unable to limit myself to just a few favorites, so I’m splitting this into two posts!) All of these are 3 x 5″ notebooks with lined pages, unless otherwise noted.

Most of these notebooks are from childhood, and my top favorites from back then would be these Paper King notebooks from the late ’70s-early ’80s. They are the first notebooks I owned that had a wire-o binding instead of a regular spiral and I loved that detail. It’s so much tidier than a spiral, less likely to catch on things and when you flip the pages around to the back, they stay aligned rather than being offset by one hole. I especially liked the red one because for some reason it was thicker than the others. With wire-bound notebooks, I always liked it when the rings were just barely wider than the thickness of the pages. I don’t remember ever seeing these notebooks or this brand for sale again after the short period of time in which I bought these 3. I wrote more about one of them in this post: Paper King Notebook

The Vernon Mcmillan memo books were also favorites, particularly the ones with the mottled pressboard covers, which date to the late ’80s. (The neon green one is from the mid-’70s and is one of my oldest notebooks in terms of personal usage.) Again I liked the thickness and ratio of ring size to the pages, and I loved the pressboard covers. I wrote more about one of these notebooks: Mid-1980s Vernon McMillan Notebook

I also loved these “Comp” pocket memo books. Such a cool design. These are quite thin, but on two of them, the rings are smaller so they have a nice feel. But the rings are plastic, and they are double looped around the end holes, which makes it a little awkward when you try to flip the pages all the way to the back. The third Comp memo has a normal metal spiral, but with a slightly larger diameter. See more details on these in this post: Early 1980s Comp Pocket Memo Books

The same slim profile is evident on these Bear Brand notebooks dating to the early ’80s, and one of them also has the double looped plastic spiral. They were sold by the Eugene B. Baehr Company of Stamford CT, but made in Taiwan. I can’t find any trace of this company online.

Also from the early ’80s, these Reliance notebooks have a pleasing design, especially the marbled looking ones. These were made in Korea and the company was based in Tennessee.

The Pen-Tab notebooks are not particularly exciting but it’s interesting to see how the design and manufacturing changed while the product number is the same. The two red ones were made in Taiwan. The yellow one was made in Argentina, which seems really unusual. The yellow notebook is very thin vs. the spiral diameter but it’s because a lot of pages were ripped out. (I did not tend to rip pages out of my own notebooks, but this one belonged to my mother originally, and she gave it to me when I left for college, with notes about how I should wash some of my clothes. Laundry had not been one of my chores up til that point!) One of the red notebooks just has the Pen-Tab name, but the other two have the company name as Prudential-Feldco.

These CVS notebooks appealed to me enough to buy two of them, for some reason. They are pretty basic, but have square corners, which is unusual. One is somewhat thicker, and is filled with daily lists of homework for my high school classes. The other was only used about halfway, and contained random lists and self-improvement resolutions, as well as some poetry copied out from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It also contained one page I have shown below, as I found it rather amusing!

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post with more details on the rest of the collection!