This World War I notebook found on eBay is a recent addition to my collection of vintage notebooks.

I was intrigued by this notebook because I’d never seen one quite like it, and there is no manufacturer’s name or symbol anywhere on it. Unlike the other World War 1 soldier’s diary in my collection, it’s just a plain lined notebook with no added content. It measures 3 3/8 x 5″, close to today’s standard sizes but a little bigger than many typical antique diaries, which tend to be more like 2.5 x 4″. It is about 1/4″ thick, with 6 signatures of paper.

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The cover seems to be a faux leather wrapped around cardboard. The pages are gilt-edged, though the shininess is quite faded from what it probably used to be. Inside, the endpapers have a pattern printed in metallic ink. The endpapers are two separate sheets, so you can see a gap at the spine where red cloth tape shows through. This must have been a very elegant looking notebook when it was new.

Inside, the pages are lined. Many are blank, and the notebook doesn’t seem to have been used from front to back. The written-on pages are scattered throughout. It seems to have been used to record letters sent and received while its owner was stationed in France during World War 1. The dates noted begin in 1918 and continue into 1919.

There is a mention of “devastated areas” so peacetime must have still been quite difficult for soldiers serving in France in the aftermath of the war, but he makes no mention of events as they happen, only the letters and postcards he sends or receives. Presumably their contents would have been censored until after the war was over.

The World War I notebook also contains various names and addresses, mostly written in the back pages, so it must also have served as an address book where the owner recorded information about people he met during his travels. Some of the addresses are in various US locations including military bases, while others are French names and addresses. The entries are written in a mix of pencil and different colors of fountain pen ink. The handwriting is quite beautiful. One page even seems to be written in shorthand.

There are a few odds and ends tucked into the notebook: a visiting card, a blank prescription slip with numbers written on the back, a newspaper clipping and a typewritten poem. As noted in the poem, the owner’s military service in France seems to have covered several months at the end of the war and continued during after the armistice.

An interesting sidenote: The poem seems actually to have been a parody song written by someone named Grantland Rice, according to a newspaper from that time, though the words here are slightly different. I found references to this song in other online sources, such as this one where it was similarly written on a loose sheet tucked into a diary. It must have been quite popular at the time, perhaps as a humorous thing to include in letters home. But maybe the men were told not to mail it in censored letters, as it might have seemed too negative, and thus it was carried with them in their notebooks and diaries.

This is quite a fascinating and mysterious notebook. The contents are in a way quite mundane, without any personal reflection other than, perhaps, the poem/song, so we can only imagine what the owner’s wartime experiences must have been like. Someday I’ll take the time to look up some of the names in the notebook, but I’m not sure they will help me identify the owner, as he does not seem to recorded his own name or his relationship to the other people named in the notebook. It is amazing to think that this notebook has survived in relatively good shape through the end of a war over 100 years ago. It’s battered and musty smelling but seems alive with history.