Continuing with Part 2 of my exploration of spiral notebooks and wire-o notebooks from my collection! As in Part 1, all of these are 3 x 5″ notebooks unless otherwise noted, and mostly from the 1980s.

The Roaring Spring notebooks seem very classic and looked a little retro even in the ’80s. I loved those pressboard covers. As you can see, I added some extra dividers in one of them. Being able to unwind the spiral and add new pages (if the holes line up) is one area where spiral has wire-o beat. I’ve written more about these Roaring Spring spiral notebooks in these posts: Roaring Spring Spiral Notebooks, Early 1980s and 1980s Roaring Spring Spiral Notebook

Roaring Spring’s current products seem to be limited to larger sizes.

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The plain red Roaring Spring notebook above is also branded as Top Scholar on the back cover. Here are some other Top Scholar notebooks, I guess from before they merged with Roaring Spring. They date to the early ’80s. I’ve previously written about the one with the trippy collage cover, which is so unlike all my other spiral notebooks : An Unusual 1980s Spiral Notebook

Mead became such a ubiquitous name in stationery from the ’80s onwards, but I only have a few Mead notebooks in my collection. (I know I used many larger Mead spiral notebooks in school, but I didn’t tend to keep those.) These are pretty unremarkable. They don’t say where they were made. Here we see one of my few 4 x 6″ notebooks, which is very beat up because it contains a sort of cartoon soap opera written for, by, and about all my junior high school friends, so it was passed around a lot between classes in 1981 or thereabouts. It’s very funny but also rather embarrassing to read now! Mead still makes very similar pocket spiral notebooks, which you can get in super cheap multi packs.

I have a couple of notebooks made by Joredco, of which one is 4 x 6″. I don’t know much about this company but found an online listing saying the trademark for the name had expired in 1996, having been held by Joseph Redegeld & Co., of Elizabeth, NJ. These date to the late 1980s.

Here are two other 4 x 6″ notebooks, the blue one made by Top Flight, which is still an active brand, and the Snoopy one, made by Plymouth Inc. I posted about the Snoopy notebook here: Happy Valentine’s Day

The rest of the collection is kind of a random assortment of brands (noted in the captions below). I rather like the Sparco notebook, again because it has a slim profile with very small wire-o rings. The only problem with such tight rings is that the pages can get stuck when they’re being turned. I am sure I have spent many hours in my life trying to straighten notebook pages that were sticking out! Sparco is still a current brand but I’m not sure if they still make pocket notebooks like this. The green Harvard Square notebook belonged to my father, and I wrote about it in this post: Harvard Square Notebook, late 1960s- early 1970s

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There are a few other notebooks with wire bindings that date to my adult life. I remember buying this Maruman wire-o notebook in San Francisco in the early ’90s. It might be my first Japanese notebook! I was totally enamored with the cool cover. Written about here: Notebooks in My Office. Maruman is still very much an active brand, though this product is no longer current.

Clairefontaine also makes an appearance. I only used a few pages of this notebook, perhaps because I would have bought it right around the time in the ’90s when my notebook obsession switched to Filofaxes and hardcover or softcover journals with stitched bindings. The current version has slightly different covers.

The marbled wire-o notebook also would date to the ’90s. It has unlined sketch paper inside, but was used for daily notes at a job. There is no brand information. It reminds me how surprising it is that these pocket notebooks always had lined pages– why didn’t anyone ever make them with a plain or squared option? Pocket size sketchbooks with wire bindings are kind of rare too.

My taste in notebooks is pretty different now, but I had a good long run with all these pocket spiralnotebooks! I just couldn’t resist them in my younger days. Many of my notebooks show evidence of being started for random specific purposes and then soon being abandoned– sometimes I just wanted an excuse to buy a new notebook! I rarely wrote anything resembling a diary in them, but the notes and scribbles do reflect aspects of my life at the time– starting clubs with my friends, interests in things like astronomy or geography, goofy cartoons, school assignments, tracking how much (how little) money I had, and grappling with my first few jobs. I’m glad I’ve saved them all these years!