This is from a couple of months ago, a notebook that belonged to Agatha Christie was being auctioned: Crime novelist Agatha Christie’s handwritten notebook in which she plotted ideas for one of her detective novels is up for auction. The 1948, “regular, off-the-shelf†bound notebook, which features a hand-drawn ink sketch Christie made to illustrate … Continue reading Agatha Christie’s Notebook
This is an antique notebook I found on eBay. These kinds of diaries seem to have been issued to soldiers during World War I & II, to encourage the recording of memories of the battles fought in, places seen, friendships made, etc. It also includes some handy French phrases. This notebook is completely blank– I … Continue reading World War I Soldier’s Diary
I go through phases of being extremely disorganized as a blogger. People email me cool tips and sometimes I don’t get to them for a while, and then sometimes I am not sure whether I’ve used them or not. And in the case of this post, someone emailed me all these great photos, which I … Continue reading Notebooks from a Mental Hospital
I’ve been doing a lot of handwriting practice lately, playing with fountain pens in my old Hobonichi Techo. There is something very satisfying about it… but also frustrating, as I aspire to a level of fluid elegance that I don’t think I’ll ever attain! So I was quite amazed to see the image below as … Continue reading The History of Handwriting
This sounds like an interesting exhibit, at the Concord Museum in Massachusetts: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal. “The show centers on the journal Thoreau kept throughout his life and its importance in understanding the essential Thoreau. More than twenty of Thoreau’s journal notebooks are shown along with letters and manuscripts, books from … Continue reading Exhibition Featuring Henry David Thoreau’s Journals
You may have heard about the movie Victoria and Abdul, which stars Judi Dench as Queen Victoria, and Ali Fazal as a young Indian servant named Abdul Karim, whom she became close to. He taught her to speak and write in Urdu, which she practiced in notebooks such as the one below. Karim kept his … Continue reading Queen Victoria’s Urdu Notebook
The notebook image below is from an interested blog post from the V&A Museum in London. It’s an example of a pattern book: “They are reference guides for production. Maybe they show things made by the company in the past, maybe images by competitors, maybe historic objects – all intended to aid in further design. … Continue reading A Pattern Book from the V&A Museum
I was trying to find online images of Van Gogh’s small sketchbooks (the supposed “moleskines”) when I found the images below. The notebook pictured did not belong to Van Gogh, but was rather a sort of logbook kept at a cafe in Arles that Van Gogh visited. The notebook has been cited as evidence for … Continue reading A Notebook with a Link to Van Gogh?
You can find some amazing things in online archives. Below are some pages from a sketchbook by a botanist named Roland Thaxter, who lived from 1858-1932 (read more about him here). The actual sketchbook is in a library at Harvard, but it is shared via The Biodiversity Heritage Library, which “works collaboratively to make … Continue reading Roland Thaxter’s Sketchbook, from the Biodiversity Heritage Library
You may remember Michael Bierut’s stack of composition books that he’s used for many years– one of my favorite notebook stories ever. Now, Aron Fay, a colleague of Bierut’s at Pentagram, has a Kickstarter project going for an upscale, redesigned version of the composition book, using higher end materials and construction. While part of me … Continue reading The Composition Book Reimagined: “comp”