This library in central Tokyo is like no other. Instead of offering volumes ranging from the usual, it displays the decidedly unusual.
How about a bittersweet story of unrequited love between two high school students, a man’s passion for job-hunting or someone’s fixation on a pop idol?
These glimpses of the emotions of total strangers are available courtesy of personal pocket notebooks and diaries.
Called Techorui Toshoshitsu, the cubbyhole of a library located within the art gallery Picaresque near Sangubashi Station in the capital’s Shibuya Ward is generating quite a stir.
Visitors are able to browse through the “honest feelings†of nameless people they have never met.
Set up in a small space about the size of four and a half tatami mats, shelves in the small space house 300 diaries, pocket notebooks and jottings. A list of the materials available allows visitors to choose notepads they like based on an author’s personal data, or perhaps a specific period when the stuff was written.
A lot of professional athletes seem to keep notebooks to track their successes and failures, their physical conditioning, diet and motivational strategies. Often, I want to share these stories but there isn’t much detail and the article lacks a photo of the notebook. But here’s one that’s a bit more satisfying!
Before every game, one of the linchpins of the Yankees’ talented bullpen, Adam Ottavino, finds a spot in the clubhouse to sit and write.
To combat the six-month mental minefield of self-doubt that is baseball’s regular season, Ottavino has found solace in a daily routine of writing in a journal. In it, he tracks how he cares for his powerful right arm, how he sharpens his focus, how he plans to attack an opposing lineup and, sometimes, he gives himself a pep talk by writing such messages as, “I am a great pitcher.â€
[…F]or more than seven years, Ottavino, 33, has written down what he calls mental and physical cues — basically, reminders — to keep him focused. At the suggestion of his father, Ottavino began jotting down thoughts in his cellphone in 2012 because his mind wandered too much on the mound. It later morphed into hand writing into a pocket-size black notebook, which has helped him become a bullpen star for the Yankees, who beat the visiting Texas Rangers, 4-1, on Wednesday.
And while Ottavino, whose devastating slider has him leading the bullpen with a 1.66 E.R.A., was willing to discuss his prized notebook, the exact contents were for his eyes only and he was careful to hide it in his locker. He’s on his second of the season, with the rest stored at home.
I continue to use my Nolty notebooks quite faithfully. A couple of weeks ago I started seeing news online about the 2020 Nolty diary offerings, which go on sale in September. Once again, I’ve been exploring the Nolty website with the help of Google Translate to try to figure out the various options!
Just a few of Nolty’s 2020 diaries!
The new 2020 Nolty Diary items I noticed are most notably larger B5 and A5 versions of the Efficiency Notebook. Actually, these are just new to me, as I realized they’d actually began offering these in their series of diaries that starts in April 2019. (These are timed to the Japanese school year, which starts in April.) Anyway, for people who aren’t interested in the typical 144 x 95mm or 130 x 85 Nolty formats, the larger versions should be a nice option.
2020 Nolty Diary Model # 2020-6126 in B5 size
The other Nolty style that interests me this year is the series whose name is translated as “Lights” or “Rights.” These are very similar to the Efficiency Notebook in some ways, but they don’t offer the Gantt chart in the monthly pages. Versions with either a horizontal or weekly block layout are available. For the weekly pages, you can either get a similar basic layout to the Efficiency Notebook, with a week on the left side (each day is divided into 3 sections, a difference from the Efficiency Notebook) and a blank page on the right, or the more traditional week on two pages layout, or a very unusual layout with small blocks for the days of the week across two pages, with an open area of grid lines underneath. This week plus grid layout , which they seem to call “Lights Memo,” looks like it’s only available in the 130 x 85mm size.
2020 Nolty Diary Model # 2020-1241, 144 x 95mm with monthly block layout2020 Nolty Diary “Lights Memo ” week plus grid layout
I made a spreadsheet to track the Efficiency and Lights/Rights options shown on Nolty’s website as best I can figure them out. (This is not a full list of every Nolty style, but I think I’ve captured all the Efficiency and Lights options.) The ones in bold are what I’m considering ordering this year, though I will probably narrow it down to just two. The leather cover Gold version costs about $50 US (not including shipping) so I’m not sure whether I’ll go back to the regular plastic one next year, since it is only about $13. If I do plastic, I think I’ll get the one with the railway maps, even though I can’t read them and don’t need them! What I’d really love to try is the Lights Memo week plus grid layout in the 144 x 95 mm size, but it doesn’t seem to be an option.
My spreadsheet listing Nolty’s 2020 diary options in the Efficiency Notebook and “Lights” styles
One other thing I stumbled across on Nolty’s website was a selection of notebook covers designed to fit the Efficiency Notebook. These are really pricy, and they’d add some extra size to the notebook, but some of them look rather beautiful!
Beautiful notebook covers for the Nolty Efficiency Notebook
Rakuten Global seems to be the best source to order, if you are an English speaker in the US, at least. Kinokuniya should also have them on their web store, but their shopping site is closed for maintenance as of this writing. Hopefully they’ll be back soon, as you can save on shipping by having special orders shipped to a store if you have one near you.
Have you tried a Nolty diary? Will you be buying one for 2020? Which style would you pick?
Every once in a while, I get this weird impulse to search for vintage Filofaxes on eBay. I bought one about a year ago and haven’t gotten around to reviewing (or using) it yet. In fact, I haven’t used a Filofax actively in at least 15 years. But I still love them, and as with so many other things, they just don’t make them the way they used to. So I was rather excited when I discovered a UK seller that seems to have quite a few old style Filofaxes for sale, seemingly brand new stock that must have been sitting somewhere for at least 25 years.
The ones I was looking at were all pocket size “slim” organizers, without the snap closure. They have the old 4-ring set-up, which is not compatible with today’s inserts. (They used to make pocket size inserts with holes sized to fit both the old 4-ring binders and the current 6-ring binders, but apparently they discontinued them in 2015.) But if you have a stash of old inserts, or are willing to punch your own, these vintage pocket Filofaxes could be a great find!
This one is exactly the same as one I bought about 25 years ago and posted about here: Pocket Filofax, Early 1990s.
They also have it in other colors. If I remember correctly, this leather is kid leather– it’s really supple and soft and beautiful. Here’s mine, which was cut down to a slimmer size.
My beloved old Filofax from the 90s
I also have one of these Filofaxes in my collection:
I might even have two, I’ll have to look when I get all my notebook boxes out of storage! It has larger rings than the super-slim ones above, and the leather is a bit more stiff and sturdy. It was a daily carry for me for a while.
The seller is called cosmoszero. They are based in the UK so shipping is almost as much as the item price, but I think they are still an amazing value. You just don’t see leather organizers like this anymore. (Please note: I have not bought anything from this seller and can’t vouch for the quality or authenticity of these items. My opinions above are just based on what I can see in the eBay listings, so if you are interested, please study them carefully and buy at your own risk. And of course, these may have been purchased by the time you are reading this.)
I was looking through Moleskine’s Fall 2019 catalog and noticed something I found quite shocking: it seems that Moleskine is discontinuing the pocket sketchbook.
Moleskine is discontinuing the pocket sketchbook
“While stocks last“?? Meaning there won’t be any more stock of the classic black pocket size Moleskine Sketchbook? (Or any other color in pocket size.) They have a bazillion products and the one they decide to discontinue is a long-standing favorite of so many creative types? I know a lot of people use the larger size. And I know that nowadays there are other pocket sketchbook options out there with better paper, like Stillman and Birn. And as I myself have complained, the quality and construction just aren’t as good as they used to be. But really?? Really, Moleskine??
I find this absolutely baffling. Even if sales have declined a lot from Moleskine’s heyday, I find it hard to believe that the pocket size Sketchbook is unprofitable or somehow not worth it for them to produce. I looked back at some figures I was able to get from the Bookscan system that tracks publishing industry sales– it only captures numbers from book retailers (including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Target, and independent bookstores, but not art supply stores, gift stores, etc.) but should be relatively indicative of overall market trends. While the pocket sketchbook sells less than half what the large sketchbook sells in that channel, and way, way less than what lined notebooks sell, there are many other Moleskine items that sell a fraction of the pocket sketchbook quantity and still seem to be active in their catalog. And at least in the book channel, sales for the pocket sketchbook had been increasing year on year from 2015 through 2018. I would guess they are selling at least 20,000 a year in the USA alone. Is that really not enough?
They seem to be pushing the newer Medium size (4.5 x 7″) in various products and as you can see in the image above, they’ve just introduced medium size sketchbooks in 3 colors (black, red and sapphire blue. That’s nice. I think the medium size is attractive, even though it’s not going to fit in many pockets. But I’ve been using the 3.5 x 5.5″ format for decades, so I’m not going to just switch. I’m sure a lot of other people would feel the same way. I have such a nice collection going of journals and sketchbooks in this size– it already includes some non-Moleskine notebooks, and I’d much rather mix in other brands than try to squeeze a different size into these boxes!
My completed journals and sketchbooks since about 2001.
Unfortunately, I haven’t yet discovered an alternative to the Moleskine Pocket Sketchbook that offers a similar heavy but smooth paper in a hardcover. The closest I’ve found was Art Alternatives’ heavy weight Pen & Ink sketchbook but they’ve changed it to a diagonal elastic closure. Leuchtturm makes a sketchbook with nice heavy paper but the texture is different, and of course it is 3.5 x 6″. Stillman and Birn makes great sketchbooks with so many options, but if you want a 3.5 x 5.5″ size, they only offer softcover. HandBook and Hahnemuhle have nice pocket sketchbooks with hardcovers, elastic closure and back pockets, but the paper isn’t smooth. So I guess I’ll still just hope to spot some old Moleskine sketchbooks on eBay, though the supply seems to be drying up. I hadn’t been actively buying the recently manufactured ones anyway, but if I didn’t have a pretty good stash of spares, I would be buying them, grumpily.
You would think Moleskine would do some sort of analysis and realize that they have a product that doesn’t really have any direct competition with all the same features– so if they weren’t able to sell enough to make it profitable, they could just raise the price and some of us would be crazy enough to keep buying them!
As for other new products from Moleskine, the bullet journal-intended notebook that they showed off in Japan is finally being launched in the US. Instead of calling it the “Bullet Notebook,” they’re calling it the “Logbook,” which I guess is their way of trying to seem different, or not get sued, or something. If you want a dotted notebook with somewhat heavier pages, in the 5×8″ format, it might be worth a try.
There are also some new larger format Watercolor Blocks. I’m not sure why they are expanding their watercolor paper offerings so much lately, as this is definitely an area with a lot of competition from well-established art supply brands.
I’m sure I’ve said it before, but I’d love to be a fly on the wall in Moleskine’s strategic planning meetings… smh…
Sounds pleasant, doesn’t it? A fishy old notebook? But this is actually a pretty cool story!
One day in June 1919, workers in a busy Canadian cannery in Port Essington rushed to clean, cook, and can the bright red flesh of a huge number of sockeye salmon hauled from the nearby Skeena River. Watching the frenzy was a government “fisheries overseer†named Robert Gibson. Periodically, Gibson selected a fish, scraped off a few scales, and affixed them to the pages of a small notebook using the salmon’s own slime. Next to each sample—he collected a total of 125 on this day—Gibson wrote the weight, length, sex, and catch date. A U.S. fish biologist hired by British Columbia would follow up by calculating each fish’s age with the then-new technique of using a microscope to count the growth rings visible on the scales, much as botanists age a tree.
The dozens of notebooks Gibson filled with scaly fish slime were thrown in a box and forgotten until they were rediscovered 23 years ago. Now scientists are analyzing the salmon DNA in the notebooks in order to study and compare to today’s salmon population.
A very poignant article from the Sept. 1, 2019 New York Times: Waiting for the Monsoon, Discovering a Brain Tumor Instead. The photo of reporter Rod Nordland’s journal was what caught my eye, but the whole story is well worth reading. A few brief excerpts below, focusing, of course, on the journal, though there is a lot more to the tale…
I routinely give titles to my journals, in which I have long recorded interviews, appointments, odd thoughts and cris de coeur. My journal commencing June 17, 2019, is called, “Waiting for the Monsoon.†… On the morning of July 4, I left Delhi for Uttar Pradesh to report a story on India’s feverish toilet-building campaign. I was out on the street most of the day, when I noticed ink in my journal was smudged with raindrops. “The monsoon has arrived,†I noted.
The smudged page also contained a fragment of overheard conversation: “We will marry our daughter to you only if you have a foot.†It was the first line of an intriguing story I would never write, because the next day I went for a morning jog in Delhi’s beautiful Lodhi Gardens.
That is really the last thing I remember with certainty. I only learned later that I had, somehow, made my way from the gardens to New Delhi’s Golf Course Colony, several miles away.
This is where a malignant brain tumor, as yet undiagnosed, struck me down and left me thrashing on the ground. …
My journal picks up again on July 8, a Monday, with the pages of the preceding weekend blank, as if they had disappeared from my life. I noted the absence with dismay. At that point, I had been moved to a private hospital, and my journal was full of puzzlement about what had happened.Â
Many people have the problem of loving notebooks but not knowing how to fill them, as described in this article by Claire Swinarski:
As a writer, I’m often gifted journals. I’m also a total sucker for beautiful notebooks and can spend way too long perusing the paper section at Target. That means I’m the owner of a thick stack of pretty journals, just waiting to be filled with scribbles. But I have a confession: I’m not much of a journaler.
However, she recognizes the benefits of journaling and provides some helpful prompts that will help anyone get writing!
Journaling prompts can be helpful for those of us who dread staring at a blank page. However, a lot of the typical “what you did today” prompts feel a bit stale to me. I simply have no desire to do a breakdown of my day, which so often involves dull activities like checking email or handing my kids fruit snacks. I want to embrace creativity within my journaling and really dig deep into my thoughts and emotions. If you’re like me, it can sometimes require a bit of outside-the-box thinking to have an effective journaling session. Here are ten journaling prompts to help all of us who struggle to journal find the creative juices we need.
If you could change one thing about what happened today, what would it be?
How would the best version of yourself have handled the day?
Isn’t this flower stunning? I love sketchbooks that surprise you with big spreads of saturated color!
Dasha Egudkina, Study of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in gouache
The painting is by artist Dasha Egudkina, who says:
I carry about three sketchbooks with me at all times. For the rare occasion I am not, I have a pocket sized Moleskine. Besides a few exceptions, often made for the larger books, I have been drawing, painting or collaging the covers for about ten years. What may simply be a stack of bound paper means more to me than I would often like to admit, and painting the cover has become a sort of ritual for me.
This is the cover of one of her other sketchbooks:
Dasha Egudkina Sketchbook cover in gouache – Winter 2018-2019
Some of my favorite images from artists’ sketchbooks are from Eugene Delacroix’s travel notebooks. A new book now translates his notes into English for the first time.
In 1832 the 34-year-old Eugène Delacroix, already well known for his Orientalist works, accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco and travelled through Algeria and Andalusia. His exposure to these places made him realise how limited and stereotypical his ideas had been about the “Orient†and thereafter fired his imagination. He wrote extensively about his experiences in several notebooks, noting the places he visited (shown here, a sketch for 15 March 1832: “Went into the mountains and, after some way, discovered the great valley in which Meknes [Morocco] is located.â€), his routes, the scenes he witnessed and the people he met. He published two articles from this material which are included in this book which is the first time his notebooks (along with a newly discovered fifth notebook) have been translated into English by the scholar, Michèle Hannoosh.
