Forbes recently published a round-up of notebooks suggested as Mother’s Day gifts, though these choices would work just as well for non-moms. A few of their recommendations were Moleskines that will be familiar to everyone, but I was intrigued by these brands I hadn’t heard of:
BLU Notebooks
Stimulate your creativity with the first blueprint paper notebook, complete with white gel pen, from BLU. Made in Canada, these innovative journals pay tribute to a time when creation was a tactile experience. Blueprints have been an essential tool in building some of the world’s most important projects, and may continue to be, thanks to these hands-on beauties.
It’s a fun idea, even though nowadays I’m not sure how many architects still print “blueprints” in this color scheme. And maybe after a while it would be tiresome having to always use a white pen? But their website says they are “Designed to inspire innovation,” and the unusual paper might do just that.
Ezra Arthur Notebooks
These heirloom-quality notebooks are hand-stitched and bound with full grain leather and filled with Tomoe River paper, which is renowned for its thinness and resistance to ink bleeding and feathering. Available in two sizes and half a dozen rich colors, they slip into any bag and turn list-making into a sophisticated activity. Price: From $32
These look quite cool– sort of a cross between a Field Notes and a Travelers Notebook, made in the USA with top-notch materials. But at $32 for a 128 page pocket notebook (and $65 for the 5.25 x 7.75″ medium size), Ezra Arthur notebooks are not cheap. Their website notes that they can re-bind/re-fill the leather cover for $12, but that is also pretty pricy and inconvenient vs. just slipping a new refill into a Travelers Notebook or other leather covers. But I still want one!
The geek girl pop culture site The Mary Sue talks about a Twitter post that went viral, revealing some very widespread notebook addiction amongst their staff and commenters:
A few days ago, a Tweet went by that made me smile: “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you already have six blank notebooks at home,†Twitter user @TraceOddity wrote. Actually, that smile was more of a grimace, because six notebooks? Try thirty-six. I am a repository of mostly-unused notebooks. And apparently, I’m far from alone.
The Tweet struck a chord, garnering a staggering 181k “likes,†41k retweets, and thousands of replies. I think I’m a little surprised by this result because I’m a collector by nature, so I rather thought this bottomless notebook hoarding was just another thing I did.
I know a lot of writers, and writers love a good notebook, but I assumed that they were getting more mileage out of them. Yet as soon as the Tweet was dropped in our Mary Sue chat, every staff member said that they felt called out.
The rest of the article and the comments are basically a big therapy session amongst notebook addicts!
An amazing image from the notebook of a Sudanese political prisoner in the 1970s:
Trained as an artist and photographer in Khartoum, London and New York, El-Salahi began documenting the experience he and other prisoners — including university professors, labor union heads, lawyers, scientists and media figures— underwent, drawing on shreds of cement bags. Fearing solitary confinement if guards were to find them, he buried the drawings, along with a four-inch long pencil, in the sand outside Quarantine A, the same cell that housed Bavarian mercenary Rolf Steiner a year earlier. Fortunately, prison guards never found Salahi’s buried drawings. After his release in March 1976, he developed the initial visual fragments imprinted in his memory in a sketchbook using black pen and ink…
I had a scare the other day when I went to one of my all-time favorite stationery shops in New York City. I’ve been going to Paper Presentation on 18th St. for about 20 years. They used to have more competition in the neighborhood from the late, great A. I. Friedman and Sam Flax, and a shorter-lived store called Envelopper, but Paper Presentation always had one of the biggest selections of notebooks and journals (as well as pens, art supplies, cards, gifts, rubber stamps, stationery, envelopes, etc.)
The other day, I just ran in to find a birthday card. I was focused on the card section and noticed that it had moved to a different area. Then I realized that they had very few birthday cards to choose from. Then I started looking around further and realized that all the shelves were looking really empty. I went to the part of the store where all the notebooks used to be and was horrified to see that the shelves were nearly bare! And that usually means only one thing: store going out of business.
I was quite shocked, but also… not shocked. In NYC, so many great stores have closed in the last few years. There have been articles about certain neighborhoods becoming retail wastelands, because greedy landlords demand such high rents that no one can survive, and the spaces end up just sitting empty. Paper Presentation has a huge space spanning the whole block between 18th and 19th St. and I could imagine that it would be tough to sell enough paper products to pay that rent.
When I went to pay for my birthday card I asked the cashier what was going on. The news turned out not to be so dire: they had been planning to close and had a big sale to clear out their stock. “For three weeks, it was crazy here,” she said. “People were buying up everything, all the Moleskines…” But at the last minute, someone stepped in and bought the store, and at least for the near future, the plan is to re-stock and keep it open as a stationery store. [UPDATE: per a comment below, the store is still open and has changed their name to City Papery.]
I’m still blown away by how wiped out the store looked. I was just there about 6 weeks ago looking at their Bindewerk notebooks and everything seemed normal. I spent over $50, so I can’t help being bummed that I missed their big sale! Most of the non-seasonal stock is now back to full price, and ironically, among the very few notebooks they had left were these larger size Bindewerk linen journals… no pocket ones, sadly!
Support your local retailers, people. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.
I picked up this vintage travel diary on eBay for about $7. I’m not sure exactly when it would have been manufactured, but it definitely dates from an era when travel was quite a different experience from what it is today!
The diary begins with 17 pages of frontmatter, most of which consists of various travel tips. Things like “The most convenient way to carry money is in the form of travellers’ checks or letters of credit,” and “Ship all heavy baggage to arrive at the steamship piers at least 24 hours before sailing.” Throughout the travel tips, there is an assumption that your journey will be by ship, with sections on “seasickness,” “deck sports,” and how to “avoid professional gamblers.” One is advised to “secure a deck chair when obtaining ticket and arrange that the deck chair is placed on the starboard side of the promenade deck when sailing East, and port side when sailing West. Thus you will be facing South all the time.”
There are far fewer tips on air travel, most of which seem either obvious or irrelevant or laughable today: “Stewardesses are at your service on all Air Lines flights.” “Stop-overs may be made at any scheduled stop provided that reservation has been made accordingly and that stop-over is within time limit of passenger ticket.” “Tickets are normally valid for a period of 4 months after date of issuance.” “Passengers using their own ground transportation to the airport are requested to report to the ticket agent at least 20 minutes before departure time.”
The diary then continues with unlined pages with headings for “Itinerary,” “Going,” “Returning,” “Hotels Stopped At,” “Autographs,” “Incidents,” “Side Trips,” and “Memorandum.” Then you have lined pages headed “Places Visited,” with a sub-head for date and place. At the end of the diary are pages for Cash Accounts and Addresses, and a section of world maps.
This diary is completely unused and in pretty good condition other than a spot of residue from a label. The cover is very thick and padded and the page edges are gilded. My only clue to how old it is comes from the list of National Parks, which includes the dates they were established– the latest one listed was opened in 1944, so the notebook must be from after that date. I imagine some debutante in the late 1940s bringing it on her grand tour of Europe, but then being too busy to write any notes about the dances on board the ship and her trips to Venice and Versailles…
This week’s addict is on Instagram as @schreibaerin, where her beautiful photos of nature and landscapes are often joined by photos of her extensive notebook collection. These are some of my favorites!
It’s so nice to discover new notebook brands, especially ones that are committed to donating part of their proceeds to people in need. Lois Ho founded Pebble Stationery Co. in Perth, Western Australia and was able to fund her first project, a pocket notebook made with Tomoe River paper, in 24 hours. For each pack of notebooks they sell, Pebble Stationery donates a pencil to a child in need, and with the initial Kickstarter campaign, they provided 200 pencils to the Shree Annapurna Panchankanya Primary school in Nepal, which has been severely affected by the Earthquake in 2015. Let’s take a look at the sample Lois sent me to review:
Exterior and Construction
The Pebble Stationery notebook comes in a two-pack. The notebooks are held together with a paper band with branding info on it, and then enclosed in a clear plastic envelope. The design of the packaging is clean and classy. The notebooks are grey with a subtle linen texture, and the Pebble Stationery name almost invisibly stamped on the cover. The endpapers inside are a pleasant surprise in a robin’s egg blue, with space to write contact information and notebook contents. And here’s a neat trick– from the outside, you can’t even see how they are bound! The cover is actually 2-ply, which allows the binding to be concealed.
Inside the notebook, ta-da! Here’s what that 2-ply binding is hiding: lovely blue stitching!
Each notebook has 80 pages of 52 GSM Tomoe River paper. They are amazingly slim compared to other staple or stitch-bound notebooks, such as the Field Notes Ambition and Women Artists in Paris notebooks seen with it below, each of which only has 48 pages.
My only quibble with the exterior of the notebook is that after opening it, the cover seems to curl slightly, so that the notebook doesn’t sit fully closed. I’ve had this happen to a few other notebooks– I think it is due to humidity causing uneven expansion of one layer of the cover, so it may vary with the weather, and daily use will probably curl it up a bit anyway. I don’t really consider this a defect or problem, as it doesn’t affect the function of the notebook, and if you use a notebook cover, it shouldn’t be an issue at all. It’s just a minor aesthetic thing that may bother some perfectionists!
Pen Tests
The paper is, of course, great. Tomoe River paper is always so smooth and lightweight, it is an absolute pleasure to write on. What I also love is the dot grid pattern, which is spaced at 4mm instead of the more typical 5mm. I have small handwriting so this is a very comfortable size for me. The color of the paper is a cool bright white.
Tomoe River paper is known for performing well with fountain pens. All my inks produced a nice sharp line with no feathering, and colors look vibrant. None of my fountain pens bled through except for my vintage Waterman, which is rather scratchy, so the pressure of flexing the nib always seems to rip the paper fibers a bit. A few other wet pens bled slightly, but much less than on most other papers. Because the paper is so thin, there is more show-through than average, so whether you’ll want to write on both sides is a matter of personal preference, but I know a lot of people enjoy the dense look of seeing layers of writing on paper this fine.
Conclusion
Pebble Stationery notebooks sell for US$9.95 for a 2-pack. That works out to a little over 6 cents per page. Field Notes are $9.95 for a basic 3-pack of 48 page notebooks, which works out to just under 7 cents per page, and their paper quality is nowhere near as good. When you consider that Pebble Stationery are also making a donation with each sale, it’s really a good deal. Retailers are fairly limited at this point, but you can order directly from the Pebble Stationery website.
Pebble Stationery has made a lovely pocket notebook that is a sophisticated, attractive and reasonably priced addition to the options in this category. I’m excited to see what products they’ll come out with next!
Giveaway!
Thanks to the generosity of Pebble Stationery, we are giving away a pack of these notebooks! One winner will be randomly selected from entries received in any of these ways:
On Twitter, tweet something containing “Pebble Stationery Notebook @NotebookStoriesâ€, and follow @NotebookStories .
On Facebook, “like†the Notebook Stories page and post something containing the words “Pebble Stationery Notebook†on the Notebook Stories page.
On your blog, post something containing the words “Pebble Stationery Notebook†and “Notebook Stories†and link back to this post, also leaving a comment below with the link in case the trackback doesn’t work.
On Instagram, follow @Notebook.Stories and @pebblestationeryco and comment on my Pebble Stationery post, tagging a friend and adding a hashtag of your favorite adjective describing the Pebble Stationery notebook. (Example: “@myfriendsally #fountainpenfriendlyâ€)
The deadline for entry is Friday May 3 at 11:59PM, EST. Good luck everyone!
I realized that in all my “Using Now” updates, I’d forgotten to include one notebook that I use quite regularly. My cooking notebook is a large Piccadilly notebook that I bought at Borders many years ago, not long after I started this blog.
In the first few pages, I wasn’t sure what I was going to use it for, so there are a few random notes and drawings, but at some point, I decided that I would use it as a place to capture recipes. I almost never label or decorate the front of my notebooks, but on this one, I used a label maker to identify it, even though I have no other notebooks this size that it could possibly be confused with!
Some pages have clippings torn out of newspapers or magazines, most of which I’ve never actually made. But most of the pages are handwritten recipes for favorite dishes that I make repeatedly, with notes about any variations in ingredients or cooking methods that were successful or failures.
After so many years of occasional use, the notebook has held up fairly well except that the front cover is splitting from the spine, mainly because the notebook has been crushed closed with lots of extra papers tucked into the cover. Also, the elastic has been totally stretched out and slack for years. But nevertheless, this notebook continues to serve me well, and it’s helped me serve some delicious meals!
In case you are wondering, this one is steamed cod with soy and ginger, which I’ve adapted with some variations on a recipe originally found on Martha Stewart’s website. It’s quick, easy and yummy and quite healthy too.
In case you can’t read my scribbles (and I’ve added a few clarifying details):
Steamed Fish with Soy and Ginger
Serves 2
Ingredients:
Approximately 3/4 to 1 lb of skinless cod fillets. Cod loin is great because it tends to be a more consistent thickness. Sea bass would also work well. Cut the fish into two portions.
3 TBSP rice vinegar
2 TBSP soy sauce (low sodium)
1 TBSP mirin
a dash of sesame oil– about 1/4 TSP
2 TBSP grated or minced fresh ginger
3 scallions, separated into finely sliced white parts, and green parts sliced thin lengthwise and cut into 3-inch pieces. (If not using scallions, substitute 1 clove garlic, minced)
Combine the vinegar, soy sauce, mirin, sesame oil, ginger, scallion whites (or garlic) in a skillet with a lid (ideally a glass lid so you can see what is going on)
Season the fish on both sides with pepper and place it on top of the sauce in the skillet
Bring the sauce to a boil, the reduce to a gentle simmer. Cover the skillet and cook until the fish is almost opaque, 6-8 minutes. Then scatter the scallion greens over the fish and cook until they wilt and the fish is totally opaque, about another 2 minutes.
Serve with rice and vegetables (lightly sauteed sugar snap peas or roasted cauliflower go well with it. Bok choi or broccoli would also be good.) and spoon some of the sauce and ginger over the fish and rice when you serve. Depending on how much you like salt and ginger, you may not want to use all the sauce– it is very flavorful, so go easy at first. If you have furikake (a Japanese seasoning mix with sesame seeds and seaweed flakes), sprinkling a little on the rice gives a nice added flavor.
I found this photo on my computer– I saved it over 3 years ago and never got around to writing about it! A notebook belonging to the artist Robert Rauschenberg:
Rauschenberg wrote mainly in pencil, often on a yellow legal pad, in block letters that suggest both how arduous writing was for him — he was dyslexic and, it would appear, self-conscious about it — and how graphic, how attentive to appearance, were even his private jottings and notes to himself. You can see his brilliance for arrangement even when he’s writing a postcard. Other papers show him experimenting with puns, homespun adages, epigrams: “A STORY OF SURELOCK HOMES,†“I WANT TO MEET A RICH ROACH,†“SUNSETS AND STRAWBERRYS NEVER APEAR THE SAME.†For Rauschenberg, titles were of extreme importance, not to limit or clarify the work but to add to it another layer of poetry and complexity. He was, apparently, virtually a non-reader, but his instincts about language, concision and metaphor are, in fact, a poet’s instincts.
What a lovely display of notebooks and pencils, from the Instagram account of xanelachic. I recognize a couple of brands from Portugal, similar to ones in my own collection: Serrote Letterpress (the white one that says “caderno”) and Emilio Braga (the hardcover with contrasting spine and corners at bottom left).
