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 […]
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 […]
Most of my notebooks are ones that I’ve bought new and filled with my own notes and sketches. But I also occasionally succumb to my weakness for collecting other people’s used notebooks when I see them at flea markets or on eBay. Here’s a few that I’ve picked up along the way. This Rice-Stix notebook […]
A very cool story about someone finding his grandmother’s old diaries… and what lovely diaries they were, with colorful patterned covers and red edges… “My parents recently found five journals in one of those listless cardboard boxes that leaves an attic only when somebody dies or the house is sold. (Don’t worry, everyone survived the […]
Here’s a really cool item I snagged on eBay: This is an early version of the Federal Supply Service notebooks I’ve reviewed here. I don’t know when they changed the information on the back, but from googling the Government Printing Office and the Federal Supply Service, my theory is that the US government used to […]
From an interesting article at Slate: “American student Barbara Donahue (then Barbara Finlay) lived in Italy between August 1937 and March 1938, when she was 7 and 8 years old. She attended a Catholic school, the Istituto Vittoria Colonna, in Milan. There, she was issued these small soft-covered government-produced student notebooks, decorated with colorful, dramatic […]
I love stumbling on interesting antique notebooks like this! “Andrew Croswell (1778-1858) was a student at Harvard University in the late 1790s. He later studied medicine in Plymouth, MA, and practiced there and in Fayette and Mercer, ME. In the collections [at the Massachusetts Historical Society] we hold two notebooks that were kept by Croswell. […]
Thanks to a tip from a reader named Raymond, I can share these images of a notebook that belonged to Albert Einstein: “Einstein’s search for general relativity spanned eight years, 1907-1915. … sometime between the late summer of 1912, when Einstein moved from Prague to Zurich, and early 1913. … [Einstein kept a notebook that was] found […]
I spotted this on Facebook– I especially love the simplicity of the lighthouse image!
A reader named Resi tipped me off to this wonderful website where you can see the pages of a journal kept by a young girl while she was at sea on a whaling ship in 1869 (her father was the captain): Laura Jernegan: Girl on a Whaleship – Explore Laura’s Journal. It’s pretty amazing to […]
