Notebooks

I’ve covered this subject before but last week I had to lay aside my lovely notebook as it was full.

The passing of a pocket notebook and the beginning of another is a ceremonial occasion. The old book is laid gently in the bottom drawer with its predecessors. A few tears are allowable before turning to its successor.

But what successor? Choosing a notebook is not a simple matter. It has to be slim, small enough for the pocket but not so small that it can’t be used to write complete lines. Or lost. It needs to be hard backed, there’s nothing worse in a notebook than creases on a page. It needs another requirement which will be touched upon later.

I have a basket full of notebooks untouched. Bought in a surge of excitement in a bookshop or stationers and which on return home prove to be totally, or frustratingly almost, unusable for any variety of reasons.

Over the years I have come to treat with disdain some of those offered in even well known stores. What, on earth, is the point of those pocket notebooks with spiral metal hoops that are guaranteed to get tangled with normal stuff found in your pocket and dragged out to fall over the floor just as you need to jot something down.

The colour of the notebook is totally irrelevant to whether they are fit for purpose. I’ve had blue, green, black. If it glowed in the dark, I wouldn’t care.

These are my requirements in a pocket notebook:

The size is about 7 cm by 11 cms

About 50 pages

The quality of the paper used is 90 gsm or more ( but I’m guessing at that )

It has to have a robust, hard cover.

It has to have a space on the spine for a small pen or pencil

I would like an integrated elastic band to wrap round the notebook

Ideally it would have a ribbon to mark my place

The one thing that really bugs me about 99% of notebooks for sale is this:

Consider what you need a notebook for. It’s not for looking at or for tearing its pages out. You need it for making notes. But those 99% of notebooks do not have a slot for a pencil or pen. It’s absurd.

As an aside – the best small pen I have ever, ever found is a zebra and is telescopic, slim and fits perfectly in my very new wonderful notebook ( purchased from a bloke at a Lytham craft fair, he is a book maker or rather a maker of books ). Long live the notebook.