It feels like every single time I post a picture of my notebooks somebody asks me what kind of pen or notebook I use, so I finally just made a list of my favorite gear.
What brands of pen and notebook do you use?
Search Results for: notebook
Pocket notebook retirement
Sometimes the retirement of my pocket notebook is more bittersweet than finishing one of my diaries, because I carry my pocket notebook with me constantly and I fill fewer pages every day, so it’s with me a lot longer. (More about my notebook turducken.) This one had a particularly good guardian spirit:
I swapped hot pink for electric blue. The new one starts with a clipping of the 4-H pledge:
Every time I start a new notebook there’s that little ping of excitement: What will I fill this with?
Phones smash, notebooks bend
Robert Macfarlane shares the notebooks he accumulated while working on Underland, and why he sticks with paper:
People sometimes ask me why I don’t use a phone to take notes when I’m ‘out’ in the field. The answer is that phones smash, while notebooks bend. I also like the way that notebooks record where they’ve been not just in terms of what’s written in them, but also in terms of the wear they bear as objects.
In a wonderful thread on Twitter, Alastair Humphreys shared one of his, soggy from the field:
Here’s one of my own notebooks, which got soaked while encountering the wilds of my washing machine:
And elsewhere on Twitter, user @bernoid shared their nature journal to much fanfare. (They take a hybrid digital/analog approach: Photos out in the field, drawings later in the notebook.)
https://twitter.com/bernoid/status/1121778177771220997
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Paper is a woonderful technology.
New notebook, new spirit
Old pocket notebook, meet new pocket notebook. For the guardian spirit, I decided on this painting of Salt-N-Pepa by Frank Morrison, from the book The Roots of Rap.
Notebook vs. washing machine
I was searching for some earbuds and found this notebook in my walking fleece that I haven’t used for months now, sadly, as we have entered the hell season in Texas.
It was my “scratch” notebook, the one I carry around all day, scribbling notes that I then either copy into my logbook or my diary, so it wasn’t that great of a catastrophe.
One interesting thing: I used two different pens and a pencil for these notes, and the water washed out all the felt-tip Flair pen (I didn’t realize they use water-based ink!), but the Pilot G2 ink and the Blackwing pencil remained mostly intact. So now I have this weird object in which some things are erased, some things survive.
Usually with notebooks what survives is the quality of the idea — in this case, it was about the quality of writing tool!
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