A Note on Notebooks

I was in a little motor scooter accident yesterday. It happens. It is nothing major but I am taking it easy as I am on the mend. I still have plenty of blood left in me.

I was spending a few idle minutes notebook shopping. You may not realize this but I usually have one or two or three notebooks on me at any given time. I am old-fashioned. I do a lot of work with pens and pencils on paper.

You probably don’t care, but, I find that the best pocket notebook is manufactured by Field Notes, an outfit in Chicago that does fine work based on agricultural memo books from the 19th and 20th centuries. Some things cannot be improved.

If you are looking to waste some time, Field Notes puts out a quarterly special edition of their notebooks. Each quarter, they make a short film, usually a minute or so, illustrating what they had in mind when they designed each edition. They are quite clever, as one would expect from creative people with attention to detail. If you are bored, there is a whole page of these short films. They are collected all in one place.

They are quite interesting in their own way. Of course, it helps if you like notebooks and doing things by hand. I do not subscribe to the special editions. I go through so many notebooks that I find it a bit twee to cherish something that is no more than a workmanlike tool to me.

I will be staying home, probably for the rest of the week. I have things to do that I have been postponing, in my usual way. Summer is over so the city is starting to rouse itself from its languid doing-nothing. I need to get busy before this year is over.

Have a great New Orleans day today, wherever you may happen to be.