Notebooks
I’d like to say I went on a notebook making frenzy recently, but that wouldn’t be entirely honest. The truth is yes, I did make 4 notebooks but not in a frenzy, not all at once, but one at a time.
The first was a 3×5 notebook with purple covers. This was followed a couple of weeks later by a pink covered 3×5 and a blue covered 3×5. And my most recent notebook - a Moleskine Cahier made with buff covers and containing blank, ruled and squared pages from 6 Cahiers.
Actually, these aren’t the first notebooks I’ve made. I’ve done A4 notebooks for work - dated pages in front, and blank pages behind - but found them to be too big. Next, I tried A5 notebooks, again for work, and again with dated pages in front and blank pages behind, and found them to be the right size for me.
And always there were the 3×5 notebooks scattered here and there. This was my preferred size for travelling, when I would carry a blank one, and allocate a page each to everyday I was travelling. On each of those pages, I would put the date and also the plan for that day. Throughout the trip, I would use the back pages to note what I did everyday, and then pull out the pages to put them behind the dated page in front. This then was my travel journal for each trip.
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Why not just get ready-made notebooks? Lots of them available in bookstores and stationery shops.
Well, I am very fussy about my notebooks. First of all, I prefer spiral to bound. And not just spiral, but a specific type of spiral where the pages are not fixed and I don’t have to snap open any rings to take out the pages. Instead, the pages get pulled away from the spiral and put anywhere else in the notebook.
It’s a particular system I discovered quite a few years ago, something called Circa made by this US company, Levenger. The system is similar to a Rolodex where the rings are fixed and the pages have little notches that hook around each ring and do not fall out easily.
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Almost at the start of my love affair with Circa, I bought the desktop punch so I could punch my own Circa paper without having to buy refills from Levenger. True to form, almost as soon as I ordered the punch, the price dropped by more than US$10/-. It is probably my most expensive online purchase to date; I still remember my bank calling me to ask if I’d made such an order to a company in the States. I’d replied yes, and approved the purchase.
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I used to cut up thicker colour paper to use for the covers. Then, recently I realised I could use some 3×5 plastic folders that I’d bought from Levenger. That was how the purple, pink and blue 3×5 notebooks came about.
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As for the Moleskine Cahiers, I’d been buying them whenever I saw reasonably priced stock at the neighbourhood Borders. But for some reason, I never took to the Cahiers, and especially disliked the perforated pages in the second half of each Cahier. The other evening, I had a flash of brilliance and realised I could detach the perforated pages and punch Circa notches in them to make into a Circa notebook. I used the original buff covers of one Cahiers and filled it will blank, ruled and squared pages from 6 Cahiers.
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With so many notebooks, I don’t have a problem of having something to write in when I needed one. But what if I had to go somewhere and could only bring one? That was what happened yesterday evening. I didn’t want to bring a bag, and only had pockets and my hands to carry one notebook, my Palm TX PDA and my phone. I so wanted to bring along the Moleskine Cahier, but in the end, decided on the purple notebook. A fitting choice actually, as this is my everyday catchall notebook that I take with me most everywhere.
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