moleskine notebooks/diaries, c or d?

Tracer, you are king.

WOW, that's a great idea, but it was actually an Alan Partridge reference - go rent it!!!!

I just watched that episode of Alan Partridge yesterday

Ultimately I've never found anything better than these 200-page notebooks I get for $1.99: inconspicuous, tacky colourful swirls on the cover, and coil bound (which is good because I only use the front side of the sheets of paper).

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/gypsyfrocksbedlam/803-mole_people.jpg

oh dear then there's the kind of mole on skin, which is icky to think of too, 'specially if it's described as kinda rough and prickly like a porcupine...

http://www.nenature.com/HairyTailedMolePhoto.htm

Anyhow, Dr. Scholl's moleskin:

http://www.drugstore.com/qxp14190_333181_sespider/dr__scholls/moleskin_plus_roll_padding_24_x_4_58.htm

Anyway, never mind, I should have gone to Wiki in the first place:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moleskine

http://www.galison.com/Write-On-Journals-C58.aspx

plus you can use the little pocket to hold your receipts, which is useful for freelance writer types.

and the pocket rules

weird

I always use a disposable fountain pen -- hideous looking, but the smoothest write for my carpalled-to-shit wrists.

i use a disposable quill and inkpot.

I know but srsly these things inspire big feelings. xxp

lol @ s1ocki walking around with a Styrofoam cup of verdigris and an ostrich feather in his back pocket.

boing boing has a big cock for moleskine too, fwiw

i wonder if they have any good hacks for mine

Spine Labeling

In the same manner as the spine icons, you can use a silver Sharpie, or something similar, to give your Moleskine a title or summarize the contents. This can be done before or after your have filled the pages. For example, you may want to label your Moleskine journal by the month and year you began writing in it and the same for when you finished; Journal: Dec. 2003 - May 2004. You may also like to label a collection of sketches or stories into one volume and use the Sharpie to indicate it as such; Watercolors 2004.

Moleskine Smoking Journal

I’ve recently resumed the terrible habit of smoking cigars. I’ve used a Moleskine Heavy Sketchbook to paste in the labels and make notes on each smoke. You could do the same with your own guilty pleasure, whether it’s wine, candy from East Asia, or—I don’t know—labels from beef brisket, I suppose.

They are too beautiful, I cannot bring myself to spoil them with half-formed writings/lyrics/etc...

right. more reasons for ringbound; you should be able to tear pages out, to give people numbers or eradicate traces of bad flashes of tepid inspiration.

muji stationary's lovely, even if being in there makes me feel like a sucker for desiring stuff on the basis of it being all simple and undesirable. their fineliners are so choice.

guys there aren't any writers in the world who don't write crap. not everything in your notebooks has to come out perfect, okay? also, believe it or not you can tear out pages from a moleskine!

I'll write the crap on ILX cheaper notepads, then transfer them to a journalbound.

.. a bit like the front-one on here http://www.leatherjournals-accessories.com/pcat-gifs/products-large1/leather-bound-journal-4a-1.jpg

.. which contains the only actual song I've written in 10 years. Actually, make that 15.

.. and nothing else, as yet.

c, I have filled 5 pocket-sized hardcover plain Moleskin notebooks with demented scribblings on and off since like 2005/6, plus used a bunch of gridded medium-sized cahiers for school notes/work/auxiliary demented scribblings

but this revive is just to post

http://media.moleskineus.com/newsletter/2011q3/nl1109a/nl1107b-mus_02.jpg

Are these amy good?

https://www.fabrianoboutique.co.uk/prodotti/agende-e-calendari/fabriano-ispira-giornaliera-2018.html

The photo makes them look very nice and Fabriano makes good art paper. But the question is kind of broad. Good for carrying around? For impressing people? Good for writing in? For sketching in? For making watercolor portraits of amphibians in the field? Good value for the money?

For my purposes (writing), the most important aspect is how comfortable it is for using when there is no hard flat surface to lay it down on as I write. Next, I prefer spiral bound, so I can fold it back entirely on itself. After some trial and error, I settled on this a long while back.

Pens are a whole 'nother issue.

Pondering this question again.

Need a diary for work. Could use my work phone but that doesn't really work for me.

Prefer A5. It's not for impressing others - but maybe it is for impressing myself, if that makes sense. Nice for writing in and useful for making me feel vaguely organised are considerations. I don't like spiral bound but only because I tend to wreck them.

Moleskines are the biggest scam imo, they've become a huge thing but afaict the paper is too waxy and toothless for sketching, and all their notepad type products are kind of nonfunctionally designed. Like I looked at their weekly and monthly planners recently and it was like left hand calendar side is all crowded, while unneeded right hand "notes" side is wide open space. Things like that.

I didn't even know what these were until I read a book called The Revenge of Analog last month (Moleskines get a whole chapter).

I'm making a jump from softcover moleskines (dots, please, or maybe the grid or the plain, fuck off ruled paper) to leuchtterm1917 this month. I go through about one notebook every quarter for work (now school) stuff. one thing I already like about the leuchtterms I've bought is they number the pages for you, so I get to skip that chore and get right to slapping stickers all over the cover.

once you get into the life of decent non-ballpoint pens and fancy paper it's basically impossible to go back. I see people with their bics and composition-style notebooks with bleached white pages and I'm like GET A JOB, WHAT ARE YOU, ELEVEN?

my advice is don't go online - find a nice stationery store that carries a variety of good notebooks, put your hands on them, look at the paper, see if they fit in your coat pockets nicely, etc. Amazon is a terrible place to shop for notebooks.

Muji has good stationery and rollerball pens
Jetpens.com is a delight
0.38mm is the ideal rollerball pen size
Rhodia paper is good stuff
I don’t do Moleskines anymore I guess

I love pocket sized blank Moleskins for sketching. Use pencil, inks and watercolor on them without a problem.

rhodia is too much orange

Leuchtterm red-dot hardcover is the business, especially with fountain pens

I don't buy moleskines 'cause I'm tight but I have had one, no problem sketching in it, plus if you have an abrasive eraser you can rub away the cream surface to reveal white beneath for subtle highlighting.

They often have a bunch of them in TK Maxx.

it prob depends on your sketching style/technique. when i helped with running an architectural study abroad program years ago, our resident sketch experts were very active in steering students away from moleskines and towards Hand Book brand "Artist Journals" which were great for both pen and pencil sketching, and also had good weight/feel/size as objects to keep in your bag all the time.

these days i don't sketch much, only doodle, and stan for cheap yellow notebooks and a-grade-above-bic ballpoints (pilot precise v5s, like $2.50 or $3.50 at my shop) that have good feel and good flow. i just need paper to write stuff on.

They are fine but not magical. I've owned a lot of notebooks and sketchbooks and blank books. I write left-handed, and often have trouble with spiral or ring-bound notebooks.

In college I favored the Daler brand (because that's what the art school store carried). I got a Moleskine as a gift a while ago and liked it fine; when it filled up I got another, slightly larger and unlined. (I like to be able to switch between writing and drawing and sometimes pasting things in, so unlined ones work best.)

For work or more ephemeral activities, I have done okay with the Levenger Circa system. Unlike perfect or spiral or comb bindings, things go in and out and back in easily. You can even get a Circa cutter to make any paper compatible with the binding system! You could use it for travel memorabilia, concert ticket stubs, love letters. If I were way more obsessive about paper I can imagine doing that.

But the rings are a problem because of my crabbed lefty grip, so I end up turning pages backwards and upside down. And finding that I am writing something essential and serious on the reverse of something embarrassing and juvenile.

Tldr: Moleskines are okay. But you're not Ernest Hemingway and neither am I, so don't get all romantic about them.

Ask me about pens next. I Have Opinions.

Pilot G2 0.7mm or gtfo

pens are problematic for me (also left handed) and i would be interested in your Opinions. i try to go for cheap-ish gel ink ones these days.

fine nibbed ones i just tend to crab and scratch at the page with.

stet otm about leuchtterms.

a-grade-above-bic

The Pilot Precise line is more than a grade above Bic.

The distinction between a ballpoint with paste ink (on one hand) and a rollerball with liquid ink (on the other) is huge.

In one case you're doing manual labor - shoving a recalcitrant sphere around in order to get some stubborn goop to grudgingly leave a sticky trail that sort of corresponds to what you meant.

In the other case, you're lovingly guiding a swift messenger, at speeds that can ideally approach the speed of thought. You don't force the ink onto the page, you merely allow it to flow.

Gel attempts a compromise and I don't think it quite succeeds.

While Pilot G2s are about the best gel ink pens available from non-speciality merchants in the US, using a tip as large as 0.7mm sounds ridiculous to me at this point. Fortunately the G2 is available in 0.38mm.

If you write with a 1.0mm rollerball you’d better be a child

I find the V5 or V7 more than adequate for daily use. The G2s aren't really my thing, but I won't quarrel with their fanbois.

In the olden days I had a fondness for Parker and Cross cartridge fountain pens and some disposable fountain pens. They felt great but were messy; the heel of my hand would be blue for days. One of these days I may get back into that scene.

The 0.7 is at the upper limit of line fatness and i do smudge from time to time but it also feels much more comfortable for me.

Oddly enough I’m completely the opposite when it comes to pencils which is probably why we have sharpeners bolted to the furniture on each floor of the house.

the v7s definitely flow easier and are maybe more of a pleasure to write with, but the ink bleeds through to the other sides of my planner pages, so it's v5 all the way for me. okay yeah they're more than one grade above bic but i like to imagine i'm not quite at the level of indulgence as people buying $10, $30, or $50 pens.

You’re on the thread where we talk about spending $19 on each notebook

Perhaps 25 years ago I had a brushed steel Cross pen that was engraved with my initials (I think it was a groomsman gift). Lost it, probably on the subway. Not going that route ever again.

i am here to let this thread know there is a middle way

the trick with fountain pens, even cheap plastic ones from Japan, is to leave them on your desk.

Yes, but that's much less romantic than recording your totally original observations on the transitory nature of existence (or the beauty of a solitary flower in a simple vase) in to your 20 dollar Moleskine while you sit for hours in a bohemian cafe.

The attractive server sees you there and is intrigued. Who is this mysterious intellectual individual, who is apparently contemplating beauty and the meaning of life, amid the urban maelstrom of commerce, the quotidian hustle and bustle? This person seems interesting, and should totally be invited to share the narrow bed in my garret later. We will share our romantic artistic dreams in the candlelight, and run away together.

Just kidding. It's a Starbucks. In Paramus, New Jersey.

And your observations are actually about your cat and how much you hate your boss.

Just kidding. It's a bus station Starbucks. And all you've written is a list of Bon Jovi singles you kinda remember.

Pilot Metropolitan is the only fountain pen I’ve found works for my left-handed style. I’m a big Stan for em

Useful, thanks stet.

They’re good, but I find they clog really easily.

Six years later and I still like my transparent Lamy Safari, even though my sister’s dog got a hold of it and put tooth marks over the back half. I’m no longer a huge proponent of refillable cartridges, because on-the-go they’re leaky and inconvenient, and I don’t want to travel around with a pot of ink.

At my desk I usually use refillable carts tho. shin-ryoku and fuyu-syogan Pilot Iroshizuko inks, because they are dreamy colors.

Muji .38 blue-black rollerballs on the Muji unbleached craft-colored paper are my go-tos at work, but they’re super scratchy on regular copy paper.

how did you come to adopt the blue-black lifestyle, soda

rhodia is too much orange

My entire life revolves around Rhodia #16 dotpads - they have a black cover if, like me, you can't deal with orange.

uni ball micro 4vr

I love the feel of gel ink pens but the ink tends to show through the paper of my notebooks, making it a bit unclear/cluttered. So after a while of just writing on one side I realised this was wasteful and switched to biro and got into the 4-colour Bic habit, which I got for German class hoping to write e.g. different genders in different colours as an aide-memoire, but the clicky switch was too noisy for in-class use, so I'm not even doing that

not sure if the ink bleed problem is because I press the pen too hard (I do press too hard, a very ingrained habit that I can't shift - suspect mild dyspraxia) or because I buy cheap notebooks. Anyone else press too hard and have a favourite forgiving pen & paper combo?

(I did get a Moleskine as a gift which I've been too perfectionist to use so far because it's too expensive and tidy-looking to sully with my messy wrong notes on stupid boring subjects, so I guess I can investigate whether that's better. Usual notebook purchasing policy: does it have a nice colourful cover? does the paper feel not too cheap and thin? does it cost less than £5, OK maybe £6 if the cover is really nice? job done)

Said this 6 years ago:

1 notebook now. It used to be 3 or 4 - an a4 one for making notes or writing at a desk, then a little one for my coat pocket if I didn't have a bag, (those would both be serving as a journal), one for a particular writing project (was happiest with a 300pp squared-paper medium Miquelrius notebook for this), maybe a scratch pad for work stuff (loved plain Rhodia for this, and for any sort of quick thinking on paper, scribbling sort of writing). Now everything goes in one A4 book (Clairefontaine lined).

...

― woof, Thursday, 12 July 2012 10:46 (six years ago) Permalink

I am completely back to 3-4, more or less as described. 1 clairefontaine lined A4, which is my comfortable need-to-write, clearing my head book; miquelrius A5 squared for bursts of writing-writing; plain Rhodia scratchpad for work - drafting, scribbling alternatives (my way of thinking aloud it feels like). A little A6 miquelrius in my bag, but I barely use it now. And trying out a Leuchtterm for language notes - copying out Old Norse forms lol.

I've got a pen which is MY PEN. Pelikan 150. Had it for ten years. Managed not to lose it. Nest of pilot gels in the bottom of my bag, along with a steel ruler and staedtler fineliners in red and black, just in case I need to edit on paper.