Or journals, or anything books, as they're called. What makes them so fascinating to me? I go to the bookstore and I paw thru all the blank books they have. Nice ones, cheap ones, leather bound, spiral bound (well, not so much the spiral bound), square bound, stitched, glued, etc etc. I crave them. If I had a bit less self-restraint, I'd have dozens of them sitting on my shelf, mocking me with their emptiness. I like to write longhand. The reassuring sound of a pencil scratching across a page, or the sensuous flow of a gel-ink pen as words and sentences glide from its tip . . . it's one of those "Aaaahhhhh" moments for me. But after a couple pages, it's like the magic is used up. I've four or five of these things with the beginnings of stuff in them that I have rarely picked up since. Is it the sheer potential of that blank page staring back at me, knowing that it can become anything I have the will to make it? Is it that it looks so much like a finished book already, even tho there's no content inside? Ever see the movie Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp? There's a couple scenes in that where his character, Ichabod Crane, is working in his journal and either writing or reviewing stuff, notes or drawings or whatever, and every single time I see that movie it makes me want to snatch up a blank book and start filling pages. Comments?
I've bought many a blank book for various reasons, and couldn't bring myself to mark on them. Blank paper is both a terror and a beauty to me.
Writing in longhand is one of the most freeing things a writer can do, I find. There's literally a sense in which you can feel the words flowing from your brain down your arm to your fingertips that, for me at least, tends to take a stutter-step when there's a keyboard involved. Don't let yourself be intimidated by the quality of the blank book, though. It's yours, you bought it and paid for it, and however good the quality of the paper and the binding, you alone can decide the quality of what you put on those pages. Or you can always start with a spiral notebook from the dollar store for practice.
I have dozens of them as well. I use them for everything from Christmas Card lists, to-do lists, travel expense reports, and my "favorite" has all of my accounts all over the net, passwords, etc. I've also been known to use them for letter writing. mm
I use them as diaries. I think the 'moleskins' are really cool, too, but most of them are just too damn expensive. Great marketing though. Slap the label of 'artistic' on something, and suddenly everyone wants it including me. As if by owning one I'd become a better writer, lol. This reminds me of a great part of an interview with one of my favorite Dutch writers, Jeroen Brouwers. He wrote a book a long time ago called 'Bezonken Rood' (translated as 'Sunken Red') and during the interview he is asked what he uses to write his books. He gets up, rummages through a box of manuscripts, and pulls out this notebook he found in the school supplies section of a store with a photograph of a girl on a scooter (or rather, her behind on a scooter). He said he couldn't find anything else at the time, so he wrote what is now a classic in Dutch literature, in a teenager's notebook. Pricesless, really. When I am tempted to go for 'shiny' I remind myself of that interview. It's all just paper.
I like shiny... Anyway, I end up writing on looseleaf and legal pads most of the time; the bound books are for "special" things.
I have a few nice blank 'books' that I fill with writings - in fact, just the other day I filled one up that I have been writing in since college. I like writing letters and such to myself to read years in the future. Some of my letters are from when I was five years old! It is interesting to see what I was like back then, what I was interested in, what I was thinking about, how I saw the future and how I understood the world. I like the ones where on side of a page is lined and the other blank, so I can make drawings and sketches and diagrams.
I'm left handed, and ever since Middle School (7th grade or so) I've always written backwards in all of my books- spiral bound notebooks, composition books, blank hardcovers- everything because writing the other way my hand rests on the binding uncomfortably. I have several of these books you mention, blank tomes awaiting my scribble and scratch mocking me with their limitless potential that I am as of yet unable to harness. This thread reminds me of an afterword (foreword?) by Stephen King in one of the Dark Tower novels. In summation, he wrote about how he got started on The Gunslinger (the first in the series) and it was on a free ream of paper, this brightly colored ugly stuff that sat in his room for a long time before he decided to fill it with words.
I remember that bit King wrote! It was some kind of cheap crap paper, green, with "big chunks of undigested wood floating in it" or something like that. Also a non-standard size (may have been A4 and King didn't know what that was at the time). He put a sheet in his typewriter and began "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." I think of that anecdote every time I look at the first page in a new blank book, wondering where my first sentence will lead. Glad I'm not the only one.
I think by backwards, locustinferno meant starting at the pages in the back of the book and progressing toward the start of it. When garamet mentions Leonardo's writing, she means literally backwards (the text reads correctly only when viewed in a mirror). Or does locustinferno truly write in mirror-imaged script?!?
Blank books are hilarious though in that they command a lot of money. I was at Barnes and Nobles and they had all sorts of fancy ones for 20-50 dollars. Who knew blank pages would be such big business?
There was a FANTASTIC one at Sam's yesterday for 20 bucks... about 500 pages, leather bound, very clean and simple design. -_- If it weren't for my lack of money/college expenses...
I think what you're actually paying for in those cases is the quality of the binding, covers, and paper of the pages. Some of these blank books get very hoity-toity with actual tooled leather covers, stitched bindings, and so forth. There are plenty of low-end blank books to be had for under $10 if all you want is something basic (but still nicer than loose leaf or spiral bound) to write/draw in.
Well DUH!!! Come on you don't think I know that? It's still hilarious. Yeah you can get basic blank hardcover books for 5 to 10 dollars but it is laughable how they get people to buy blank paper just for the fancy cover that you can't use again once it is full. Heck Barnes and Noble has books that are hand stitched in Italy for thirty bucks (for about 250 pages). The nice ones are the ones with the old world maps but I ain't buying them.
And lo, behold you my brethren, a miracle has come to pass. I've taken up one of my blank books again! It's black, faux-leatherbound, and thick (300 pages IIRC). I started it two years ago and got about five pages in. Now I'm writing in it again. This book is sort of "Cosmology in the Lanzverse" and could prolly best be descibed as a Necronomicon without the evil.
How's this for geeky? Here's a whole blog devoted to blank books and journals, and it uses the Moleskine as its standard of comparison.
I tend not to like the pocket-sized ones. Seems too small to be useful. I like at least the 5x8 size.
I've thought of getting one of those from time to time. Most of 'em have some pretty nice artwork or inlays on the cover. But I haven't seen one with a symbol on it that really appeals to me. In my wilder moments, I toy with buying one of these. When I'm feeling really froggy, I go look at these.
I have tens of unused notebooks too!! I'm not much of a writer, or an artist, but I adore notebooks of all types. I buy a lot from Papernation. The last ones I bought had a little magnetic strip to keep them closed when not in use, a ribbon marker and a wallet at the back for spare paper. I line them all up in my own kind of decorative/size order in the bureaux with a nice pot of pens beside them, but I've only written in two to press. OH goes mad at me when I buy them, and I go mad at him if he ever *gulp* rips a page out of one of them to jot on.
