turn no: tip off

Old pulp, new lines

Mayette Q. Tabada covers a classic gadget with a “killer user interface.”

IF YOU’RE TRAWLING the Web for a notebook these days, chances are you will turn up one that requires navigating and recharging.

But for heritage buffs who just want their notebook to be open to receive marginalia and musings, there’s a brave new world out there.

Beloved by those who write, draw or keep a scrapbook, a notebook is just a bound sheaf of papers. Or not.

Wikipedia says paper is the most common material used for a notebook’s insides.

But to the hardcore, paper is anything but common. There are as many notebooks as there are varieties of color, opacity, brightness, porosity, stiffness, thickness, strength and archival characteristics.

Connoisseurs who carefully choose their pens by their nibs will appreciate a notebook with pages of vellum (calfskin used for a scroll or codex).

Such degeneracy will be lost on an industrial drone who will go for notebooks with pages of polymeric materials, transparent, erasable and, unlike pulp, durable and nearly perpetual.

A notebook’s size, tips Wikipedia, determines usage.

It can be the other way around: the content found on those pages determines the notebook’s dimensions, with size of pages and cover diminishing in proportion to their owner’s transparency.

Thus, a pocket-sized journal holds that which seals the lips but betrays the heart. An executive-sized notebook bound in impeccable shagreen and carefully left open on a carelessly scrawled page smeared with appointments is intended either to impress the reader about the owner’s itinerary or lack of leisure.

Thanks to the marketing wizards of “aspirational consumption,” notebooks have shaken off their dusty associations with school and library detention.

For an artist friend, choose a large notebook with wide pages and blank spaces for drawings. Lawyers are far from yellow but their legal pads are, by tradition, a light shade of lemon.

If lawyers’ pads are bigger than those used by journalists, it is not true that ego has anything at all to do with it. When they write in their notebooks, lawyers will most likely have a table as a nearby accessory. In the light of recent events, a journalist may be handcuffed and dragged through a crowd while jotting notes; hence, the more portable the notebook, the better.

Should a journalist have a free choice of what to write on, many would be happy to trade in their beat-up pads for a Moleskin.

Produced by a small Italian firm, the Moleskin is distinctive for the elastic band that holds the notebook closed, as well as the sewn spine that allows the pages to lie flat when the pages are open.

According to Wikipedia, the Moleskin notebook was fashioned in honor of the favorite brand of notebooks used by the English travel writer, Bruce Chatwin. When his Paris stationer finally had to tell him that the notebooks’ supply had dried up, Chatwin was disconsolate.

Fortunately, he did not cease traveling and writing. If this world is lucky, its stock of stories will never dry up, too.

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