The joys of a new notebook

I've mentioned my love of notebooks before, but I don't think I made it quite clear how much I love notebooks! In the absence of a diary, my notebooks are the quiet carriers of my day to day thoughts and inspirations. I use notebooks for everything.

I have notebooks for:

• Lists (what to pack, what to do today, people to call, things that are bugging me, things to buy, etc.) - these are my mongrel notebooks, the ugliest, most functional ones which end up with random addresses, phone numbers, mathematical calculations and automatically allocated internet passwords scrawled into them.


• Ambitions - well, I only have one of these. I write down my most important ambitions, just for a place to keep them. (Go to Egypt; Learn to bake bread; Become a good essayist; etc.) This one is a lovely, cloth bound notebook with a silk tie. It lives on my desk.


• Thoughts on books - of course. The larger kind of notebook, pretty but functional.


• Random venting - for those times I wish I kept a diary. I hope that when I'm gone, somebody does me the service of burning these because most of the time, I only write down the things that aren't worth remembering. This is the only use I have for large notebooks.


• Quotations - I have a quotation fetish. I collect them. And for this, I reserve the tiniest, most beautiful notebooks I own.

Paperblanks makes gorgeous notebooks. I also picked up one today by a new Australian brand called Rasberry- keep an eye out for them.

The strangest thing about my notebook obsession is that I never finish using one. The last quarter or so is always blank. I think this is because they're so personal, so attached to my day-to-day life that when I move to a new place mentally, I can't stand to keep using the same old notebooks.

No two I own are the same.

The medium and the message

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

There is something about the tactile qualities of paper and ink and glue that can never be replaced by their electronic counterparts.

As a reader, I like to feel the weight and texture of books in my hands. I also tend to remember how to find bits and pieces of text by where they were positioned: about a third of the thickness in, on the left hand page near the top of the second paragraph.

As a compulsive writer, I use a word processor for larger projects (after all, it makes editing a dream) but I also have an array of notebooks and scraps of paper on which I jot down lines of inspiration and frustration as they come to mind. I have never really kept a diary (and oh! how it makes me feel like a failed writer!) but if you could bring together all the scraps of paper, the margins and the forgotten notebook pages on which I've scrawled thoughts as they came, you would have a diary of sorts. When I have new ideas for a narrative, I tend to write these by hand initially, then go on to word process. Typing these things out would never do.

Typing poetry would never do, either. Poetry, by nature, needs space to breathe. The mind has no time to breathe when word processing. Besides, once I'm finished, I like to see what the shapes of my letters tell me about my own frame of mind.

Sadly, I hear handwriting is on the decline. I can't help feeling that a certain type of insipiration is declining with it.

Umberto Eco discusses the problem here.