In the same way that football players endorse particular boot manufacturers and pop stars sell their favourite fizzy drinks (I assume these things still happen, I don’t really know), I would like to turn the crisp sheet of my newspaper to discover a full page ad with e.g. Jeanette Winterson advertising her favourite pen or George Saunders extolling the virtues of a certain make of desk.
For my part, when I am grown up and a fully-fledged famous author with pages and pages being written about my pages and pages, I would have no hesitation in agreeing to become the face of the Leuchtturm 1917 Jottbook Medium (A5).
“Details make all the difference,” I would purr in my by-then-distinctive handwriting.
I have kept notebooks for the last 16 years. Each has served as a place to jot down half-thought out ideas, scribble little messages, expand ideas into sentences and paragraphs and stick cuttings or wayward pieces of paper.
The ideal notebook is smart enough to care about but not so polished to give the impression it must be kept immaculate. Part of its job is that it must be possible to make mistakes in it – making mistakes in is what it is there for.
Its pages must be welcoming – it is a mobile office to use however, whenever and wherever you want or need. It needs to be ok with having something incongruous stuck in with glue, to have a sentence that might not work yet scrawled in it or to house a preposterous idea written with confidence in big letters.
A few years ago I bought my first Leuchtturm 1917 Jottbook Medium (A5) during a visit to Fred Aldous, the art supplies shop in the centre of Manchester. I was looking for a new notebook as the one I was using at the time was running low on unused pages, so I had a little flick through one of the Leuchtturm 1917 Jottbooks they had there. It seemed decent enough.
But after using it for a few weeks I came to appreciate its many qualities. Slim, with decent paper, and bound loosely enough to accommodate being fattened with stuck-in cuttings but not so loose as to feel like it might fall apart. Then the nice touches – rounded corners, page numbers (!), a contents page (I feel no real need for a contents page, but I have found fun uses for them).
I haven’t really looked back and must be on my sixth or seventh Leuchtturm 1917 Jottbook – my preference is for the ones with squared paper but blank pages works well too (for some reason, I have never found lines conducive to work). All of which makes me, I think, the ideal face and handwriting of this particular brand of notebooks.
What would you like to see advertised and who by and why? What kind of notebooks do you like using? Is this how I am supposed to end blog posts, with a series of questions? I wasn’t sure how else to wrap this one up to be honest? It was just a bit of a vague ramble, wasn’t it? Oh well?
Digestive Press 