Mr. Peasant On His Homemade Pocket Notebooks

Writing to Father, Eastman Johnson 1863

Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.

JACK LONDON

When I go on my walks, I carry a homemade notebook in my pocket. This homemade notebook is custom made to fit my front shirt pocket. It is more square than rectangular. I am unable to find anything like it on the market, and those store bought notebooks are expensive. They are so pricey that they hit my perfectionism nerve and make me not want to write in them. I don't want to mess them up with my scribblings. A homemade notebook made from junk paper liberates me to think and scribble.

There are two ways to make a homemade notebook--modified and from scratch.

1. Modified

A modified notebook is when I am gifted something like Field Notes or a similar equivalent. I never buy these things for myself because I think they cost too much. I like these notebooks because they are the right thickness and don't have a spiral wire at the top of the book. Their only deficiency is they are too long for my shirt pocket. My solution is to cut them in half turning one regular notebook into two pocket notebooks. This butchery also slays that perfectionism problem I have with scribbling into a pristine store bought notebook.

2. From scratch

A scratch notebook is when I take junk paper harvested from junk mail and other places and collect them into a pad. I make durable covers from things like my old paper calendars or covers of the Magnificat. I cut these materials to the right dimensions for my pocket and staple them together. I don't make them overly thick or else they will come apart. I find that three staples do the trick.

Pencil is the preferred writing instrument for the pocket notebook because ink tends to run and stain especially if there is sweat and precipitation. I also keep the last pages blank in case I need to hand on information to a third party. I write down the info and tear it out for them.

I mostly write down ideas that come to me as I walk. These are usually blog post ideas. I have had ideas on my walks, but I lost them because I had no way to write them down. I told myself that I would remember them and write them down after my walk. That didn't happen. Now, I stop and take out the pocket notebook to capture the idea in the moment. It has done wonders for my creativity. This post began as an idea jotted down in my pocket notebook.

Gentle Reader, I hope that you found inspiration to make your own homemade notebooks or simply to carry one at all times in your pocket. You never know when ideas will come to you. Thank you for reading.

An Old Man Writing a Book by Candlelight, Godfried Schalacken 1663