The Sketchbook Project was created by Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker in 2006 to collect and archive travelogues, photo logs, memoirs, and, of course, sketchbooks — more than 12,500 from 130 countries, according to a piece in Sunday’s New York Times. Participants pay $25 for a 32-page sketchbook, which they then fill and send back to add to the collection. For an extra $30, you can also add your book to the Project’s online digital library.

The physical collection was first housed in Atlanta, and has been in Brooklyn since 2009, though I somehow managed not to hear about it when it was in my neighborhood, Red Hook (it’s since moved to Williamsburg’s Brooklyn Art Library). The coolest part, in my view, is that each sketchbook is available for checkout, where it can inspire new work.

For those of you who don’t live in the area, there’s also a touring component.

Have you participated in the Sketchbook Project?

I thought it might be fun to work with a group of people from Quo Vadis Blog and see if we could develop our own ghost story – either a page or two of writing each, a sketch, a collage–whatever writing or artwork we want to create to tell our part of the story.  We would pass the notebook along and create as we go.  The last person would write the ending.

Please send me an email (karen@exaclair.com) if you might be interested in participating.  The goal is to have fun, work on a collaborative project together, and publish our Ghost Story on Quo Vadis Blog when it is done.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Well, this is appropriate timing… I’ve been reading Janet Malcolm’s excellent book about Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman, and a day after I blogged about handwritten fonts, I reached a passage where Malcolm describes a pack of letters from Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, to the poet and biographer Anne Stevenson:

As I looked at the pages of dense, single-spaced typing, punctuated by x-ings-out and penned-in corrections, I had a nostalgic feeling. The clotted, irregular, unrepentantly messy pages brought back the letters we used to write one another in the 1950s and ’60s on our manual Olivettis and Smith Coronas, so different from the marmoreally cool and smooth letters young people write one another today on their Macintoshes and IBMs.

These days, I guess we’re just syntactically messy.

Clem writes some of the most memorable ink reviews I have ever enjoyed. Because of her beautiful, flowing language and imagery,  I’m convinced she was a poet in another life. Her reviews are always balanced, thorough and precise. She is one of the people I rely on for an expert opinion on notebooks and pens as well as different inks.

Besides our mutual affection for all things pen and paper, we both love lighthouses!

If you have published an ink review recently (all brand welcome), please include a link to your review in the comments section.

We’re on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, and we’ve read a lot lately about Pinterest, the shareable virtual pinboard. Stephanie is already a fan, and I’ve had a lot of fun looking through the absolutely amazing paper creations that others have pinned to their boards, though I haven’t taken the plunge yet personally.

Do you use Pinterest? Would you welcome it as another way for us to share all the awesome things people do with our products and/or post our design inspirations?

On the heels of Snail Mail My Email, Dialogus, and the many pen pal match-making sites comes a new initiative called Letters In The Mail.

Through it, people can subscribe to receive weekly letters from writers like Dave Eggers, Margaret Cho, and Jonathan Ames. (The cost is $5 a month, and each subscriber gets the same letter.)

“I got this urge to get back to sending paper letters, and I also knew a lot of authors who I knew would be really excited about it,” founder Stephen Elliott told MSNBC.

If the author decides to include his or her return address, participants are encouraged to write back.

Thanks to Cecilia for passing this on!

I was poking around online when I came across an old post by needlepoint blogger Cynthia. Cynthia sells her designs online at The Drawn Thread; as it turns out, she’s also a fan of the Note 27, and even stitched her own cover for it!

Pictured above and available for sale here, the cover is a perfect complement to the planner, and every bit its aesthetic equal.

Though the angle of the sun conspired against my cell-phone picture taking efforts, this lobster trap Christmas tree — at Lee’s Market in Westport, MA — seemed like the perfect follow-up to the book tree Cecilia found earlier, and in the spirit of the not-quite-gone season, I figured I’d post it here.

Hope your holidays were joyful!

From Cecilia, our product manager and finder-in-chief of cool stuff on the Internet, comes this amazing Christmas tree at Beck’s Book Store in Evanston, IL.

What’s particularly great about this idea to my space-starved urban eye is the fact that you can pack it up at the end of the season by putting the books back on their shelves. A, er, novel approach, dare I say!

From my French counterpart, Murielle, comes this post about Jitesh Patel, an amazing London-based paper artist — sculptor, I might say. As Murielle explains:

Jitesh Patel founded his studio in London in 2007. The artist works on paper in the form of multifaceted 3D creations and with a resolutely graphical style. A feast for the eyes, these achievements offer the ultimate results in advertisements for the Alpina Yogurt as well as in the streets of London.

You can see one of Patel’s street art projects in the image above; to see the intricate paper birds and butterflies he crafted for Alpina and learn more about his work, check out his website.