One of the more specialized product lines in the Clairefontaine catalog is our modest collection of music notebooks.

Since the task is so specific, we don’t spend a lot of time promoting them, but we recently got an inquiry from a New York based music store, and it occurred to me to poll our readers and see how many of you write music. After all, why should composers have to put up with shoddy paper and an inferior writing experience?

Do you write music?

From my perspective in the US, I wouldn’t have guessed that Europeans think they live in a disposable culture… it seems so much worse here! With the exception of certain large cities (I’ve patronized repair specialists for umbrellas, microwaves, and vacuum cleaners in New York), it’s practically impossible to find people who can fix stuff and not just replace it.

There was an interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times, though, about a Dutch foundation called Repair Cafe, which facilitates events at which volunteers come together to fix lamps, clothes, appliances, and whatever else comes their way.

Inspired by a design exhibit about the creative, cultural and economic benefits of repairing and recycling, [founder Martine Postma] decided that helping people fix things was a practical way to prevent unnecessary waste.

Very cool, no? Here’s a link to the foundation’s website for those of you who live in the Netherlands or are simply curious to see inspiring pictures of things being fixed.

Speaking of retailers… one of the questions that comes up again and again is where to buy our products and what to do if you’re not lucky enough to live near one of the independent local stores that stock them.

On our website, we try to make the connection as seamless as possible not just by listing online retailers but by noting the places that carry specific products and even specific planner/cover combinations. But there is still a jump between our site and theirs, and we aren’t able to list prices because prices are set by each outlet. There are multiple reference numbers because each combination has a different number even if it’s the same planner insert, or a refill only.

And then there’s the problem of shipping, which Karen has already tackled at length.

All this to say, I guess, that we hear your frustration, and we know it isn’t easy. If you’re having trouble tracking something down, you can always contact us for help. Over time, many fans of our products find particular outlets whose service and selection they appreciate, so if you’d like to solicit advice from your fellow consumers, you can always check the Fountain Pen Network.

A lot of you like to give your old planner covers new life by reusing them on notebooks, and there are a number of different combinations that work.

So what if you want to buy a new cover on its own, either to replace one that’s damaged mid-year or to use alone on a notebook? Generally, this is a question we’re hard put to answer, because we rely on retailers to distribute our products, and those retailers tend to sell covers and planners together since that’s what most people want.

However, we’ve been able to confirm that New Jersey based Classic Office Products is willing to fill special covers-only orders. If that’s something that interests you, I’d suggest you email their service department at customerservice [AT] classicofficeproducts [DOT] com or call 888-285-6330.

Happy (re)covering!

Here’s an intriguing idea from bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler, which I got to via The Kitchn: use an address book to store your most-referenced recipes.

It’s the most important tool I own, and I never set foot behind a bar without my book. The alphabetical tabs make it quick and easy to look up a recipe, and inside I’ve got years worth of classic cocktails, house recipes, syrup and mixer recipes for prep or to share with guests, variations, and layer upon layer of correction fluid and margin notes. It’s absolutely indispensable to me.

Morgenthaler uses a Moleskine address book for this purpose, but you could easily use the insert that comes with your planner (assuming that, like many of us who are tethered to our cell phones and computers, you don’t already use it for addresses) and move it with you from year to year, as it grows. And of course, you could store more than cocktails — I know I’m always looking up the quantities for my favorite pancake recipe on the weekend, which I can never seem to remember…

Our latest Writers’ Project interview is live! This month, we sat down with Michelle Krell Kydd, who writes about the history, myth, and folklore behind different scents and flavors at her blog, Glass, Petal, Smoke, and various other outlets. It’s an unusual niche, so be sure to check it out and learn how Michelle discovered her “nose,” what she’s working on, and her love of the pencil.

While you’re there, you can catch up on some archived interviews with cookbook author Maggie Green and playwright J.D. Eames.

Our discussion about the small Habana’s ruling size reminds me of a broader conversation we had here a few years ago about whether people preferred narrow or wide notebook lines…

Narrow lines seemed to, er, rule the day among our commenters, but what I’d be curious to find out is how deep your preferences run. Have you rejected a notebook you liked otherwise because the ruling was too fat or skinny? Is it one of the factors you check before deciding to try a new brand?

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.

Murielle passed along this site a few months ago, which allows you to create a font from your own handwriting and use it to send your friends an email.

Alas, we were both too late, because the campaign ended last June and the service is no longer active. I still wanted to blog about it, though, not just because I think it’s a practical way to personalize electronic messages, but because it brought back warm memories of other handwritten fonts I’ve encountered, like the one in the Moosewood Cookbook. (Weirdly, I can’t seem to find images of it online, and my own battered old copy is at my parents’ place.) There’s Comic Sans, of course, which designers love to hate. And there are other sites, it seems, that will turn your handwriting into a font, albeit for a fee.

Do you like or use handwritten fonts?

I was flipping through this month’s issue of Scientific American when I noticed the following complaint:

Has not the curse of steel pens swept over the land until decent handwriting is almost unknown? Do not ninety-nine persons in a hundred use steel pens, and has more than one out of the ninety-nine the effrontery to say he can write with them? Lord Palmerston was quite right — the handwriting of this generation is abominable; and as new improvements in steel pens go on, that of the next will be worse.

It appeared in a section that reprints excerpts from old issues, and bore the publication date of March 1862. Plus ça change, eh? One wonders what the writer would have thought about the effects of tablet styluses…