“A journal is personal.  I can play with margins, draw doodles, and make corrections in my own way.  When I go back and look at my marks on the page, I can even follow the train of thought that led to the changes.  The paper is mine, and I can skip pages or even fold them.  Words pour from the heart to the brain through the hand and pen onto the paper. This is the process of writing. Palm pilots and computers are excellent for logical order, planning and things, but not the free flowing emotion that is the centerpiece of a journal.” (by Robert I., college student, about 8 years ago.)

What do you think?

Guest blogger Kate Marshall of K’s Notebook went to the Philadelphia Pen Show last weekend and came back with a gorgeous antique Waterman. If you’re not jealous after reading her description, check out these photos on Flickr.

So it’s probably been well established that I like fountain pens. Me + fountain pens = TRU LUV 4 EVAH!

I’ve almost always stuck to modern-day pens until last week at the 2012 Philadelphia Pen Show, when I stumbled across a Waterman pen so old that it was probably around when Edward Cullen was still a human. I’m not quite sure what made me stop and notice this relic of the Woodrow Wilson era — was it the oxidation of the black hard rubber? The Waterman No. 2 nib with its jaunty, heart-shaped breather hole? The clear and crisp imprint stamped in the middle of the pen’s chasing? The ringtop cap, which may or may not be original to the pen? Who knows, but at the end of the day, I came away with a black hard rubber Waterman No. 12 PSF pen in reasonably good condition, and my contemporary pens all felt slightly jealous that they were still 60-odd years away from collecting Social Security benefits.

After doing some quick research on sites like Fountain Pen Network and Richard Binder’s website, I learned that my 12 PSF was the precursor to Waterman’s famed Ideal No. 52 fountain pen (still in high demand on the vintage pen market). The thing to remember about flex nibs is, they aren’t magic like unicorn horns. They won’t automatically turn one into a professional calligrapher any more than a new…scrub brush…will turn a someone into a master…scullery maid…whatever, there are a lot of analogies that could work here. But sometimes, a nice flex nib can add a certain “je ne sais quoi” to a person’s handwriting, because the nib responds to changes in writing pressure. Plus, the idea of writing with a 97-year old pen is pretty cool. My great-grandparents (or maybe even my grandparents) could have used a Waterman No. 12 back in the day. What sort of adventures did this pen’s previous owners get into during the past nine decades? How did the pen finally wind up among Susan Wirth’s wares at the show? Most importantly, what might the future hold for it?

Here’s another item to add to the list of things I don’t need, but would love to have nonetheless: the propeller pen. This refillable ball-point pen balances on a stand when not in use, and you can spin it, too! I’m not a doodler by nature, so this seems like the perfect thing to fidget with during phone calls.

The downside: according to a reviewer, the refills aren’t easy to purchase.

Ok, so it isn’t a real holiday. But I still think handwriting is an important cause to promote in the age of electronics… according to the Writing Instrument Manufacturer’s Association (WIMA), which sponsors it, “National Handwriting Day is a chance for all of us to re-explore the purity and power of handwriting.” It falls on January 23, in conjunction with John Hancock’s birthday, because “Hancock was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence and is famous for his large, bold signature.”

Interestingly, Western countries are not the only ones who struggle with this issue. According to a post on The Economist‘s language blog, computers and mobile phones have made Chinese characters much easier to read and look up, but harder to write from scratch:

In Chinese culture, good handwriting was long seen as indicative of moral fibre, knowledge of characters was synonymous with learning itself, and calligraphy was a great art. Now, the Chinese can avoid the drawbacks of the writing system while reading, but in avoiding those drawbacks, they are atrophying their ability to write their language with a pen. Writing on a computer is different – type in “wo” and Windows’s Chinese support will give you the most common character (the one that means “I”) first, along with the ability to choose many other characters pronounced “wo”. The software will usually find the most appropriate character for the context.

A few years ago, I discovered that my old Sapa X covers fit perfectly onto the smallest size of staplebound Clairefontaine notebooks. It was a particularly handy thing to know when I switched to the Space 17, and it got me wondering about other planner/notebook cover combinations.

Of course, it then took me a while to track down the covers and notebooks I needed to experiment with, and even longer to get off my duff and write up the results. Nonetheless! Here are the combinations that work:

• Sapa X + small (3.5 x 5.5) staplebound Clairefontaine, pictured here
• Visual + medium (6.5 x 8.25) staplebound Clairefontaine, pictured above and below
• Visual + medium (6 x 8.25) clothbound Clairefontaine, which fits quite similarly to the previous combo, so I didn’t photograph it
• Prenote + large (8.25 x 11.75) clothbound Clairefontaine, pictured below
• Notor or Textagenda + Exacompta Forum journal, pictured below

And here are some more pictures, plus the combos that didn’t work…

Visual + staplebound Clairefontaine:

The Prenote + clothbound Clairefontaine:

The Notor/Texagenda + Exacompta forum journal:

Now for the combos that didn’t work. The Minister is a bit bigger than the Visual, and while it does hold a medium clothbound Clairefontaine, there’s a fair amount of extra space, so it’s not ideal. And I couldn’t find any notebooks that fit the covers of long, slim planners like the Space 17 and the IB Traveler.

Note that we don’t sell covers independently of their planners, but I know a lot of you experiment with different formats, and this is a great way to put those old covers to productive use.

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who’s taken our planner survey. We’ve gotten more than 200 responses thus far, and we’re planning to collect and analyze the results at the end of the month. (So if you haven’t done so already, please take a few minutes to take the survey and make your opinions heard!)

Once that’s done, I’ll be sure to share the results; preliminary findings include:

• 69% of you would prefer a weekly planner, while 25% prefer a daily planner and 5% prefer a monthly
• One of you prefers a two-pages-per-day layout (but realizes “that is impractical in a bound book unless, of course, it came in two volumes”)
• 77% want fountain-pen friendly paper — no surprise, but it’s nice to see the numbers!
• 72% consider monthly planning pages essential
• At least one of you wants a place for to-do items each week

Thanks again, and stay tuned for further results!

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.

There was a great piece in Slate last week about recipe cards — “an accidental charter of [family] traditions, rendered in 3-by-5-inch index cards” — and how digital collections have since replaced them.

I’m certainly guilty of maintaining a digital recipe collection: blog posts that I’ve bookmarked, emailed recipes that I’ve filed away in a dedicated folder. But I also add my favorites to a binder I’ve owned since college, which has, like the index cards of yore, become “spattered with grease stains and marked with thumbprints.” It’s a haphazard bunch of dishes that I’ve printed from my computer, cut from the Sunday paper, or written out by hand, and it’s always fun to flip through and be reminded of something I added when I was living in Germany, say, or looking for new ways to cook the green beans from my garden.

Do you keep a recipe box?

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.

From Pens and Paper, the site of a UK based organization (or organisation, I suppose) that teaches composition and handwriting and blogs about the life creative, comes this phenomenally comprehensive review of twelve different notebook papers — from the Habana to the Webnotebook and Moleskine, Leuchtturm 1917, and many others.

Each review is written with a careful and comparative eye, which makes it very useful indeed to have them all in one place.