Who knew there were so many ways to use a little piece of elastic? One of the comments to my recent post on elastic bands contained a suggestion that I found so novel and surprising, I just had to repost it here:

I also used the elastic band for a bookmark, but I say the whole notebook world is upside-down! The first thing I do with a new elastic-banded notebook is…flip it over.

For me, the band is for getting USED pages out of the way, wrapped together under the “front” cover. This secures my existing notes for privacy and convenience, and leaves a bookmark for as many blank pages as I may need to rifle through while taking notes. If I need to reference existing notes, that’s when I pull a few pages from under the band. I don’t need to conceal blank pages from anybody, especially me, and I don’t like bumping into the band when I write.

The only problem, according to our illustrious commenter? “The only trouble is that I haven’t seen a decent banded book that conceals the elastic attachment points. Everytime I look at my notebook, there are the ragged nubs on my ‘front’ cover.”

I don’t think the problem is so easy to fix; after all, the elastic’s gotta be attached to the notebook somewhere, and if it’s not glued to the “back” of the cover it creates a bumpy surface for those who use the notebook the — I wouldn’t say, right way around — shall we say the traditional way?

Nonetheless, a very interesting idea.