In which we discover that three notebook covers is not enough, because I simply have too much going on and each project needs its own notebook once it’s formed in my main daily notebook.
And so I went to InkitLeather, because I have a ton of Field Notes notebooks from when I was on their quarterly subscription service:
A black leather notebook cover. It smells so good. And it’s a custom design. It’s built to take SIX Field Notes notebooks.
And that completes the system. This gives me fifteen notebooks in use across four notebook covers.
All serious thinking is pen on paper. All memory-making is pen on paper.
Why? Because I am really busy, I do a lot of thinking on to paper, I have a ton of projects in train and they all need their own notebook. So I have three of the Atoms notebooks in this cover, they are all live, and now I grab one of three notebook covers when I go out, totalling nine different notebooks – and, frankly, right now, that’s not even enough. It is, however, organised and portable.
Yesterday I reduced a viburnum by half, hacked back salvia and holly, raked a bed, dug a trench in it, mixed a hundred litres of compost into the trench, and planted three cherry trees. Today I am actually less achy and knackered than I expected, especially bearing in mind that I still have this plague in my system. Once I have some charge in my phone, I’m going to check the weather and see if I’m going to have the space to plant some apple trees today.
Today it’s the Swatch Metropolis, yesterday it was the G-Shock G-Rescue because it was a day of working with saws and chainsaws and other implements of destruction.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
When asked why he had made death the penalty for most offences, Draco replied that he considered the lesser offences to deserve it and had no harsher punishment for the greater ones.
So I got given these lovely A6 notebooks the other day:
Atoms To Astronauts make some gorgeous notebooks. However, they’re A6. Which means they don’t fit the Wanderings Passport notebook cover or the newestor Field Notes-sized cover, or the Field Notes-sized cover I’ve ordered from a maker on Etsy. So I had to order one of those randomly-generated-Chinese-company-name leather notebook covers in A6 (UK), because I got bought nine of these notebooks and I really want to get working in them.
That’s the third stage of the new notebook system, and I’ll write a separate post about that at some point. And when the other cover comes in from Etsy, that will be the fourth stage. Because I’ve decided that this year is all about going deep on working on paper and thinking on to paper.
I wanted to pre-order thar CD for herself, but Napalm Records’ shopping system is broken.
OPERATIONS: contracts processed, setting up another reprint project (fingers crossed), scripting and planning and printing off research notes to paste into one of the above notebooks STATUS: wearing the field watch today. Email at a dreadful 154. Still not back at full power, but getting there. READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
Pythagoras had always been a paragon of humility, declining to be called a ‘wise man’ [sophos] and preferring instead to be called ‘a lover of wisdom’ [philosophos]—thereby coining the term ‘philosopher’.
LISTENING:
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I started to feel a little better yesterday, managed to overextend myself by cleaning out the chicken coop and turning the compost bins, and then got mild food poisoning. I’m ready to lay down on the edge of the property and get eaten by pigs like in DEADWOOD.
I have remembered, for the first time in a week, to do my short stack: 2000mg liposomal nicotinamide riboside with TMG and Pterostilbene, Vit D3 and K2, 1 Floradix for insurance, taken with a bowl of blueberries, blackberries, almonds and honey.
SpaceX shifts focus from Mars to Moon, which seems from here to be about Musk working hard to realign himself with the White House. Also, since the US is all about the Moon in terms of space policy right now, the money is right there, and SpaceX has its eye on ramping to 10,000 launches per annum, largely in pursuit of lofting space-based AI compute. It’s also worth nothing that Japan have now started beaming space-based solar power back to earth via microwave.
PROJECT HAIL MARY trailer. People are saying it contains spoilers. It does not. A trailer for a buddy movie that introduces both buddies does not constitute a spoiler.
Bought myself a leather notebook cover that can contain up to six Field Notes notebooks, from InkitLeather here in the UK.
I also had my eye on the covers from Veyrona, but it looks like they might be winding down.
Additionally, I saw something unusual on MUJI, of all places: a Vietnamese variant on the French chore jacket, long-cut/fingertip-length, in a blend of denim and kapok, which I picked up in a medium grey with matching wide-leg trouser.
I’m wearing a new ribbed grey 100% cotton henley that I picked up for a song from a site that didn’t appear to know they were selling it, under a black Carharrt work shirt I’ve had for a dozen years and which seems to be indestructible, paired with a black Carharrt utility pant. I love workwear and I cannot lie. I fell back in love with clothes a few years back and am enjoying it a lot.
STATUS: siiick READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+) , M SON OF THE CENTURY, Antonio Scurati (UK) (US+) LISTENING: Just discovered Duo Ruut via Night Tracks on Radio 4:
About to switch on the Retro Nano and stream some podcasts from the phone: I deleted hundreds of episodes of stuff from the app that I know I will simply never get to.
It’s “All aboard!” as Verity Sharp presents an eclectic selection of sonic odes to rail travel, 200 years on from the first ever passenger railway journey in the UK. Expect an archival adieu to the steam locomotives from Carnforth, Lancashire, echoes of a station piano recorded during a transit interlude, and a ticket inspector’s nod to the quiet solitude of the trans-European night train cabin in the form of contemporary field recordings.
Jennifer Lucy Allan presents your weekly dose of adventurous explorations in sound. There’ll be distorted cello sounds from Seattle, composed by Nirvana’s cello player Lori Goldston, who hopes to give her listeners room to breathe and dream. Leo Chadburn also brings a dream-like labyrinthine recollection of misty quarries, disused railway lines, and shadowy monumental factory buildings, via closed-mic spoken word, vibraphone, wine glasses and drones. Plus a sonic dedication to “Radium Girls”, female factory workers exposed to radioactive luminous paint, courtesy of Phew, Dieter Moebius and Erika Kobayashi, composed in the shadow of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011.
A new study uses digital tools to analyze nearly 1,000 Syriac manuscripts from the British Library, focusing on how scribes and editors selected and rearranged parts of texts—a practice known as excerpting. Researcher Noam Maeir introduces a new measurement called Excerpts Per Manuscript (EPM) to track how often this happened. This approach reveals that the people who copied and compiled these manuscripts were not just preserving texts—they were actively shaping what future generations would read and remember.
By highlighting these editorial choices, the study shifts attention away from authors alone and shows that scribes played a key role in organizing knowledge, adapting texts for new purposes, and influencing how Syriac literary culture developed over time.
A long and fast tour of the history of the notebook. Very friendly and smooth writing, taking you from the Roman wax tablets called “handhelds” all the way through to today’s bullet journals and morning pages.
So fast, in fact, that I wish it’d lingered on a few more things. But I can’t begrudge him the time spent on Florentine accountancy, because it turns out it’s the key to everything in the notebook world.
Over six thousand leaves (which is to say, thirteen thousand pages) survive, and experts estimate that this represents about a quarter of the original total. This implies that Leonardo da Vinci filled his notebooks at the rate of about a thousand pages a year.
Leonardo, like a Florentine bookkeeper, kept different formats of notebook for different purposes. They vary enormously, from big, formal folios to the little pocket books which he kept on his belt, ready for whatever thought or observation sprang to mind.
Leonardo was externalising, putting his thoughts down on paper the better to manipulate them.
Shakespeare, Frida Kahlo, Johnathan Swift, Brian Eno, Bartok and a thousand others are all in here. Parchments, wax, codexes, table-books (almanac tables printed in the front, then a dozen pages coated in gesso and glue so you could wipe them clean), holster books, Moleskines, radioactive diaries:
Physicists and mathematicians pore through Newton’s and Einstein’s notebooks, identifying moments of crucial insight. They would love to browse Marie Curie’s lab notebooks too, but proximity to her experiments left them irradiated.
It’s a huge and fascinating book, and it’s given me a lot to think about despite its necessarily shallow passes on things I’d like more details on. which just spurs me to discover and read deeper on those things, which isn’t bad, right? I can see why everyone was raving about this book. It’s a great achievement and a great tool for thought.
Multiple studies have found that students who take lecture notes on laptops don’t learn as well as those who write with pen and paper. This is partly due to the distracting temptations offered by the internet, and partly because typing encourages verbatim note-taking, rather than paraphrasing, summarising and concept mapping, which are much more effective ways at encoding new information in the memory.
The physical labour seems to play a part, as we encode memories better when muscular effort is involved. So do the tactile, sensory qualities of the paper itself, and the fact that a note on a page has a fixed location, while a note on a screen scrolls away or vanishes altogether.
These little notebooks from MUJI, 48pp, were recommended on Wirecutter for their paper quality, and I found them at MUJI for two quid each plus, at the time of purchase, a decent discount, which meant I could grab ten for like one-fifty each.
Being passport size, they fit the Wanderings Passport perfectly. I still have an old roll of large white plain stickers, and I can bung one on the front of each to write my indexes on.
Expensive whiskies come in wooden boxes. I therefore have a few wooden boxes. Turns out they fit Field Notes nicely. So I have a repurposed storage system now. Hail whisky, the cure for all the world and the water of life.
(The sticker is covering over the title of an unannounced project in production)
