I began blogging in 2005, when blogging was a newly popular thing, before social media shortened our attention spans to 140 characters. I wrote about notebooks, mostly about Moleskine notebooks, and also about pencils, and pens and notebook related musings. I regularly featured some of my own notebook related artwork – that was when the Alchemy Notebook project began – and also the notebook art of others. I also sold notebooks, first through eBay and then through my own online store, before you could easily find quality notebooks everywhere. All of this was generated by the fact that I was a notebook fanatic, and I figured out that if I found like-minded souls, I could sell them notebooks to support my own habit. Over the course of two years I made a lot of online friends and I sold a lot of notebooks, and ended up keeping more notebooks than your average person would find to be reasonable. My online store is a thing of the past, but my obsession has not subsided in the least. If anything, it is even stronger because of these experiences.
The photos accompanying this blog post are of my notebook nook, an antique Table Talk pie crate turned into a desk organizer, crowned with a wonderful Eberhard Faber vintage rubber band box that is just the right size to hold pocket sized Moleskine notebooks. This represents my current assortment of notebooks in use. This does not include the Stash – the uncounted number of notebooks still in their shrink wrap awaiting future use. They are legion. You might also notice that there are a few pencils to be seen in these photos, but I think it best if we avoid talking about those for now.
I have been wanting to document this history in some way on my current blog, since it has so much to do with how I got to this current place in my life, and I wanted some kind of record of those posts that have disappeared into the void of the internet. Rather than reprinting them here into the current timeline, I like seeing them in their original archival state via the time travelling marvels of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. I have added a link in the sidebar under the heading WABAC, in reference to the original WAYBAC Machine of Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon fame, which was a childhood favorite of mine. If anyone is curious at all to see them, or if by chance there are some of you who actually remember those days, now there is a way to do that.
So, Sherman, set the WABAC Machine to 2005, and visit the original Ninth Wave Designs blog HERE!
