Notebooks I have known

Bob Sassone was curious to know more about the notebooks I use. So here is a rundown—of interest, maybe, to readers who love to write by hand (I suspect there's a significant overlap with typewriter lovers).

My notebooks fall into two groups. 

There are the academic notebooks, which I've used since college for class notes (as a student, then as a teacher) and notes from conferences, lectures, etc. These are usually around 8.5" x 11". I am currently on my 41st volume.

Then there are the personal journals, which are smaller, usually 6"x8" or so. I started these in high school and I'm currently on my 19th.

UC Berkeley had a little room where you could buy books to support the library. They were discards or unwanted donations. I found quite a few bizarre oddities here, as well as a few ledger-style notebooks—the kind Bob Sassone says "look like something Scrooge would have used for his business." They had a few scientific notes, written in a fluid and confusing hand with a thick fountain pen. These must date from the 1950s or earlier. 

I filled them with course notes (and doodles).

Once the "Scrooge" volumes were full, I turned to unruled artist's sketchbooks, which leave me free to organize text (and doodles) as I like. 

For many years I preferred plain, black-bound sketchbooks. There were some exceptions, such as these beautiful volumes. My mother-in-law bought the green one for me in Egypt; I bought the other in Montalcino, Italy.

More recently, I've been using colorful (even a bit garish) blank notebooks produced by Flame Tree. Half Price Books sells these for only $10 apiece.

For the personal journals, I started out in high school with a little, paperbound, lined notebook. All the rest have been nicer, blank journals from various sources. I've gotten several from Epica, which imports beautiful Italian leather-bound journals. Pricey, but worth it. 

Moleskine and Leuchtturm 1917 also make good journals, but I've gotten some with thin paper that allows too much ink to show through; in those cases I've written only on the recto (right-side pages).

My preferred handwriting tool is a Pilot Namiki vanishing-point fountain pen. Every year or so, I drop mine on its nib and have to replace it. I'm a klutz.

What if I really want to write something by typewriter? This happens pretty often when I'm preparing for class. I type it up and tape it into a notebook.

There is a lot of satisfaction in working with ink and paper, and filling a shelf with your writing. 

What are your favorite ways to write by hand?

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August '24 typewriter safari

I stopped by the Ohio Valley Antique Mall today and checked out the latest crop of you-know-whats.

I'll tell you right now that I didn't buy any of them. But I can still create a quiz: Which of these models is the rarest? Do you know? Write your guess in the comments below.

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A fine flatbed

This 1912 Royal no. 5 "flatbed" machine was one of a group of three typewriters I bought locally. The other two were a very nice green Lettera 22 and a Blick 7 that needed some serious disassembly and cleaning. They are all bringing funds to WordPlay Cincy. 

I don't have "before" pics, but I can tell you that this machine was dirty, rusty, and inoperable. Still, it seemed worth trying to restore, since it had fairly good paint and came with an uncommon wooden base and sheet-metal cover.

I soaked the frozen parts in mineral spirits and Blue Creeper. Even added some of that stinky standby, PB B'laster. Then I tapped and pulled until the parts started to move.

What a triumph when the starwheel and pawl finally budged and the carriage started to move along with a nice "zip"! (The mainspring and drawband are still in good shape.)

I managed to pull off the H keytop when trying to remove the key ring. Trevor Brumfield of TB Writers Plus kindly came to my rescue with a replacement key.

Greg Fudacz offers a reproduction user's manual.

I used Turtle Wax to clean and polish the painted surfaces.

The bolts that connect the typewriter to the wooden base were missing. I had to make two trips to the hardware store to find some that worked. I ended up using some metric bolts, which certainly aren't correct but are close enough.

These flatbeds have various features that were retained on the no. 10, the company's big seller.

The paper table looked dull even after waxing. Finally I sprayed some Pledge on it, smeared it with my finger, and let it dry—then buffed. That left a nice shine.

The typewriter finally looks good, and it works. These flatbeds have a springy, easy touch, and you can see why they sold well. There is a slightly disconcerting feeling as the keys close to the typist tilt a little when you depress them. But someone will be able to use this Royal as an actual writing machine, if they want to. It is not only an ambassador from the world of 112 years ago, but it can tell new tales in the year 2024.

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A case study in writing on paper

As shown in my previous post, one of my current writing projects depends heavily on digital technology.

My other main project is unbesmirched by digits. I'm assembling a collection of aphoristic thoughts on remembering. They began as reflections in my handwritten journals over the last several years.

I reread my journals and selected entries that I wanted to include in this book. For each entry, I typed a heading on a page, noting on which journal and page the entries appeared.

Now I'm using my old friend, the 1937 Remington Noiseless Model Seven, to turn handwritten journal entries into typewritten text. I revise and rethink as I go.

The typewritten pages get ordered and reordered with the help of paper clips, staples, binder clips, and Post-Its.

There's still a lot of writing and rewriting left to do. I'll be marking up these typewritten pages, retyping some of them, removing pages, inserting new ones, generating new thoughts as I go.

Why am I doing things in such an old-fashioned way?

First, I just enjoy working on paper. It's a break from the frantic, edgy mood of digital composition. 

Also, the difference between human and machine memory is one topic I'm writing about, and in order to do justice to human memory it seems appropriate to sink into a purely non-computerized way of recalling and thinking. It helps to turn inwards. (That's what the German word for memory, Erinnerung, literally means.)

This process is inefficient. These thoughts have collected over years, and gathering them into a book is also taking years. That's all right. It's the process of gathering that is most meaningful to me, not the finished product (which maybe no one will want to publish anyway). As I've been saying recently, computers will never catch up to humans because they're not slow enough. Time means nothing to a machine—it's just a measure of how efficiently it produces its output. But for humans, as Kierkegaard puts it, "the time itself is the task." I could ask AI to produce a book about memory, and it would spit it out in seconds. Maybe it would even contain text that would be thought-provoking and meaningful to readers—but not to the computer. And not to me.

As the digitization of the world continues to accelerate, I believe seemingly absurd projects like mine will become ever more important. We need moments, spaces, and activities that can't be reduced to the efficient processing of information.

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A case study in digital writing

 Philosopher Martin Heidegger spent over 65 years handwriting his thoughts. 

His manuscripts piled up.

His writing is small, and hard to decipher for those who aren't familiar with the obsolete Kurrentschrift cursive.

His brother and his assistants would use typewriters, including this 1932 Urania-Piccola in my collection, to create multiple, easily legible copies of his texts.

Shortly before his death in 1976, the collected edition (Gesamtausgabe) of his writings began publication. In 2024, it is nearing its goal of publishing over 100 volumes. Another 30 volumes of correspondence are projected.

Almost all of these volumes have been illicitly scanned and turned into searchable PDFs. This is what happens these days to every book with a detectable audience. I have downloaded as many PDFs as I can. I don't feel guilty about this, because (a) I'm not reposting them publicly, (b) I have personally bought quite a few expensive volumes from the publisher, and (c) my university library subscribes to the whole series. 

Having all of these texts on my laptop makes it possible to search nearly Heidegger's whole body of work in a split second. Thanks to digital memory, his 65 years of thinking are, in a way, more transparent to me than they could ever be to his own human memory. 

He would be disgusted by this. His instructions for the Gesamtausgabe forbid any indexes, so that no one can be spared the work of thinking through the texts in context, following his trains of thought. He didn't want to become a mere object of analysis. The point of his texts is "not to communicate the opinion of the author, and not to characterize the standpoint of the writer, and not to fit it into the series of other historically determinable philosophical standpoints. Of course, such a thing is always possible, especially in the information age, but for preparing the questioning access to the topic of thinking, it is completely useless."

Nevertheless, this summer I've been writing a text that does dig into his "standpoints" on the issue of presence. In brief, early in his career Heidegger had a brainstorm: to be, at least in the Western philosophical tradition, means to be present. But presence is an aspect of time. So our understanding of being is made possible by time—and the tradition has not grasped this. Hence the title of his main work, Being and Time.

I'm asking: What exactly do "being" and "presence" mean for Heidegger, and did he keep pursuing his critique of the tradition throughout his life? For this project, it's extremely useful to be able to search digitally for words referring to presence. Of course, there is a danger of taking passages out of context, and I'm doing my best to avoid that.

The whole project has proceeded with very little use of paper. I'm composing in Microsoft Word—not my favorite application, but so familiar that it would be a pain to switch. One feature I do like is the Outline view, which makes it easy to create headings and subheadings, collapse and expand them, and shift them around. My whole text can be seen here in outline form.

This system is working well to assemble a complex study that surveys decades of Heidegger's work. It would be much harder without computers. If all goes well, the text will also be published digitally before it's available to be printed on demand. It's one in a series of digital-first academic studies that Cambridge calls "Elements." They're like very long articles or short books. 

My text includes some critical words on digital technology:

In the twenty-first century, our world is constantly scanned, measured, and recorded. We inhabit a global positioning system, a quickly spreading and indefinitely extendable regime of tracking and surveillance. Everything, especially including us, is treated as a resource to be datamined, monetized, and controlled. Nothing seems to resist our digital systems of representation. ... The accuracy of cybernetic representation depends on vast amounts of binary data: nanopresences and nanoabsences, “ones and zeroes,” which are then algorithmically processed to yield new ways of producing and processing what is present. ... Whenever we take a mobile device from our pocket and use it to schedule the delivery of a product that lies ready in a massive warehouse, we are relying on a highly complex and sophisticated system of command and control, presentation and representation, that uses modern science and technology—and thus is founded on modern philosophy, which in turn would not be possible without a history that reaches back into the primal experience of presencing among the Greeks. That, at least, would be Heidegger’s analysis.

The irony has not escaped me. But I don't see myself as a complete hypocrite, since neither Heidegger nor I are saying that all use of digital devices is wrong; we just don't want to accept an unquestioned  technological "Paradigm." 

Still, this all leaves me with a craving for old-fashioned paper, fallible human memory, and quiet reflection. That craving is being fulfilled by my other major writing project—which I'll describe in my next post.

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