Southworth air mail stationery

What a spectacular box of stationery I found at my neighborhood antique mall this afternoon! I love the lettering and imagery on the box and the lightning-bolt motif.

Southworth paper has special meaning for me. Not only was this the first company to produce paper especially for typewriters, but it was founded by my great-great-great-grandfather Wells Southworth.

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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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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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Staplers I have known

If you work on paper, you need to keep papers together. This is why a number of typewriter enthusiasts have also acquired a variety of staplers. I'm not a stapler collector, but I've been cleaning my study and I ran across a few that may be of interest.

This very pretty and excellent Aceliner turned up in the local St. Vincent DePaul store. I also have a staple remover that matches its marbled plastic.

I'd forgotten that I own these midgets. I should bring them to class when papers are due and students inevitably ask if I have a stapler.

Another midget is this Swingline Tot 50 which has been with me since I was under ten years old. A box of staples for it has also survived, somehow, all these years!

Still older is my father's stapler. It looks like it's from the 1940s. The base is Bakelite. He scratched his initials on the bottom. I can't see a maker's name on this stapler; does anyone know what it is?

Finally, this is not really a stapler but a Bump Paper Fastener, patented in 1914. It cuts a tab out of the paper and folds it into the cut.

Here's a video that shows how it works.

I believe devices like this are still made in Japan and are popular there.

I know Sean up in YYC has some interesting staplers too. Who else?

 

Ode to paper

 

Time for an update

More about this Remington

To see a 1939 Remington 17 in original condition, visit this post.

Austin Typewriter, Ink.

The plot of Evertype, represented in a webwork diagram à la Harry Stephen Keeler.

The Writing Cabinet

PoetryFox.com

Hal Wildson

Red Door Magazine

Freddy is a very helpful companion.