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French Notebooks

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jul 19, 2021
Category: Art

From the New York Times: “A growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It’s not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in high school classrooms or that they hurt productivity in meetings in all kinds of workplaces.”

One shelf of my bookcases is filled with composition books, the detritus of decades of journalism. I’m not alone in using the once-traditional notebook of college students. These pseudo-marbled notebooks have been favored by Michel Basquiat and Eddie Vedder. Roy Lichtenstein immortalized them in a painting, Composition II.

I was reminded of these notebooks recently, because Tina Brown used them to record her Vanity Fair diaries. She’s recalled those scribbling sessions:

What was good about the Vanity Fair era was that I wrote so much. These days, the only place I really do my diary is on my laptop on a plane back from Davos or L.A. or London. But back in the pre-digital age, I had those black-and-white marbled composition notebooks and new New Yorker eyes (because I’d just arrived from London) and I was so wired with everything I was seeing that I had a desire to write it, share it, impart it… I’m at my most prolific when something new is happening and I’m on my own somewhere. There’s nothing like that caught-in-the-moment, onrushing immediacy of a diary. Where you don’t know where you’re headed: That’s the fun of it.

Tina Brown used the classic notebooks. Me too. You can get them cheaper, but those usually have flimsier covers. These last. [To buy Mead Composition College-Ruled Notebooks from Amazon, click here.]

For gifts and indulgences, consider an upgrade.

The “Mon carnet de croquis poche” notebook is divided, by Gaul, in three parts: journal pages in the front, graph craft paper in the middle, and divided perforated pages in the back. [To buy it from Amazon, click here.]

Most “authentic” is the Vintage French Journal.. A dreamy gift for Francophiles, your most intimate confessions, and/or me. [To buy it from Amazon, click here.]