#notebook posting

42: stickers sent to me by @belovedapollo ♡

44: sticker by the brilliant @sweatermuppet

45: the original cover had a quote that said, "Originality consists in returning to the origin— A. Gaudí," so I made an anagram of it. Match sticker by @choodraws, whose sticker sheets are one of my favorite things in the world (you can see a couple of them in 43's cover as well).

46.1: Don Patch of Sun gifted to me by @sillyknightagain ♡

47: I amazingly had two cutouts of the exact same tile in different sizes and a piece of cardboard that matched them almost perfectly. Stickers from my one true love, the Tools & Toys Hobonichi box.

WHY I NEED AN ARCHIVING SYSTEM

The reason I don’t have a notebook system is because I use my books for absolutely everything, from sketches to grocery lists and journaling. It is crucial to me to not have any restrictions or expectations when it comes to my books, and that’s how I’ve managed to fill 43 of them over the years.

But of course, when you’ve been using notebooks without a system for most of your life and you want to read a specific entry, you can easily spend a full hour flipping through a sea of paper until you stumble upon those notes on the Bubonic Plague you took in 2011 or whatever you were trying to find.

SO HERE’S WHAT I DO

When I finish a notebook, I try to determine what its most important contents are: stuff I might want to reference in the future (project ideas, meeting notes) or is very characteristic of a period in my life (friends' drawings, travel logs). Every single page contributes to making the notebook what it is and gives it a unique personality, but not all of them are gonna be keepers, and that's fine (I'd even say fundamental, at least in my case).

These are the extremely generic categories I sort my Chosen Entries into. It's similar to the dot system so many people use, just applied retroactively:

🟣 Study notes 🔵 Work 🟢 Personal 🟡 Projects 🔴 Misc

And here's where the real archiving begins. This info goes into:

1. THE INDEX CARDS

(I always write them in Catalan; this one's a mockup and most of these are not real entries)

A little piece of cardboard with the notebook number, its start and end dates, and most important contents. I keep each index card inside its corresponding notebook, either in its own backpocket or an adhesive one I stick there myself.

This way, whenever I want to take a quick look through the book, I get a general idea of its contents at first glance. Sometimes, just holding it in my hand and reading the index card brings me back to the time when I was keeping it, and that time-travel feeling gives me a rush like no other. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm crazy about my notebooks.

2. THE SPREADSHEET

Same as before, just a couple more pieces of info (number of months, physical description) added to a file with the rest of my notebooks' data. Again, these are not real entries for privacy and language reasons, but they're very similar to the kind of stuff I do keep. The spreadsheet helps me find specific entries with a simple ctrl+f, and it's also a bird's-eye view of my progress through the years as a notebook keeper. I can see when my interests shift, how long some of my most important projects took to come to fruition, and even similar types of entries that repeat every few years which I wasn't even aware of before putting it all together. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

I hope this was useful, or interesting at the very least! If you’re a notebook keeper trying to find their own archiving system, my main advice would be to start early so you don’t have to deal with almost two decades of material like I did :’)

If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask.

Good luck 🖤

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned multiple times on this blog, I’ve been keeping notebooks since I was a child. I started using them just for drawing, developed the habit of carrying one with me at all times, and ended up using them for absolutely everything. Whenever I needed to write, doodle, or scribble something, my book was there for me. I’ve never had a set structure: I simply use the next available page until there’s none left, and then I start a new notebook.

Although the basic mechanics of my notebooks have remained the same over the decades, my relationship to them has changed. At first, they were only tools: places I could keep my thoughts safe in, only to be used in the very short term and probably never touched again when I was done. They were an integral part of my life, but only in a practical sense.

A couple years ago, I moved out of the apartment I’d spent nearly a decade in. While preparing to leave, storing all my life in cardboard boxes, I realized I’d accumulated an insurmountable amount of loose pieces of paper. Concert tickets, magazine cutouts, napkin doodles, theater programs—most of which I had no place for and forced myself to throw away. It was right then and there that something clicked: everything not saved (written, drawn, glued, somehow kept) in a notebook would be lost forever.

The following summer, I ran away from the place I’d moved into, taking with me only as much as a couple of suitcases could carry. I packed a winter coat and all my notebooks, and never looked back. Everything not kept in a notebook was truly lost.

I’ve started looking at my notebooks as a life archive. They no longer serve only present me but also long-in-the-distant-future me. I number and date them as clearly as I can, have developed a system to find old entries more easily, and write stuff down in a way that will make sense in the long run (as opposed to your classic “I know what I mean”). My pages have never looked flawless and perfectly aesthetic, nor do I want them to, but now I decorate them to my heart’s content and have a great time doing it. All in all, and even though they’re still tools I use in my everyday life, I want my books to be nice places to stay in, be it right now or years down the line.

As I said in the beginning, I’m not sure what the purpose of this post is or where all these thoughts leave me. I just think it’s wonderful to have so many years of my life documented by myself, and the ability to look back on them is priceless. Sometimes a notebook is all I have, and that’s more than enough.