Since today is my 40th birthday, I thought it was about time I got around to digging out my archive of personal notebooks and taking a good look at them all. Despite having thrown out a few over the years, I still have over 70, dating back as far as primary school when I would scribble down my thoughts at the end of the school day. It's a surreal experience to read them now, more than 30 years later, and hear the voice of this child speaking back at me about the dramas of life as a 9 year old.
I have a very early memory of making a notebook myself, with folded pieces of A4 paper and a stapler. I drew a picture on the front cover, but even at pre-school age it annoyed me that the pages didn't quite line up perfectly. It was several decades later that I remedied this annoyance forever by buying myself a guillotine, which meant I could trim books I had bound (or just slice the edge of the yellow pages for fun). In fact, the guillotine was a gift from my then-boyfriend, though thankfully the symbolism was not fateful as we're still together.
It's hard to say when my notebook obsession began, but certainly while I was still at primary school I began writing in a diary and treating this as a space where I could say whatever I was thinking and feeling. It's odd now to read back this extremely honest stream of consciousness by my 9 year old self, who for better or worse, was certain nobody was ever going to read these diaries. Let's hope they don't.
Over the years, the ritual of choosing and using notebooks and diaries in a variety of colours, designs and formats, became very important to me. Even since founding Mark+Fold in 2015, I have continued to pore over (and very occasionally purchase) notebooks and diaries from other brands. Many of them inspire me, or take me back to a moment in the past when I wrote in those pages every day. Many of them also annoy me because a detail is not right, or the paper allows the ink to bleed through. I didn't know it at the time, but this all became research for the products we make at Mark+Fold.
