Another one bites the dust. Finished off a shop notebook yesterday and found myself staring at the corpse like some kind of deranged archaeologist—seven dead volumes since 2015. A hell of a paper trail. But the real question is: Do you keep one?
You should. A proper shop book is the nerve center, the battle plan, the sacred text that keeps the gears from flying off. Mine is a chaotic mess of to-do lists, scribbled cut diagrams, half-baked blueprints, and scattered inventories of missing consumables I should’ve restocked months ago. It takes discipline—just a little, nothing life-altering—but it pays off when you can actually find your goddamn measurements instead of squinting at a grease-stained napkin.
Regrets? Oh, plenty. Chief among them: Moleskine notebooks. Overrated. Inflexible. And yet, I keep using them, like an addict making excuses for bad dope. I should’ve jumped ship years ago, especially after seeing what my Porsche-restoring buddy runs—a stupidly expensive Japanese-made Plotter. The thing is a leather-bound 6-ring binder that ages like a fine whiskey. Pages move in and out, projects shift between books—it’s modular, adaptable, bulletproof. And it looks like it’s been through a war. Gorgeous.
Then there’s the Traveler’s Notebook. Another Japanese import—thinner, sleeker, slightly more affordable, but with a tragic flaw: it takes bound notebooks, meaning you can’t swap pages around like you can with a binder. Still, the leather ages like an old bomber jacket, which counts for something.
But me? I’m chained to my Moleskines. Seven lined spines glowering at me from the shelf, daring me to betray them. My obsessive-compulsive nature won’t let me mix brands now—it’d be offensive to my sensibilities.
So what do you use? Or are you still trying to keep it all in your head like a lunatic?
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