‘Handwritten letters belong to you like your DNA’ | Life and style | The Guardian
Emails and texts act like the middleman between the author and recipient, technology even dictates your words by guessing them and filling them in for you. The pen, however, begs to be enslaved; it needs to belong to you.
(via Jeff Kayton)
People often ask how I find the time to write so regularly; whether notes, letters, blogs, op-eds, or even books like this. But the reality is I’m always getting my thoughts down on paper…. It doesn’t matter if you use a notebook and pen like me, or a shiny new tablet like [my daughter] Holly—the key is making writing a welcome habit. But keep a little pad in your back pocket just in case—you never have to charge a notebook.
–Sir Richard Branson, Finding My Virginity
This is a neat project from Matthew Lang. And I’ve always loved the idea that, if what you’re looking for doesn’t exist, you should create it, like Matthew has done here.
Not only did Napoleon possess a traveling library, but when that traveling library proved too cumbersome for his many and varied literary demands, he had a whole new set of not just portable book cases but even more portable books made for him.
This is neat.
Beatrix Rhone reviews the new School Set from Baron Fig.
Our own Patrick Rhone’s daughter stars in this ridiculously cute video review of the new School Set from Baron Fig.
She began with a question: “What are students’ note-taking practices?” There were varied responses — some students used paper exclusively, while many others maintained a combination of print and electronic. No one spoke up to say that they only took notes electronically.
Nice to see that, even today, and even when using electronics as well, students are still using paper for note-taking
The more than 7200 pages now extant probably represent about one-quarter of what Leonardo actually wrote, but that is a higher percentage after 500 years than the percentage of Steve Jobs’s emails and digital documents from the 1990s that he and I were able to retrieve.
–Walter Isaacson, on the staying power of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks
Did you know that those tags are stapled onto your clothes BEFORE they get washed? If you think about it, it makes perfect sense – if it was done afterwards, they would have no idea which shirt belonged to whom. But think this through all the way.. The washing machines used by dry cleaners are no slouches. They are heavy-duty industrial strength machines that give your clothes a thorough wash. A tag that can survive such a thorough beating is not just waterproof – it is a special kind of paper that is literally classified as “washer-proof” paper. TAGGED MEMO is a pocket notebook made out of this washer-proof paper.
This is s very cool notebook concept. Check out the review.
Paper is a wonderful technology for the storage and retrieval of observations. Five hundred years later, many of Leonardo’s notebooks are still around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start keeping them, can be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, long after our tweets and Facebook posts have been forgotten.
—Walter Isaacson,
The Lessons of Leonardo: How to Be a Creative Genius
(via Austen Kleon)