On Friday 01 September 2006 9:31, chuck wrote:

     As has been said many times, Black and Red paper with a Moleskine cover
would be ideal.  I use a couple of B&Rs in my wood workshop, but their
über-chintzy covers make them unacceptable for any other use.  To give a
metric to my standards, I use standard school composition books (Mead and
Office Depot brands) as my primary notebooks, and I find *their* covers and
quality to be far superior.  The paper, not so much so, but it is quite
acceptable for the price and the number I go through (rough drafts and rough
project notes eat up paper like nothing else).

    Honestly, if you're serious about finding a good notebook, I'd stay away
from the super-cheap realm of both Moleskine and Black and Red.  They are
both very inexpensive and it shows.  If you really demand a good notebook,
you're simply going to have to pay for it.  Step up to leather casebound
volumes that contain paper that has been made for generations for high
quality fountain pens.  But you're not going to find them for the low prices
of your Moleskine and Black and Reds.  Nor are most generally as compact as
either, tending toward several hundred pages and being on the large side.  

    On the other hand, if you get the larger volumes, you'll usually only need
a couple to write down your life, or you can use one in an organization for
keeping generational records and minutes.

    Small and cheap has tradeoffs.

--
Evan "JabberWokky" Edwards
http://www.cheshirehall.org/