It nearly goes without saying, but I have quite an infatuation with books. I have no trouble resisting cakes and chocolates, seldom think twice about a nice shirt or tie or a fine watch, and appreciate automobiles only fleetingly. Yet I can scarcely see an appealing review of Charles Stross, or an attractive volume of (still unread) Tolstoy or pass by a new novel from Gene Wolfe or John Scalzi without my credit card coming, with mystical rapidity, to my hand.
Amazon is like the finest heroin and I must do my utmost to avoid it, lest I add further to the vast stack of books I have bought but not yet read. But like any addict, I’ll get a tremor if I go too long without a fix, and be consumed with a need to hit a Barnes & Noble on my lunch break, guiltily avoiding invitations for Vietnamese food with coworkers, slinking down the back stairs to seek the substance of my need. It is in this way that my desk and nearby shelves have amassed a collection of over 30 new, beautiful and unread works.
Again, all this can be more or less assumed about my character.
But I have a likewise extreme weakness for something even more fundamental, which is paper itself. I buy paper I have no need for just because I like the way it feels. I buy new notebooks and pads because they look just right, or are novel in some way. I currently carry 5 Moleskines — representing 4 distinct varieties, no less — to keep track of tasks, notes, ideas, and progress towards my life goals. I have notebooks in all shapes and sizes, from Japan, France and Italy. Some notebooks are leather-bound, some cloth, some in simple manilla.
And yet the what’s between the bindings is even more varied still. I love my Squared (graph paper) Moleskine hard-bound notebooks for keeping track of ideas and for listing and tracking tasks.
I have a hefty, leather wrapped journal that I bought on a whim, but which has now become my travel log. But I also keep a stack of generic office paper that’s half used — printed on one side, but read and no longer needed — to use as scratch paper at work.
I have probably 20 varieties of Post-it notes in all the colors of the rainbow, to use as everything from bookmarks (the little colored document markers) to, well, reminders, as is their due. I’ve got stationary from Cranes, postcards from little shops in Japan and a collection of wrapping paper and calling cards from Whimsy Press (and now my secret is out).
I’ve got engineering paper — consumed in uncounted reams during my college days of physics and math courses — in 3 colors (I prefer the tan), Lab notebooks with built in carbon paper, accounting spreadsheets with a zillion rows and columns, and wonderful, heavy graphing paper I bought from Edward Tufte.
I wonder, in fact, what percentage of my infatuation with books is purely a sensual response to the paper they’re printed on, and if that percentage is maybe unnaturally high.
Quite in keeping with these passions, I love to write too. Not even so much the creation of content, though I do enjoy that. I appreciate the very feel of the pen on the page, the interaction between metal, ink and paper. I like to discover which pens work best on what paper. My standby, the UniBall Vision ELITE Micro, writes beautifully on the smooth paper Moleskine uses in it’s hard-bound notebooks (and most anything else, truly), while my Cross fountain pen leaves too much ink, which the thin fibers in that paper tend to collect, blurring my writing. The rougher, textured paper of the Cahier line works better with a more traditional ball point, with gummy, bleed-proof ink, like the thixotropic stuff in my Fisher Space Pen. Strangely, normal office copy paper seems to handle the fountain pen ink — a silky but quite fluid mixture — quite well, so when I take notes for projects at the office (on my customized Cornell method paper, that I print myself) I use that.
My obsession with pens is only just taking off, but I fear it could easily
spiral out of control too (I find myself, for example, quite attracted to this Waterman Carene…). The aesthetic value pens offer as an accessory, and the sense of connecting with the spirit of traditional writing are both quite compelling, but also the pleasure I get from writing, as I said above, is very much tied to the pen in my hand. I like to type quite a bit as well (though, it must be said, really only on my Powerbook’s exceedingly perfect keyboard), but there is something about holding a pen and writing long hand that is invigorating. And, it must be said, the more I enjoy the physical act of writing, the more I’ll do it, and that’s better for me too.
I dare say that in the future, a visitor to my house might reasonably expect to find on my desk a felt lined box with a series of fine writing instruments, next to a crystal inkwell, amongst a myriad of pads and notebooks, further encompassed by towering shelves and stacks of memoirs and references and novels.
