Intellectual Scrapbooking
As the name of this blog suggests, and as everybody who has followed my publications for a while knows, I love stationery. The more often I find myself writing in one of my many notebooks, the happier I tend to be.
Using physical notebooks for planning, writing, sketching etc. has many benefits — but of course, these tools have their downsides, too. Some Many Most of them, like the increased friction introduced by the slow writing or the lack in searchability, often turn out to be benefitial once find a workaround.
The latest addition in my ever-growing collection of half-assed ways of justifying my notebook addiction to myself solutions to the problems physical notebooks present is what I have started to call "Intellectual Scrapbooking".1
Before introducing this technique (if you want to call it that), whatever note, idea, quote, poem etc. I captured in my EDC pocket notebook had to be painstakingly re-written in whatever permament notebook it was the best fit for.
Now, whenever I write something in my pocket notebook that I know I'm going to transfer into one of my larger notebooks — for instance because it has to with a topic I'm in the process of writing about, which I do in a separate notebook, or because it touches on one of the big subjects I keep dedicated notebooks for2 —, here's what I do:
- I write that note on a new page and make it extra legible.
- I rip or cut the page(s) out and glue it/them into the larger one.3
In practice, it looks like this:
Two of my main notebooks, both with glued-in pages from other notebooks.
The look and feel this produces is oddly satisfying. There is something creatively chaotic and stimulating about glued-together thoughts on glued-together pages.
Footnotes
For the uninitiated: Scrapbooking is a journaling method that uses physical keepsakes like tickets, printed pictures, receipts, broschures etc. Glued on the notebook pages, these objects — often with the addition of journal entries, commentary, explanations etc. — help the scrapbooker to remember past experiences.↩
This whole "problem" will be further reduced once I really make the switch to something closer to The Grail Method, which means using just one notebook for everything that has to do with creative and intellectual work.↩
At the time of writing this, I am using an A6 pocket notebook by Dingbats, which has perforated pages (100 gsm). This is the perfect brand for this purpose, but of course, any small notebook and a pair of scissors will do.↩