Today, I bought myself a really good notebook. It's of a kind called "Moleskine". Have you heard of this? It's a kind or brand of notebook. "It is two centuries now that moleskine has been the legendary notebook of European artists and intellectuals, from Van Gogh to Henri Matisse, from the exponents of the historical avant-garde movements to Ernest Hemingway. Many are the sketches and notes, ideas and emotions that have been jotted down and harboured in this trustworthy pocket-sizes travel companion before being turned into famous pictures or the pages of beloved books."

Besides all that, it is light, but beautifully bound in black, hard but not cumbersome binding. The pages are an eggshell color, and there's a ribbon bookmark sewn in. It has an elastic to hold it shut. You know how some designs from the earlier parts of last century -- riding the back of the new modernist possibilities but still reflecting a deep-seated wisdom about how people want to make use of things -- became so colossally beautiful that no one has yet managed to re-forge them . . this, anyway, is how I feel about the Leica; the man's three-piece suit; the fountain pen; the ship; the pipe; the novel.

So I found the notebook version of this. They stopped making them for a while, but they've started again.