I’ve been looking for a good notebook I can use to sketch out ideas and plans. I wanted something sturdy enough to survive hard use in the shop, which would lie flat without trying to close up on me while I was working in it.

My first stop was Amazon.com. The best option seemed to be a hardcover, spiral bound, sketchbook. Definitely a possibility, but not as sturdy as I’d like. Looking in brick-and-mortar stores around me I found something similar at both Staples and Barnes and Noble. In each case, the price worked out to be around 16 cents a page. While at Staples I noticed that an 80-page sketchbook was almost the same price as a ream of 11”x17” paper. If I used the whole ream at half size, it would give me 10 sketchbooks worth or paper at a whopping 1¼ cents per page. I’ve done some bookbinding in the past, so the next logical step was to make my own notebook. A trip to Staples and an old T-shirt netted me everything I needed in terms of materials.

When I was a kid and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be an “Everything Man.” I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I had the idea. Old enough to realize that growing up to be a saber-toothed tiger might be problematic, but young enough that I didn’t see the issue with trying to do everything. Other kids all seemed to want to grow up and be firefighters, or astronauts, or president. Don’t get me wrong, those all sounded like good things, but they were all so limiting. How can you only want to fly spaceships? What about when you want to invent machines or write books or cook doughnuts instead? Clearly it was better to be an Everything Man.