A notebook is, technologically speaking, not a particularly impressive object.
Some paper. Some thread. Something around the outside to stop the paper from immediately becoming a mess.
And yet that leaves an astonishing amount of room for somebody to care about how it is made.
A couple of years ago we visited a small workshop in Vietnam run by three young people who had become sufficiently interested in notebooks to turn that interest into a business. They make the books themselves, embroider covers and other objects by hand, experiment with different materials and teach other people some of the techniques they use.
They are also exactly the kind of people I like meeting through Avanova: enthusiastic about what they do, happy to explain it and visibly delighted when somebody else gets interested too.
A book has to be built first
Before there can be an interesting cover, there has to be an actual book.
Loose sheets of paper are arranged into sections, folded and sewn together. The binding has to hold firmly enough to survive years of opening and closing, while still allowing the pages to move naturally.
It is one of those crafts where the finished result looks so self-evident that it is easy to forget somebody had to assemble it.
The notebooks we first brought back to Austria were mostly leather-bound. Some are deliberately rough, with unfinished edges, visible stitching and pieces of leather that are allowed to look like leather rather than being forced into industrial perfection.
I like that particularly much.
If somebody has gone to the trouble of making a book by hand, there seems little point in making it look as though a machine produced ten thousand identical copies.
But leather is only one possibility
The workshop does considerably more than leather notebooks.
Fabric makes an entirely different kind of cover possible. Once cloth enters the equation, embroidery enters right behind it.
One of the makers specialises in hand embroidery, adding flowers, animals and other small designs directly to notebook covers and accessories. Some pieces can be customised, which means that the decoration does not have to begin with whatever happened to be fashionable when the product catalogue was printed.
Somebody can actually ask for something.
And somebody else sits down and makes it.
That rather old-fashioned arrangement still has a lot going for it.
When different crafts meet
The most interesting pieces, to me, are often those where several techniques collide.
Bookbinding provides the structure. Textile work provides the cover. Embroidery adds another layer. And some notebooks use indigo textiles decorated with wax-resist patterns of the kind associated with Hmong textile traditions in northern Vietnam.
We have written more about that process in our article on Hmong beeswax batik and indigo dyeing.
Put a textile like that around a handmade book and suddenly the notebook becomes a meeting point between several people's skills.
Somebody made the textile.
Somebody bound the pages.
Somebody decided how the material should become a cover.
Sometimes somebody embroidered it afterwards.
That is a lot of human involvement for an object whose basic purpose is still just: write things in here.
The workshop
When we visited, what struck me most was not a particular notebook but the atmosphere around the work.
This was not some solemn temple of ancient craftsmanship where visitors were expected to whisper respectfully while a master guarded secrets passed down through seventeen generations.
They were young people who liked making things.
There were books, materials, threads, unfinished work and new ideas around them. Customers came in and out. Questions were answered. Designs were discussed. The shop and workshop were part of ordinary life rather than separated from it.
And they were genuinely nice people.
That may sound like an irrelevant qualification for making notebooks, but after enough years in business I no longer think it is irrelevant at all.
Skill matters. Reliability matters. Quality matters.
But working with people whose enthusiasm survives contact with customers is considerably more pleasant.
Teaching the process
They also teach.
Visitors can learn embroidery or try bookbinding themselves, choosing materials and gradually discovering why the apparently simple object in front of them contains rather more decisions than expected.
I have always liked workshops for precisely that reason.
You do not need to become a professional bookbinder afterwards. Making one object yourself is already enough to permanently change the way you look at the next one.
Suddenly you notice the stitching.
You notice how the pages were grouped. You look at the spine. You understand why one construction opens beautifully while another fights you. And when you see embroidery covering a piece of fabric, you have a somewhat better idea of how much time disappeared into it.
Why I still like notebooks
I use computers for almost everything.
I write on them, work on them, communicate through them and occasionally spend unreasonable amounts of time arguing with them.
And I still like notebooks.
Not because writing on paper is somehow morally superior to typing into a computer. It isn't. The delete key alone has done more for my writing than several generations of stationery ever could.
But a physical notebook becomes an object in a way a file does not.
It collects bad handwriting, crossed-out ideas, sketches, tea stains, forgotten notes and things written years ago that suddenly make sense again.
And if the book itself was made by somebody who cared about the paper, binding, leather, fabric or embroidery, I find that even better.
Made by people
That is ultimately why these notebooks belong in People & Craft rather than in a catalogue of stationery.
The interesting part is not that leather is durable, that paper is pleasant to write on or that notebooks make good gifts.
The interesting part is that three young people became fascinated enough with a very ordinary object to start making their own versions of it.
One learned to build the books. Another brought embroidery into them. Different materials and textile traditions found their way onto the covers. Customers began asking for individual designs. Workshops followed.
And somewhere along the way, a pile of paper and thread became their craft.
If you would like to know whether we currently have any of their notebooks available, you can contact us.