“Barnes & Noble is having a 40% off sale,” Tiff told us the other day. For once, Kris didn’t object to a trip to the bookstore.
I wandered around looking for great deals. I picked up a book on writing, and a book on the Hindenburg. I didn’t find as much as I’d hoped. Then Kris came up to me — her basket full of stocking stuffers and other little gifts — and said, “Did you see they have moleskines on sale?”
Well. I put my books back on the shelf and instead loaded my basket with $150 worth of my favorite notebook. (Which only cost me $90!) When we got home, I made a pile of my current notebook collection, a collection that is a sad reflection on the nature of one of my obsessions:
Click on this image to open the annotated Flickr version in a new window.
This is my notebook collection. (The notebooks I purchased the other night have big red dots on them.) Note that I don’t collect these the way one would collect stamps or coins or little ceramic cows. I collect these the way one would collect bags or buckets or old tools. I collect them because somewhere in the back of my mind, I believe these will be useful some day. Also note that nearly all of these are unused. And that this doesn’t include all of the notepads and index cards and reams of paper that I have stacked in various drawers and closets.
I admit that it’s probably just another irrational compulsion, but I don’t care. I now have seventeen moleskines and I want more!
(Further note: I am very particular about lined notebooks and journals. Most ruled paper drives me nuts. Most of it has these widely-spaced lines that are useless except for junior high school girls (with their bold, loopy handwriting). I like my journals narrow-ruled, and the narrower the better. That’s one reason I love moleskines.)
Thank God I’m not alone. My weakness is index cards. Like you, I believe that someday I’ll need 150 index cards. Sigh.
Have you discovered the mini Sharpies that you can hang on your keychain? They rock!
Three years later and this site is still the number-one google match for the phrase milky women. I still don’t get it.
I think I’m not alone in using the “milky women” search term to find your weblog when travelling or web surfing at the public library.
I always think your url is kinkedexpanse.com or something, give up and type “milky women”. It works everytime.
Is the sale still on?
Yes, the sale is still on. I think it’s on until the middle of April. This is what’s happening: the Barnes & Noble across from Clackamas Town Center is moving into Clackamas Town Center. For corporate bureaucratic reasons beyond my ken, they’re treating this as if the old store is going out of business and the new store is starting from scratch. While it might make sense to you and me for the old store to simply move the fixtures and inventory to the new store, that’s not what is going to happen. Everything that can be returned to the publishers for credit will be returned, but the stuff that can’t — for example, my precious moleskines — is marked down 40%. Kris tried to fish to find out if there’ll be further markdowns, but she didn’t have success. We suspect there will be, though, and so plan to show up at the store again during the first week of April. At that time, I fully expect to see even more books marked down, and those that were already marked down available at a deeper discount. Also, they have to sell the fixtures. Will they sell them to the public? We didn’t ask, but I’d love to have one of their reading tables.
You might want to check out this blog about notebooks and the search for the perfect little black book:
http://blackcover.wordpress.com