I bought my first notebook in a stationery shop on Via del Corso in the winter of 1997. The shopkeeper wrapped it in brown paper and tied it with string, which struck me as absurd for something that cost twelve thousand lire. I was twenty-three, about to board a train to Vienna with no itinerary and very little money, and the notebook felt like the most serious thing I owned. By the time I reached Salzburg, I had filled three pages with architectural sketches and one with a recipe that a waiter had dictated from memory.
The Object Becomes the Ritual
What surprised me over the following decades was not how many notebooks I filled but how many I carried untouched. A blank notebook in a coat pocket changes the way you move through a city. You notice the geometry of fire escapes in Lisbon, the particular green of a courtyard wall in Fez, the way afternoon light falls through a train window somewhere between Lyon and Turin.
“The notebook is not a record of the journey. The journey is an excuse to carry the notebook.”