Notes on notetakers

Adam has gathered a few notes on how others take note.

Jun Aoki from Monocle

Architect Jun Aoki takes notes on the train: “I used to sketch the changing landscape. One day in 1992, I forgot my sketchbook and bought a Kokuyu Campus notebook — the type that’s available everywhere. Since then I’ve gone through about 160.” via Monocle

Journalist Jenny Kleeman: “I use an A6 red hardback notebook. Exactly the same notebook I’ve been using since 2001… I always use a purple pen. I always have a list of things to do and a list of people to chase.” via Longform

Spy novelists John le Carré: “I love writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafés, then scurrying home to pick over my booty. When I am in Hampstead there is a bench I favor on the Heath, tucked under a spreading tree and set apart from its companions, and that’s where I like to scribble. I have only ever written by hand.” from The Pigeon Tunnel

Crime novelist Patricia Highsmith’s diaries will be published this November. From the New York Times:

“The diaries were discovered after Highsmith’s death in 1995, tucked away behind sheets and towels in a linen closet in her home in Ticino, Switzerland. The 56 spiral-bound notebooks, totaling some 8,000 pages, were found by her longtime editor, Anna von Planta, and Daniel Keel, the executor of Highsmith’s will and the literary executor of her estate. […] Transcribing and editing the journals was a monumental task, von Planta said. The process was complicated by the fact that Highsmith kept two sets of journals: notebooks about her professional life, where she recorded her plot ideas and thoughts on writing, and diaries in which she wrote down her private reflections and memories. “She had a system of double bookkeeping about her life,” von Planta said.

Highsmith’s diaries from Norton