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Transcript
and now all man on the left coast andy welfle or something like that welcome to episode twenty two of the erasable podcast tonight we're talking all about pocket notebooks and we're still looking for a belly man big enough to pull the three of us together into one pack i'm andy welfly from woodclinch dot com and with me i have my two co hosts johnny gamber from pencil revolution hey johnny hey dandy and tim wasum from the writing arsenal hey tim hey how's it going very good all right so this is kind of the first in a series about paper we've been getting a lot of requests to do a podcast about paper and we really really want to but there's so much to talk about so i think we're going to kind of take them in like formats so maybe like this is about you know little pocket notebooks there's going to be one about ledgers or notepads maybe another one about loose leaf i don't even know we haven't even figured all that out yet what do you guys think yeah
i like
the setup i think it seems like a natural place to start because we seem to use these more than anything
else and these are the ones where there's a new one every week to deplete my bank account there's so many
yeah and we just started making a list out of group member topics and there's so many on this list but
i haven't heard of some of these
yeah and we definitely like you know some of the big ones like field notes i think that we've kind of talked it to death already but but we'll we'll keep on going we have a few different ways of talking about it i think tonight that should people should appreciate so before we get started of that with that let's say we discuss tools of the trade what are you drinking and writing with tim
i'm writing with write dudes i guess do you still call i guess they tic tac they still are write dudes usa gold the natural pencil the new one that doesn't have the foil wrap i always get mixed up now because when you look at it it doesn't say right dudes it says america's pencil which i'm cool with but i've been enjoying enjoying using that today and i'm writing in my bobsleight stationer mountain tom six x four notebook courtesy of mister johnny camber is my new i finished my podcast field notes the red blooded i finished that off and so i've moved on to my bobsleigh notebook and i'm putting a podcast sticker on the front
of it as we speak johnny gamber's great have you been to his website stencil resolution revolution i can't say it
yeah kind of like stencil resolution it's
probably gonna have to go reserve that
url pretty low resolution it's sort of like there is a sushi place in my new town called sushi sam's and i cannot say it without slowing down it just comes out like sushi shams i just can't even sushi shams hey come on down to sushi shams guys
so and i'm drinking a little something i call a black hole sun which is old charter eight year kentucky straight bourbon whiskey and capri sun seriously no no johnny snuck onto my tools of the trade and added capri sun to the end of my old charter eight year kentucky straight bourbon whiskey capri sun so i came up with my own little mixed drink that was just dreaming of the black hole sun trademark i'd
have that song in my head all
weekend now johnny's show note bombings are the best they are the best he wrote down that i was drinking a seven up and i'm writing with a mechanical pencil i stole from a renegade crossing guard
johnny johnny what are you
using i am enjoying a sam adams escape route lager although i think it's halfway between an ale and a lager whatever that means it's delicious if you can find it definitely get some and i'm using a little tiny staedtler norris hb that i've handicrafted to have a pink end dip because the end dip came off and i love it how
about you mister andy i am because i just can't get over it i'm drinking an anchor steam which i'm really liking i think that's maybe what i had last week but yes anchor p thanks johnny no anchor steam's really good i had the porter that they make the anchor porter they make a porter they do make a porter that's really good yeah you can get that at
like grocery stores here which is really
weird yeah yeah that's will fengy was talking about how he can get anchor steam and groceries there so they're made in san francisco since eighteen ninety six it says right on the label i
like their fat little bottles yeah they're
really nice to hold they're kind of
cute yeah the beer can be cute
yeah and i'm writing in my ambition pocket notebook with my brand new twist bullet pencil that i got in the
mail today and the clips are pretty
oh yeah oh my i didn't get this until today because i held out to get the clip and yeah man it looks really good it it kind of reminds me of like the top of the like tornado twists by retro fifty one yeah but nicer and they're using he pulled the erasers out of what did he pull the erasers out of the choo choo choose yeah and they look really good in there yeah this is just like picture i don't want to use the eraser because i'm afraid that it's not going to look as good but no of course i'm going to use it but yeah it's a it's a really nice pencil i got the blue one with the silver pointy tip and then i got a black one with a brass blunt tip so yeah i'm i'm tickled pink i like it a lot it was a good mail day today which we'll talk about later so we could probably move on to the pencil of the week this is kind of last minute so we didn't really like put it up to a vote if you'll notice this podcast came out a little bit sooner than it usually does within our bi weekly schedule because we're trying really hard to release them kind of in ten day increments so we're not really following like the week the weekly structure which we may go back to depending on availability and how it works but so we're still getting the hang of being able to like plan ahead for these things so yeah so we decided to do the black ticonderoga which is a pretty good standard it was i think that was the first ticonderoga that i ever really thought about how about you
guys yeah it was the first one i liked as a grown up yeah
yeah i would agree with you too
yeah i used to back when i i think it was it was target or office depot i can't remember where but i used to get these really nice matte black ticonderogas and i just loved them and now i can only find shiny black ones and i don't think they're as good a quality and johnny i think you have more information
about this yeah i think it came out in ninety nine or two thousand it was called the millennium and then they switched to just calling it the black and it was matte and it was so pretty and i don't know what they did but it smelled extra
good yeah and i thought the quality
was better too yeah they were really nice and then when they stopped us production they made it shiny and ugly and not nice anymore also i think some of them have microban just kind of icky microbane yeah and they have the there's the unsharpened chinese version that doesn't say dixon which is very nice in the mexican version which is scratchy and crappy so you can guess what my grades can be but on my way out of carbondale when i moved back to maryland in two thousand six i bought a two dozen box that are stashed away from my children of the black ones i'm really trying hard not to open i have little half
used ones of the of the matte ones that i are stashed around various places but i i gave a bunch to a friend of mine because he loves the ticonderogas and like i was explaining to him the difference between the black ones and like the matte ones and the shiny ones and it's so weird that their supply chain is so strange like that like why would they produce some that don't say dixon on
them yeah i don't understand that the stuff they do yeah like now they're moving away from cedar and some of
the stuff why yeah do the yellow pencils kind of face that same thing where there's some that look one way and some that look another yeah i
think for a while the next gen ones were paler and the chinese ones were very gold and now the chinese ones are matte yellow which is actually really nice they're pretty i like this but i don't think they're cedar anymore
they're heavy how do you tell the difference between them the box yeah no
i'm just usually the chinese ones aren't
sharpened oh between the chinese you're asking like how do you tell the difference between the chinese and the mexican yeah
yeah usually they put it on the box on the outside okay you buy them online you're in trouble yeah my bad never know what you're going to
get would they have the same like upc on them like do you think
i don't know yeah that's a good question but that's charles yeah at the skinny also i've never checked to see if they have the same eraser huh
it's so too much occasion yeah that company has just been i feel like it's you know been bought and sold and divided and changed and just it's
a company that's like everybody knows it so well i mean doesn't they could put out like the crappiest pencil in the world and still be in every
store so and they do that yellow dixon thing that is awful pencil yeah
yeah that thing is horrible and then
they have like those like limited edition multicolored editions that are in like target one year and then in staples the
next year yeah i like those those
are cool yeah but is it even like made from the same stuff like
i have no idea this year's target ones are not cedar there's something lighter i think i want to say they're white pine but i have no idea what i'm talking about it's not basswood it has no smell it's made of whatever the norris is made of right now yeah i think it's some kind
of pine i usually talk about like when people ask me about collecting pencils and over pens i just i usually say pencils are so much like simpler than pens because there's so much less to know and worry about and like factor in but i think ticonderoga is kind of the exception to that because it's there's so much variation yeah yeah
get your stuff together man so performance
wise what do we think of the differences between them
yeah i can go first i do not like it i mean i just have the i think i have the mexican one the pre sharpened one that you get at target i bought a pack of them and it made me think i mean i had a lot of different thoughts about it but it made me think about hardness and it just seemed like harder than i wanted it to be and gosh there's really nothing i liked about it so i don't really know where to start because i guess i've just had tried other things that are so much better that when i went back to this it was like this thing's a piece of crap i do remember that the black ticonderoga this one was the first pencil that i had a conversation with another human being about so i value it for that like i had a friend who i found out when i was in i don't know it was maybe three years ago that he really liked pencils and i was like oh what kind do you like he said that kind we like i had a conversation so that has some sort of meaning for me but it's slippery and it's too narrow for me and it's no laddie leads it's no laddie yeah i need a beefy pencil yes i mean i just don't have a whole lot good to good to say about it but i don't have the other one like i haven't tried the chinese one so i i do have one of the i think the millennium ones which andy did you send those to me i can't remember like you might have someone sent me two of them yeah so i have those and that is better and i do i do notice a difference but i just it's packed away and i don't haven't been using it and i didn't pull it out to check yeah i've
been using pencil i've been using taekond rogas from my pack of like mid century made taekondarogas man they're so much
nicer the medium ones beautiful yeah no
the ones i think i may have sent you one of them they're like much heavier yeah and sharper they're sharper and they're like they're from the sixties or the seventies i had a a friend of a friend gave me a like his mother died not too long ago and was like a third grade teacher in the seven the sixties and seventies and she just had a box of these in her basement just unopened and he just gave me the whole thing and i was like i'm gonna use one of these dozens you know to give to friends and to use and i'm already on the second dozen but no those are the yellow ones now they're not the black ones so johnny how would you grade these well
i'd give the mexican one a d minus because it's a piece of crap and i would give the chinese ones a c because i really like their core and i find their paint is better and their cores are centered better like it's actually a pretty usable pencil but it's all clouded by the fact that the american one was vastly superior to all of them i would definitely give that one an a and if any listeners have them and you want me to like send you a hug or a kiss just send it's worth it guys totally i am soft and hairy i'm a very good hugger topher
may be dreamy but johnny is the hugger
there's our tagline if you got us together i think the world would
explode we don't let them there's a there's a law they're not allowed within like three miles of each other yeah
he's in seattle i'm in baltimore yeah
try to keep him on separate coasts
gonna be on different sides of the
rockies hey he's a texan he'd probably want you to know that but yeah usually texans are like that but yeah
we should just like have a joke about tougher and like in each episode until someday he's actually gonna come on the episode sorry tim how about you what what grade would you give this
pencil d most definitely a d and i wouldn't go as far i mean that's mostly just in the it's a d for disappointment andy like yeah it's mostly like getting such a low grade it's not it's not that terrible terrible of a pencil as far as how it's put together compared to like some of the other dixons that are out there but i just it could be so much better and when when something was better and just keeps getting worse it's just like big disappointment so d
and are you assigning that toward mexican one a chinese one any of them
i i only have the mexican one
okay i've i've used both and the trouble is is like the the china the china ones has been so long since i've used them that i can't like even give it a good grade but i would say i'm kind of along the lines of johnny like a like a c minus or a d for the made in mexico ones and then like you know somewhere upwards of a c plus for the for the china ones and i don't even remember the the usa ones if i have
some extras i'll send you guys some yeah you'll be very happy that'd be good mail day i don't know the old ones were something special the new ones are just a black painted dixon yeah i'm like oh you screwed up and made it the wrong color come
on dixon get with it all right so maybe maybe we should do a we should start out early when we before we do our next episode to try to get a proper vote in from everybody for the next pencil of
the week yeah that sounds good
fresh points tim would you like to go
first sure first thing is i finished a couple field notes in the last week and i opened so i got to start a few new ones i finished my first ambition which i loved i used the red one the memo book with the graph paper that's what i'm using right now it was wonderful i actually and i started using the planner which i really like which i wasn't expecting to like or keep using but i've been enjoying that so that's in my cody williams wallet so i keep the planner in there and then i was just carrying the red one in my pocket and it wore really nicely i mean it's a softer cover so it broke a little along the spine but it looked great and the gilding it's pretty funny inside of my wallet that any addition i put in there of the ambition the gilding rubs off of the front and so on the opposite side of my wallet it says field notes in reverse because it's like in gold pressed into the other
side gold dust all over the place you're like two chains yeah yeah exactly
it's in my lungs like the diamond dust in arrested development yes the diamond cream somebody take me to the hospital but i started i i started a new factory floor which one did you do i did the copper one the copper pipe night raid yeah and it is so beautiful which one did you
do before was the silver one this
is my first one that i've used
oh okay i see yeah yeah i
think johnny used the silver one right
yeah yeah that paper's awesome yeah i
like the paper i'm kind of indifferent about the orange grid because it kind of disappears which is fine but i carried it in my back pocket for a day and the COVID just like cracked like almost like what i see in the cold horizon you know i guess it's because of like they laid such a thick layer of ink on
it maybe yeah that's what i'm wondering
but like right at the center i have this like inch long yeah it just like cracked open which i like wasn't too i wonder if they i
wonder if they stumbled across it by accident that the silver and the orange together made that copper color yeah it
seems like but it looks such a
cool idea yeah yeah so so i
like it i'm obviously going to keep using it and i'm not like that persnickety about these things but i was a little surprised when it just kind of busted open because i think that's why my my favorite edition is still county fair because that cover like never falls apart it's like kind of indestructible i love how that looks when you carry a carry in your pocket so anyways just wanted to share my thoughts on that yeah i also got i ordered some bullet pencils from on ebay i got a couple old bullet pencils two chicago themed ones i always kind of had my eye out for chicago ones tennessee ones and i got two chicago ones and i got them home and i fixed them up on my own kind of like refurbished them and i've been using them this week and it's really enjoyable i love those old ones they're so light and it was fun to use it side by side with the twist and see how they complement each other and how different they are because there are some times that i mean i love my twist i love it but there are sometimes i just want to carry the the vintage ones too because they're so they're just great and you can you can do so much with them and so i i used yeah eraser from my first ticonderoga and like twisted it out popped it out and slid it in and used some like a i don't know what you call it like there's a litur for doing dishes there's like green scotch brite pads and just like buffed it out a little bit oh yeah brillo pads brillo pad maybe brillo pad yeah there's like the thin green ones and it looks it looks great and i loved carrying them they're both for like livestock like stockyard kind of things in the chicago area i'm guessing like meat packing places which is pretty cool
there's this one stockyard in chicago and i see i can't remember the name of it right now but i see these pencils all around and i just wonder if they just like found an old box of like like a thousand of them and then just like released them into the public because i i had like two or three of them myself and i just see more on on in like flea markets and online and it's crazy which what's the brand name of that stock stockyard i actually
don't have it in front of me i don't have it sitting right here i can't remember i can look it up in a second but no worries yeah yeah i can i think i have a i can post a picture on instagram or something that's cool there's there are two ones rounded in silver and there's another one that was silver with like a gold wrap like the words were on gold and it's one of the ones that's squared off yeah the barrel of it's squared and that one yeah i had used the choo choo eraser and my first ticonderoga eraser yeah yeah i was playing with that a lot this week and i found another eraser that fits one of my plastic bullet pencils that i can like shape and stick in there too that's cool yeah my last point is mike dudek reached out to me a couple days ago and shared a link to a newish website i guess that started around september and it's called cw pencils have you guys been to this website
yet after i heard about it from
twitter yeah how did we not know about this i know yeah so it is it's amazing it's this blog and also shop that sells pencils like a lot of vintage pencils too you can get all kinds of stuff like it's pretty amazing the selection they have and it's all pencils only pencils which is really cool and notebooks too but yeah
caroline weaver who's the cw and cw pencil she she tweeted us and said that she's a big fan of the
podcast so oh cool i didn't i didn't know she i didn't see that tweet i i just found it through yeah through mike and mike had said you know sent me there i went i looked look through the vintage pencils section and i i have my eye on one of those ibm pencils like the yeah we had talked about before because i think those are the ones that in the hunt for all the apparently steinbeck pencils that was one that i really wanted to get that ibm electrographic or something like that she has
a lot of stuff that i just don't you just don't see like yeah she has like some old blackfeet pencils yeah black wings yeah yeah she has some ben franklin pencils yeah she's selling
fifties black wings yeah fifties black wings
for sixty bucks which like it's up to you and if that's if that's worth it to you you know as a price but it's i've seen them go for much higher yeah yeah she has one of those inline pencils from dixon that has like the big kind of it almost looks like a comical version of the blackwing like it has like the the eraser looks like a little chiclet oh yeah yeah that's a yeah she has some some really neat ones and they're they're priced you know decently for her but like i would sometimes i'd rather just like get one of these and pay dollar ten for a pencil than like hassle on ebay about it so yeah yeah for sure i'm definitely kind of getting my druthers together and getting ready to make some purchases because there's some neat things on
here yeah me too there's a few that i've got my eye on and i was going to read i feel like she probably wouldn't mind but her first post is called manifesto and it's really relevant to i mean just the kinds of things we talk about but also to our pencil of the week because she mentions says hello you found a tiny niche in the universe where graphite wins over pens pages typewriters computers smartphones and just about anything else i'm caroline weaver and i have made this with this website i propose that you consider digging the sharpener out of the bottom of your stationary drawer and put the perfect sharp point on a new pencil you don't have to get carried away just yet but you probably will the smell of the wood the sound of the lead as it scrawls the tiny imprinted letters on the barrel you will fall in love and you'll probably be surprised or excited but that's the intention my first love was the black ticonderoga when they still came unsharpened and had a matte finish and then in parentheses it says rest in peace since that affair many many years ago i've grown to love every pencil for its writing qualities aesthetic appeal and story my mission here is to teach you everything i know and everything i learn in the process this is just the start but you can expect more to come this is a great first post and the picture she's doing some like i guess photo shoots for things she's gonna sell and you can't help but notice that she has pencil tattooed on her
forearm yes that is awesome i wonder where she's based out it's amazing yeah
new york i think because that's the other thing mike mentioned is that she's apparently considering or he had heard that she was considering open up like a physical shop that's cool which is pretty cool so that tattoo i want that tattoo so yeah we got to get back to our tattoo discussion we should like get get the community in on like what tattoo we should get it's
got to happen although we don't want to like crowdsource it because we could end up like we can get them
to pay for it that's true that's true kickstart our tattoos but yeah so i think everybody should go check it out there's a handful of posts like blog posts that she's done like five or six or something like that and then you can browse around and see some really cool vintage pencils and modern pencils and sharpeners and notebooks and books and stuff so cwpencil enterprises at cwpencil dot com and she's on twitter and instagram at cwpencils too you can check her out there so way to go caroline what's up awesome site absolutely really enjoyed looking through it and thanks mike dudek for pointing this out such a
quiet launch like i feel like i'm usually on top of that sort of
stuff but yeah yeah it's pretty cool
how about you johnny i have too
many things to talk about so i will pare this down so we sort of had a pencil sharpener explosion among the three of us this week oh man where troy from the classroom friendly supplies sent us each a mess of pencils and is going to sponsor some giveaways which is always exciting because you get to be the messenger of somebody getting a cool sharpener who doesn't like to do that so i'm doing a giveaway right now it goes live tonight so by the time this comes out it'll be up whereby if you listen to this episode and can repeat my tools of the trade you get an extra entry so you should definitely do that because you get to pick your color which is awesome and i have a pink one now for my daughter it's super pink like freakishly pink like oh my god and also he has a new one i wonder if he would do that for the giveaway it's the same price it's plastic and it takes fat pencils and it doesn't leave bite marks i just used one tonight and it's pretty awesome it begs for stickers too because it's blank like put stickers on me so when my when my sticker sheet comes from canon pearson i might stick them on there mine got lost in the mail they sent another one really yeah really disappointed yeah they look i mean they look fantastic i can't wait till they come i'm
super excited because before i had just one classroom friendly sharpener that i kept at work and now i can have one at work and at home and i'm very excited about that now what colors did you guys get i got a red one that i'm going to give to a friend i got a blue one that i'm going to keep at work because i have two desks at work and then i have a black one that i'm gonna have at
home does your black one have a
different sticker yeah mine has the classroom friendly sticker on yeah i love that
yeah looks nice yeah yeah i just
think looks real good yeah i got i had a blue one at school like my original one that my students use what was his name again clark clark yeah and so now we have and now i have my own personal one at school that can stay behind my desk which is red and is addison so clark and addison the streets that wrigley field is on
and i
have a now i have a black one that's my home sharpener and then i have a blue one that i packed away for henry to my son henry to use someday so that one's in storage for him and i got the black one here behind me awesome yeah so yeah thank you troy that was like so amazing i got one of the best best things ever i
communicated with troy not too long ago because i had a question about the sharpener for him and he i told him we've been talking a lot about these sharpeners in the podcast and it's kind of like our our kind of go to crank sharpener that on on the podcast and he told me that he just started recently listening to podcasts and he listened to ours and he kind of ran across us saying that and he says that he's never had anybody talk about those sharpeners on a podcast before which which i guess i guess makes sense because there's really not a lot of like you know i think actually the pen addict has mentioned it on the podcast i remember yeah they did mike mike hurley talk about like how insanely sharp of a point that you know that thing makes but but yeah we we definitely love that
sharpener here yeah it was yeah he actually i like when in an email back and forth i mentioned my one at school and he actually said that he's like yeah i remember hearing about clark clark and addison addison's my personal one now
sorry that's really funny so i was hoping our listeners could help me with this because my baron fig time travel notebooks came and they're very beautiful one of them has a horrible spine but it still works but i have no idea what the hell it means
the time traveler design yeah they're
so pretty and i'm looking at it and like i don't know what this has to do with time travel and i showed my wife and she doesn't know either so at the risk of
kind of like exposing like intersection of things moving in opposite directions kind of like that's the best i could come
up with i mean i thought it was like something to do with doctor who or heidegger or something heidegger i think i would get it but not doctor who so if anybody does know i'd be so happy to know it looks it's so portentous it's like it
means something so like the jester or the juggler one came with like a little story about it being a juggler so they don't have a story for the time traveler nope just a different
belly band weird and the inside covers are slightly faded purple to green too
which is pretty cool yeah is it a is the paper different at all
i didn't write on him yet it looks the same i really like that paper a lot kind of feel bad for being a late adopter but it's
in addition to celebrate the new year as we time travel forward into the new year at a steady sixty seconds per minute it's important to keep in mind what's behind us as well as what's in front of
so like what that doesn't help and then one of them has the division between purple and green and it's sort of jagged like
what is that friggin art students
i mean they're very very cool they're way prettier in person as most of their stuff is yeah not that they don't take good pictures but you know the texture is part of it yeah and for my last freshpoint it's kind of big my my buddy dan who's a fireman and also sometimes a carpenter we you know he comes over once a week and we have our date night and we were truing wheels last night and wait you were what we were truing his bike wheel we put it on the truing stand what do you mean chewing oh when you true a bike wheel the you know the oh
you're truing yeah yeah okay i think he said chewing i was like wait
what no he had a lot to drink one time no we were successful and i think i lent him my drawing stand and he was screwing the spokes the wrong way so it sort of had a long way to go we were marking it off with a grease pencil i was just so excited to use a grease pencil for something that was its intended use and not just like writing nasty things on mirrors i mean not that i've done that
pricing things at the goodwill same blue
but also it turns out that my friend dan who last week says he hates knife sharpening pencils he likes you know using something that makes a shorter point and also this is a secret because despite being an eagle scout and a fireman he doesn't know how to sharpen a knife very well don't worry nobody's listening to this yeah damn that's what you get for not listening to the podcast but last night he earlier this week he he let it slip that he hates bullet pencils and thinks that they unsimplify pencils i got him a perfect pencil for his birthday last month with some other cool pencil related stuff and he thinks it takes away the simplicity of the pencil i was wondering what you guys thought about that
especially the perfect pencil yeah i mean he has a point because originally bullet pencils were for a really specific purpose for farmers to carry around and it's like we're all sort of like kind of using it in like a twee way just like to to call back to those days and we're we're definitely using them unsimplified now but yeah i can see his point but that doesn't make me hate that hate bullet pencils
but he's a man of strong opinions
yeah because because they had a very specific purpose they slipped in your pocket now you have retractable ballpoint pens which which you know most farmers have probably switched to and like tradesmen and you know that yeah what do you think
what do you think tim i love bullet pencils yeah that's my offering tim's like screw you dan dan's an idiot he's a big dude man well i'm far far away so unless he can punch me over skype then no it's yeah i see i get his point but i mean just like pencils yeah so it's it's it's really when you think if you if you love pencils there's really not a i mean there there are caps but there there aren't like many better ways to to carry one with you yeah yeah i disagree
with the perfect pencil i think it's a case of more being less because since it has a cap and it has a sharpener you actually need less to in your pocket yeah usually i have a knife on me i just carry a pencil with a cap pray i don't stab myself i've used my bullet pencils embarrassingly little but yeah sorry
dan dan doesn't listen to it he
doesn't even know he's really a big
dude
i love dan very much but bullet pencils are cool yeah so yeah especially the perfect pencil which is oh and also they were sort of hard to get and then amazon started carrying them and now pencils dot com has them for ten bucks which is a steal yeah and now they have the refill pencil which has got me stupidly excited because the clip on the pencil is silver and the refill pencil has silver print so yeah you got me it's bothering me that i don't have another one but now i'm going to get some more yeah i'll shut up now you can do it mister man on the left coast andy all right
dandy andy handy andy well i guess my my big thing is that i have a new project i i had been talking with will fengy who we have talked here about and he
he
was talking about doing some kind of a podcast that you know would have people who are really into something like be it you know rugby or pencils or star trek or something and basically do like an interview show with them and he and his brother started this and they got bit by the podcasting bug and all of a sudden they started a podcast network and it's there's a few different things on there there's like a tech podcast and everything but he and i are doing one about sort of the exploration of digital and analog tools so it's not a tech podcast it's not a pencil podcast it's somewhere kind of in the middle it's called dot grid and we recorded our first episode and released it had pretty good response i enjoyed it a lot yeah it's interesting because he and i both use a lot of we watched or listened to tech podcasts we you know try out latest apps just very tech oriented but we also like analog stuff so it's it's an interesting place where i can you know i can definitely talk about fountain pens and typewriters and things like that here on erasable but it's not kind of it kind of deviates from our mission and we certainly probably wouldn't talk about like i don't know the latest ios release or something like that here necessarily unless we can tie it back to pencils so
johnny probably would johnny would i know
he loves apple products i have a
new tattoo i wanted to tell you guys about it's an apple is it
an apple logo well it's not an
apple logo an apple with a pencil
through it so i thought that was a soda can with a pencil through
it now dan did that too just
pretend like that's that's tim's skull impressively
the point didn't break it was a really nice caran d' ache edelweiss pencil
yeah so yeah they're nice so don't don't think for a second that you know that means my erasable involvement is ending or lessening or anything that erasable is my first venture into podcasting i think we have something really really amazing with me and johnny and tim so yeah this is just another podcast that i'm going to try also to do so listen in is at nerduprising co dot grid we don't have an exact reason why it's called dot grid but a little bit because it sounds a little like dot matrix which is high tech from the nineties and then dot grid is like a paper layout and also because the dots happen at the intersection of the graph imagine if it was like a line of graph paper and we feel like our podcast is kind of at the intersection of those of digital and analogs so that's why we're calling it that we're going to do that bi weekly as well just because i can't do a weekly podcast so yeah thank you for listening to that and to this another really cool new thing if anybody's familiar with on twitter with ethosophical is that how you
say it i say ethosophical ethos yeah
i've never said it out loud before
his name is chase he's a listener to the show and we've talked back and forth on twitter a lot he he actually just joined facebook and one of the first things he did kind of in i think he had it rolling around in his mind for a while but was kind of provoked by you know last week or last episode we here talked about how we thought some of the everyday carry stuff was cool but we didn't really like all the guns and like assault knives and things like that and we talked about that on dot grid as well so he started a facebook group called practical carry and it's kind of an edc pocket dump bag dump kind of a kind of a group where you show off what you have what you use that's more focused on like you know writing tools and stuff like that than
you know a glock for gentle people who aren't paranoid and so i don't
want to get a lot of emails or anything like that but you can
send them to me well leslie had the best points i mean guns are okay but i don't know that's how i go to starbucks with five guns and six knives in my pocket thing is really bizarre dude you must really not be nice to people stuff like
that have a lot of enemies yeah
so be sure if you want to go check this out go to facebook dot com groups practicalcarry and it's kind of like erasable you have to request enter but chase is pretty good about letting people in so we've already had some fun discussions i've learned some new things taffer taught me that there is a lip balm out in the world made by sephora for men called jack black lip balm and i spent probably a good ten minutes thinking it was like a high end lip balm made by the actor jack black but it has nothing to do with that jack black just like what so i did a little research and finally tafer was like no it's not the actor it's just some guy jack black so yeah if you want to if you want thirteen dollars chapstick you should buy some of that but that was part of my pocket dump was i included my
burt's bees i only have twelve dollars in my lip balm line of my
budget for the month i buy one
a year my lips hurt real bad
real bad i lose them like crazy my cat like just knocks them off whatever surface they're on that he can
get on there's like a hoard of them somewhere in your house like there's like thirty of them that the cat
has hid when we moved my wife found like probably like six of them and they now live in a drawer in the bathroom so yeah that's practical carry also i finally we talked about this earlier but i finally got my twist bullet pencils and certainly by choice i asked them to kind of wait until the the clips were on were had arrived and were on the pencil before i got mine because i didn't really have a place to put them as i was moving but they're really really nice they they feel like really well weighted did tim did you get
the blue color i did not i got red and black and you johnny
you didn't get that you got black and silver i got all silver all silver very boring this this blue is just gorgeous it's beautiful i also have the black one which i like a lot too but i just love love this blue and yeah i pulled it out at work and like three people were immediately like what's that and i was like let me tell you about a little something called a bullet pencil
so back up it's gonna go off
so yeah it's it's gorgeous i'm i'm liking it a lot i haven't had a chance to like really sit down and write something with it i've been taking notes in for the podcast as we go timestamps and whatnot but yeah it's it's so great so thank you
guys you know weights it well the
opex yeah oh that's a good idea
it balances it out yeah perfect fit
ooh i'll have to try that out yeah he sent me a bunch of blackwing six hundred two stubs to go with it so westinghouse i was going to mention is i am a big fan of blogs as i think we all are and the jetpens blog which i don't really usually pay attention to like they post some interesting stuff most of it is about pens they posted a guide to pencil sharpeners the other
day that thing blew my mind i
know they posted they took out all of their various pencil sharpeners that they have some hand crank some like manual there's what two four six eight ten sharpeners on here maybe eleven a bunch of them and they took really good pictures they had a big thing about what to look for in a pencil sharpener size shape sharpening angle the point etcetera they showed all of their sharpeners that they sell pictures as well as a youtube video embedded right in the page of that sharpener in action and plus some knives that they had and my favorite part they had a diagram
of any any sharpening glocks on there
yeah have you ever seen oh what is the name of that movie there's a movie where there's a like a guy who has a recurring fear that this one he's he works at a grocery store and this woman walks up and she takes out a gun and it comes to life and she takes out a gun and she points it at him and it turns out it's a like a cigarette lighter somebody should have like a gun pencil sharp pull
that out it makes me think of the the simpsons episode where homer gets a gun he like uses it for everything he's like yeah opening opening beers like trying to turn on the tv
so so this blog post they they take some pencils and they they basically show what the point on each of these look like and it ranges from like super super deep to like a really narrow point not narrow short and it's it's so helpful yeah this is this is a super great thing they have tables like like a spreadsheet on here i didn't realize that the that the uni kh twenty which is a hand crank had such a had such a long point on it that's one of the ones they sell so jetpens yeah you did a really really good job on this thank you very much
their pencil the the pencil guide they have is really awesome too yeah yeah that's super great like the different grades
they do a really really good job of content marketing by making it interesting and useful so i'll have a link to that in show notes which by the way are at erasable us twenty two which is the twenty second episode and our show notes are there so yeah that's that's all for for the main or for the follow up for the fresh points all right guys should we get on to our main topic let's do it it's a man this is kind of a big you know trunk to open daunting yeah we we posted so we're talking about pocket notebooks today and it's a word that i have we've talked about here before and i'm sure i've butchered it it's spelled k a or c a h i e r and i would say kahir but johnny what did you say that
sounded fancier i thought it was ki yay when they came out like hey here are these cheap notebooks that are
fifteen bucks and it's actually yeah that describes like pocket notebooks with the saddle stitching which is essentially just a few staples and like a cover with just a few a few pages in there so it's interesting i actually just yesterday kind of independently from picking this topic found a website as three staples com there's a guy who's kind of going through all of his field notes collection to kind of review them which is which is pretty cool but yeah i i found well we asked the group you know just list off some brands of these pocket notebooks and there's the usual field notes baron figs word notebooks that we've been talking about but man there were so many more i didn't actually post it the field nuts group which i should have done but i sort of feel a little sheepish like talking about this authoritatively on the website because i feel like our listeners at least the group members know way more about this than we do but what do you think what do you guys
think i'm sure how it seems i mean like there are words that they commented that i've never seen before in my life so yeah i can't pronounce
most of these yeah and johnny you had some information you just found about kai about these pocket notebooks that word
oh yeah there was just a hemingway reference in the garden of eden they mentioned david writing in cahiers they were cheap french school kid notebooks and pencils at one point his wife makes fun of him for using kids notebooks i
wonder if it's really funny rather than pocket notebooks it means something like you know a cover made from just like thin thicker than the paper inside but also from a fairly thin cover like you know those blue books that you wrote off you run on college you're dating us yeah hey i wrote in
yeah i wrote in them too yeah
okay now i feel better yeah i
think i missed those things miss those blue k here translates to notebook in french yeah i think it means like
notebook as opposed to journal yeah
i put a youtube video in the show notes that has the pronunciation and johnny you had it exactly right so i
pronounced something correctly
okay well johnny you have you have more degrees than either of us so i didn't take any french do you have a master's tim
i am it's a long story okay i should have a master's but the bs university in town is making me enroll in one more credit hour oh man in order to officially graduate but i already finished all my classes so in may i will be a master
of education okay it's funny you should say bs university because in indiana we have ball state university ball state yeah
my brother went there really yeah that's
a dirty joke yeah sorry yeah ball state david letterman right yeah david letterman went there yeah my mother went there so yeah both of you have way more degrees than i do
one more
and it's a it's an education degree so yeah so giving those things away
yeah so hey i have a i have like an english journalism degree so that's that's worth zero i have english
and humanities which is probably probably even
less than yours you know philosophy is the valuable one
none of us have like lenore from the group she has a she's a professor of chemistry so
we have no marketable degree i don't
even have a job
sonny has a
degree in dad yeah dad phd yeah
doctor dad anyhow so i'm just going to list these brands that people in the group came up with which are pretty great so we start off field notes spare and fig word notebooks moleskine rhodia paper stacks which was something that people started talking about in the field notes group which is pretty cool they're doing like the the toms or the warby parker method where for each each pack that you buy they're going to donate some to an inner city school where they need notebooks yeah paper stacks so there's that life notebooks which i've only dabbled in i think i sent you guys some life notebooks and i know johnny joni has some other ones
yeah they're pretty
there's the banded apple carnet peewee i've been saying bandit apple because when i look at it that's what it looks like to me i see bandy and i see taple but then somebody goes bandit apple i'm like
how about banditable yeah
bandit apple sounds
like a drink it does i'll have a bandit apple bandit apple sounds like
you sounds like you don't know how to say candy apple it's a bandy
tapple so no it was it was will on dot grid he said bandit apple and at first i was like in my head like haha he doesn't know how to say bandit apple but then i'm like oh wait it does say manit apple so yeah they have one called the peewee randy reagan was talking about that in the group oh
i have one of those you have one i never used it i forgot i have it cool i do terrible
there's the new notco one which is super cool i just started kind of playing with it calipino calipino that's what i'm gonna go with there's a whole line of like pencil dot com ones there's a forest choice one which is really nice there's palomino i don't know if there's a blackwing one yet i
don't think so yeah i was thinking about that today that like well we'll
get to that later yeah those are i think perfect bound instead of stapled i think maybe muji has some i am kind of in love with muji right now scout books of course there's one that's super fancy called flightbook it's all capitalized they look like they kind of look like expeditions field notes you
have to shout it flight book sorry
it's one word all in caps claire fontaine has one now here's a whole bunch i don't know atoma apica ogami fabriano those are some there's a doan one which we talked about done last week hobonichi has one which is kind of cool so i'm sure there's way more and if you guys can think of one that i'm totally missing put it in the comments or right in
the group oh right in the rain they make those right in the rain yeah stapled ones they have ones that
are small smaller than the three x five which i really like they have a little baby they're so cute yeah i have a bunch of those that are really cool i've been handing out to people so so we we were kind of trying to come up with some things to think about for each which with each of the brands and you know some of the things some well first of all i'm really interested to know what you guys how you first ran across these pocket notebooks and what you sort of first use them for how about you johnny johnny oh
i'm sorry the thing just cut out
for a second did you hear my
question no
i was interested to know when you guys sort of first really thought about these pocket notebooks and when that happened what you sort of first use them for when you bought one
well i think the calles came out about ten years ago is that right in the united states like the moleskin ones yeah those are the first ones that i got and i used them for notes for my dissertation in the large format and the smaller ones i would carry around for book notes and stuff like that and obscure nietzsche page references which is like the most awesome use they ever put to but i used them for a long time until finally i got off my butt and checked out field notes i guess in twenty ten and ever since then field notes have been my favorite pocket notebook but yeah i was journaling them which is why i would go through one every week but i'm on a little break and i'm using my baron figure yeah because it's it's pretty i have to use it i do like once a year i'll get a journal and then my my field notes start piling up and i get antsy i'm like i gotta fill this damn thing so i'm being one of those hoarders and i don't i think that's what i
want to be how about you tim
i started using the hardback pocket size moleskine in high school like i think i don't know sophomore junior high school that was the first pocket notebook which is really all i knew through college as far as pocket notebooks go and then shortly after college through the pentatic actually heard about field notes and that was the first one got into and like johnny said that's still my favorite i mean still the best i still love i know a lot of people in our circle don't go back to using the craft ones but i still love the craft ones a whole lot i like to go back and use those they're so iconic they are and they just yeah they're perfect they're just like i hope they never change at all because they're just wonderful but as far as usage i like i always used the moleskine for like in high school i would generally use it for like story ideas it just was like writing a lot you know started writing when i was in high school so that was my main use for them and then once i found out about field notes and other you know i've gotten into word and i have a calpino and notco and like everything else i always have like four of them going at once and so one will have podcast stuff and one will just be something i carry that's just kind of a brain dump that i put everything in like lists for the day and things to remember and stuff like that and then i have one that i journal in so yeah it started with the moleskine the hardback one and then i've spread into the pocket sized ones and that's pretty much all i use right now what about you andy
kind of the same along your lines i started with the little pocket moleskins that are like more of a book you know like a book and i can't even remember what i put in there just random stuff and i had the rhodia caille for a i think that was the first one of that format that i ever had and i i thought they were super lightweight and they wouldn't last because they had like a paper cover instead of that kind of moleskin cover so i had that and i i think i started i think i bought field notes pretty early on i talked about this on dot grid the other day i i remember when they were first announced i think i can't even remember where i first heard about them but yeah i i used field notes pretty early on the first few months of launch but then i for a long time which was super stupid of me i thought the colors were dumb so i didn't buy the green one or the orange ones or the blue ones even though i i knew all about them and i could have i should have you know
sold them for lots of money hindsight hindsight you know what if you if you bought then you probably would have
used them anyway yeah yeah and i actually did buy the balsam fir ones and i gave some packs away and i just used the heck out of them and you know they're they're worth a lot now so so it's all right i love using them so yeah so yeah that's kind of the first time i've been exposed to them but i mostly now use them just for just random notes i have podcast notes in there i have some lists going i do use one for kind of journaling either in america the beautiful or a shelter wood for journaling because they have such a nice thick paper so yeah so as far as sorry go
on i was just saying i remember getting my first amazon shipment of field notes my first pocket notebooks i'll never forget it because it was just i remember the feeling of opening it being like wow these are small like kind of wasn't ready for how how little they were yeah and how like seemingly insubstantial they were yeah i think that
yeah that forty eight pages worth of notebook is just the right amount like i actually go through them very slowly because i generally like fill up a page or i skimp on space or something but i go pretty slowly so they usually wear out even by the time i get to the end of it i think the first one i ever filled up before it wore out was a word notebook yeah
a side question where do you guys carry your
pocket notebook i carry if i'm wearing a jacket and i am pulling from it i keep in my jacket pocket or else i keep it in my
back pocket back pocket or breast pocket like if i'm wearing a shirt that has a breast pocket i'll slide it
in there oh man i carry mine in my hip pocket oh yeah i wouldn't because then i can't lose it
i have crap in my pockets so i always do either back pocket or yeah yeah i get covered with other
stuff yeah my butt's too big i can't put it in my
so i'll kind of go through a list of questions that we asked ourselves when thinking about all of these and then we can maybe go down and answer some of our top picks for these particular characteristics so some of the things yeah some of the things we thought about how sturdy is the COVID stock what's the quality of the paper inside do you like the formatting of the paper is it dot grid graph line blank etcetera how is it bound are there variations and what do you think of that so how do we want to do this do we want to why
don't we do like best cover and binding then we'll all talk about it then we'll do best paper and i'll
talk about it yeah that's a good way so yeah let's talk about the best cover in binding and we realized kind of going through this that some of them like field notes vary wildly so we can talk about individual editions instead of specifically brands so tim tell us about your favorite cover binding this
isn't going to be super surprising and exciting but i have a few in my head as far as best coverage field notes county fair is my favorite i i really don't think it gets enough love and i think it gets ignored because of all the colors editions that come out if they didn't do the colors editions but had the county fair i mean i would be happy to just use that forever you know like i traded that tournament of what was it called tournament of what's it called field notes edition the rare one tournament of books terminator books yeah i traded that for someone sent me six county fair editions just random random states and i was like this is the best trade ever because i'll use these i love them yeah you got the
better end of that one yeah that's
my that's definitely my my favorite favorite cover and then like as far as binding goes my the only my only thought is i like staple bindings i'm not a big fan of the the stitched ones just because they're kind of all over the place like sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not i typically like the staples but i will say that have either of you used calipino
notebooks i have not used them but
i've seen them they're really cool yeah they're really cool looking jay huckleberry woodchuck sent me one a white one with his pink stamp on the back of it and yeah they're really beautiful it's two staples and i will say that i like three staples better so three staples is just a nice you know nice symmetry or whatever yeah how about
you johnny i'm with tim i like the linen covers and field notes very much with the county fair and the ravenswing of which i have one more
blank ravenswing was the linen cover too
yeah flood coat it black on the inside with flood coat it gray that's cool so damn my wife gave me
one reason i'm gonna sell my car and buy some
and it's tied between that and scout books because not because they're thicker there's something about the texture of their covers it's almost like greasy in a good way they feel used already i really like them and i like the two staples because i keep mine in my hip pocket and they're always flexed and since there's not a staple in the middle that part tends to not break when it's a scout book it could be because they have less pages and they get filled up very quickly but yeah yeah how about you mister andy
i think for cover you know there's some really beautiful ones like i really like you know the county fair ones i really like america the beautiful covers but as far as like durability goes i'm gonna have to go with the word notebooks really yeah and like i mentioned before it was the first one that i had that did not just kind of fall apart before i got my way through it part of it is because i think i maybe ramped up what i was doing in that notebook but it held together really well and it like aged really well so like obviously it did get beat up it did look like it was in my back pocket for a couple months but it it held together like a champ and i it's i don't i can't identify what's different about it than like a craft notebook but it's yeah i i really liked i really like that notebook i always
feel like the book's gonna fall out of the COVID really somehow yeah that it's so stiff i feel like the staples will just give up yeah nope
and as far as binding goes it's never happened you know yeah yeah as far as mining goes i think mostly see i have to admit i haven't paid a whole lot of attention to two staples or three but i really really really like the copper staples that are on the america the beautiful edition oh yeah yeah for sure yeah and then they they reused them for the roastery edition which which of course is
bigger but i like the black staples
from the pitch black oh yeah and then i think they used those in night sky too didn't they yeah yeah so yeah best paper johnny do you want to do you want to go
first on this this is tough because the regular field notes paper is very nice but for pencils it kind of it's a little too slippery i can't use you know a harder lid but some of the additions like the ambition the ddc the coal and of course the america the beautiful and shelter would very nice for pencil and i would probably have said word until recently when i got into baron fig and i'm really in love with that paper right now yeah because i don't know the texture is perfect for pencil scout books is nice a little toothy yeah yeah you should try them their shipping is like ridiculously fast which i appreciate yeah because i'm impatient yeah you know it's twenty fifteen i get everything in my life off amazon prime so spoiled
i'll go next i think my favorite paper is probably that just thick creamy paper that's in america the beautiful and shelterwood like i wish that they did that with a graph on it or a dot grid because i like that paper a lot and i don't even use fountain pens in it so yeah it's a oh i don't have one in front of me does anybody remember it's like a seventy pound is it yep
i think so yeah yeah it's that
kind of oh it's so creamy and
nice which do you like better that's
what people say about it
that tim he's creamy and nice i don't know
you're pretty bearded i wouldn't call you creamy fuzzy and cuddly that gray hair
you have it's oh tim i was gonna text you a picture of my head i found some silver hairs on my head congratulations there's like three of them and they stick out yeah i
got a few thousand i'll send you
a picture of my head tim in case you have never seen a picture of tim tim is prematurely gray but i'd rather yeah i have a dark
brown beard and a gray head i'm twenty seven yeah i have the opposite
i have a gray beard
i have a patchy beard when i allow it to do that it looks terrible and i have three gray hairs on my head which do i like out of the the america the beautiful and the shelter shelter wood i think the show the shelter wood is a little bit
thicker right i think it's the same i just like the blue lines yeah
yeah i like the blue lines better yeah so yeah that is my favorite paper how about you tim
my favorite paper i might have to go with doan which we talked about this a little bit last week or the last episode but i i mean there are multiple answers as always yeah but i mean american the beautiful paper shelterwood paper is kind of universally like that's the best notebook paper i've come across yeah like for pocket notebooks but johnny i
swear to god johnny's trolling us in
the in the notes yeah school toilet paper is what i like to use apparently and capri sunrise with an indelible pencil no but i would go with the doan for reasons i find it the most interesting of like all the pocket notebook paper and i talked about my handwriting size and how it fits nicely with the dome paper and i just like their paper quality for different types of pen and stuff so i'm gonna have to give them a shout out i'll give them my vote for best paper because it's interesting it looks cool and it also handles pretty much anything you throw at it so i think i need to get some more i've used up my my few that
i had yeah so we can talk about the best format and i'll go first on this one i'm trying to think i think it's a tie between i really like that and i'm gonna butcher saying this to the reticle grid sort of like it's like a dot grid but it's little plus signs and stuff instead of that yeah i hate
that one really i hate it too
yeah i really don't like it i
like it i like it because it's kind of like a dark man no it's all right it's all right it
stresses me out for some reason i can't like figure it out i wish
sniper is looking at my notebook
i do like i don't know what it is about it it's either because it's like a little bit different but it see i really need a guide to write like i need to like i just kind of go at a slant if i'm if i don't if i'm writing on blank paper i don't know if it's because i'm left handed or if it's because i just like apparently can't i'm always drunk i don't know i just can't write in a straight line without always drunk i'm always drunk and with the dot grid like i like that a lot because it does help but i think the little lines on the reticle grid really kind of help guide me on that line a little bit more than a dot grid does does that make sense yeah that
makes sense yeah i think they were a good idea i think they were just too dark yeah i don't like
dot grid like i'm pretty pretty firm on that like it's just well i'm
sorry maybe if you listen to the
podcast you would yeah it sounds like when i use a dot grid i just think like this sounds like a really dumb like it could be a really dumb podcast you know but oh man just i'm just kidding i just like i like when as far as grid goes that's why i like done is that it's like way over the top like there's so much going on that it's easier for that to write over that than dot grid where i feel like if i'm writing and the dots are in the middle of a word it gives me the heebie jeebies
yeah so i also really like the way that word notebook does theirs they have the little yeah they have like the little book bullet hashes or whatever like the little circles you can fill in so if i'm making a list that's awesome but it does stay out of the way in case i want to write something like you know sketch something or write long form too it's kind of i don't have one in front of me but it's kind of like the dot dash a little bit like in like the dot dash cards that not co sells yeah is that right mm yeah it's like a sort of a hybrid between lined and and graft which is pretty cool yeah it's been a while since yeah it's been a while since we've talked about word notebooks so if you guys have not seen these go to wordnotebooks dot com and check them out there yeah they
didn't do one this far yeah you're
right yeah i think they're doing a buy two single notebooks get one free right now which is pretty cool or buy two three packs and get one free i just got an email not too long ago for that yeah and so tim i think that you covered this with dome but what is your favorite format of of pocket notebooks yeah
and this is this this one's hard for me because it's it's almost like depends on the mood sort of thing like sometimes i like i go through phases where i only want lined paper and then i also go through phases where i only want blank paper so it's kind of hard to yeah it's kind of hard to decide because i jump around so it depends on the mood overall doan is the most impressive i think but i also don't use it the most so i think as far as best format if i'm going to go with utilitarian things that i would use all the time is just the general graph like in county fair so i think if i had to go with best format in the sense of what would i use pretty much all the time actually no not county fair i would go the graph and the ambition that has the header at the top yeah we talked about that
last week it's that's it's fantastic that's
probably my best like the convergence of things that i love so yeah i would give that my yeah i would give that my vote that's cool
tim do you want to start us off and tell us what your favorite kind of notebook the favorite your favorite looking notebook your favorite notebook for aesthetics yeah
that's a tough one yeah there's so
many like unique designs out there like they kind of started off you know they all kind of look like the field notes craft paper not that they started that but a lot of them look very much like that the two
i'll tell you the two that come to mind when i think about like the ones that visually appeal to me the most and one is shelterwood yeah
i was gonna say shelterwood yeah yeah
shelterwood just like when you look at it it just has that like wow this is i've never seen anything like this you know like the whole method of shaving the wood and turning it into cover the other one though and this is probably my my true answer just as far as like overall and this throws back to my my pocket notebook origin story yeah the moleskine hardback bound pocket notebook as far as aesthetics go it's just so clean and durable you know and i i didn't use the reporter when i use just the normal normal bound one with lined paper and i think aesthetically it's just it feels very very timeless like you and this is i totally understand that i'm kind of falling into the what moleskine wants you to fall into but i can i can separate myself from that
and say that notebook
there are lots of notebooks that look the same like the rhodia one would i could say the same thing about the rhodia pocket notebooks because they look the same but just you know there's nothing they can be dated by it and they always look the same and there's something very comforting about that yeah yeah how about
you johnny oh that's tricky yeah it's hard i could maybe do top five field notes covers sure the episode right there yeah yeah oh cool that one that one's ridiculous it's so pretty america yeah the fire sparks i can brag that i have two fire spiders is
that your neighbor what's your address again
eight zero four no you know my
address i do
we think the american tradesman which i think now people are starting to pay attention to because they're rare but that was like the prettiest field notes they ever made it was
so pretty i would love to see one of those in person yeah it
was sort of like corrugate it and then the inside was white with red letters they're so nice that was plus that was my first subscription that i got for father's day in twenty eleven i was very stoked and they came like the monday after father's day it was great something like that so what's that three yeah the whole national crop because those logos that draplin came up with are just delicious maybe the cherrywood i like the shelter wood but the cherry with the black letters that's that's
tops yeah
yeah i think that's probably it and maybe there are a couple you know artistic ones that scout books did that are gorgeous but yeah you know they have like a dozen different packs like that that are good looking
yeah yeah we can't count scout books because there's so many variations i'm trying to trying to think of of some to pick too and i it's really really hard because like some of them like the life notebooks are just really beautiful just such great topography on them something like that but some of the claire fontaine ones are really fantastic but i think i think that you know like it kind of comes down to field notes for me too just because of the care and attention and variety that they put into their editions like they just sometimes just completely reinvent themselves which which i like with the ambit with the ambition they sort of like went back to basics which was good because they're like okay how are we gonna top ourselves with shelter wood how are we gonna top ourselves with unexposed but yeah how are we gonna come back from sorry guys so i would sort of say that like the most just like striking to me i'm gonna have to agree with with tim and say that shelterwood is just like you know cherry wood is super cool but shelter wood i think was that first one that just like like holy crap they it's a wooden cover that's amazing and i i put mine out in the sun for a few days when i was on vacation this summer and it tanned a little bit and so it's a little bit darker and it's just fantastic that that kind of riffs off to the roastery edition which is not a pocket notebook so we're not counting that here but that copper color that foil they put on it oh man amazing looks beautiful they've got to do that again oh yeah so i also really like the traveling salesman i
think oh yeah forget about that i
think that i don't know like sort of the green paper the edge of that kind of green paper mixed with that copper color and that what is that like a brown like it looks like an instagram photo without any filters if that makes any sense yeah it's just yeah it's gorgeous hashtag no filter yeah and then i also am just a big fan of like the process not process like offset printing like the america the beautiful paper that one really really hearkens a lot to some of the older notebooks that field notes is originally crafted after so or inspired by i should say i just love like the little tiny halftones on that it looks like they did it in like the old fashioned way which you don't see anymore because honestly like print printing has gotten better since then so like you don't really see that halftone but i like that they actually went ahead and did it which is super cool
yeah they said they had trouble finding someone that would do it yeah yeah
somebody who's like oh yeah we can still do it in this way i really like that style a lot that's the style that a lot of the bullet pencils like the souvenir bullet pencils yeah they do a lot of them that way which i love if someday when i have money and time i'm going to start a collection of just souvenir destination bullet pencils because i just
love all of them hurry up all
the hipsters are gonna yeah i just yeah i just love those there's like some super like kitschy niagara falls ones that are really great some florida ones with with flamingos i'm gonna look for some san francisco ones out here so yeah those are my favorite kind of aesthetically johnny what is your overall favorite
well the risk of sounding like the hipsters that i like to make fun of field notes yeah because i because on one hand because there's always the new field notes but it's not like moleskine where like god you make five hundred different notebooks like hey this one's new now it's gone this one's new now it's gone i like that and also just they're they're awesome i love them they they're indestructible like i sweat on them a lot they never fall apart we've done really stupid things with them they don't break they're just very very good notebooks they do what you need them to do yeah definitely field
notes yeah how about you tim yeah
i mean this part of the conversation seems almost kind of silly because they're such a juggernaut you know yeah i
mean that's my answer too so what
else what else can you pick i mean because you have all these other great options i mean with rhodia and word notebooks and baron fig and not co and it's just like we have all these good options yeah yeah okay
so let's let's start over and tim tell me what your favorite non field notes pocket notebook is okay i'll get to you johnny
yeah favorite non field notes would be doan yeah i would go with the doan pocket notebooks and i really want to try they have some new new colors he'll do different additions every once in a while not predictably not like that but there's a constant black three pack of the domed paper pocket notebooks and now he has a six pack that you can get it's twenty dollars and has six different colors that come together i saw those yeah it's pretty cool so it's like a there's a navy blue a green an orange a sky blue like a slate gray and a red is a really cool color combo so yeah doan's definitely if field notes is out then doan is for sure number one yeah
how about you johnny oh man your favorite non field notes pocket notebook i
think in theory scout books but lately in practice probably the baron fig confidants just in the last month yeah i'm using them a lot and i don't know i really like that paper i'm sure i'll move on to something else and get obsessed with it but right now i'm obsessed with those it's your
flavor of the month yeah i think i think mine is it's either baron fig which i it's funny because i haven't really mentioned them so far but yeah that paper is fantastic and they they look so nice baron fig or word notebooks i yeah i really like my i have a few word notebooks i need to get some more but yeah tim how many estimated just estimate how many empty notebooks do you have
empty notebooks like notebooks waiting to be
used pocket notebooks do you have waiting
to be used i would say oh gosh
i mean i know it's gonna make us sound awful i bet i
have forty yeah that's actually yeah yeah that's what that's the number that's that's my guess yeah it might be a touch high because i'm pretty conservative in buying them but yeah well no yeah probably forty to fifty but but these
aren't these aren't you know horde notebooks these are like on deck notebooks yes
i only have it's not terrible i think i only have like four three packs that i just have yeah basically like i'm not planning on opening anytime soon yeah yeah i'm i'm definitely like a i will use it like i'm planning to use most of what i
have so yeah how about you johnny
more than twenty less than thirty something like that but i will preface that by saying there are about one hundred thirty of them that are full yeah
yeah you go through them very fast it's amazing i go through them very
slowly i do have probably another couple of three packs put away for the kids but i'm not gonna count those
yeah i have i'm embarrassed to say i probably have and i i wouldn't even begin to be able to say which ones i'm hoarding and which ones i'm keeping i think that in theory i would like to keep i would like to use all of them but there's some that i yeah i know i probably won't open so i probably have like sixty it's it's pretty bad
you're a bad man i am i
just can't help it my my mother is like a collector and i fight against like these and when i say collector i mean hoarder there are way
worse things you could collect though yeah
it's true i mean things that take up a lot more room things that are more expensive things that are bad
for you you can keep them forever
when you're older i collect meth i'm
a cocaine collector i don't use it
i just got a trash bag of cigarette butts artisanal cocaine cigarette butts gross what do you think guys should we
wrap this up that seems like a good place to stop yeah yeah so
before we before we leave i mentioned this last time but we have kind of begun soliciting sponsorships we have a sponsorship program i don't know if you guys know have seen this in our group or online but we have pretty tremendous buying power people buy a lot they hear us talk about something and they go out and get it so insert your brand here and just be part of the be part of the frenzy of course we'll use your product and like your product and everything if we do that but yeah if you have something you want to sell or something you want people to know about hit us up we would love for you to sponsor our show we have very reasonable rates and your sponsorship money will go to building our capital to do cool things like stickers and notebooks and to make this better so go to erasable us click the little contact form it will go straight to me and then me or johnny or tim will be in touch with more information so we'd love to hear from you
yeah this thing if someone with very big pockets were to do it we could get our own field notes edition yeah linen covers and copper staples yeah
oh my god yeah so warren buffett i know you listen
he seems like he likes pencils i i think i
think he would tim oh sorry seems
like a mont blanc guy yeah waterford
pens yeah waterman pens that's what he
yeah also before we say where to find us and everything if you haven't already and i know only a few people have we'd really appreciate it if you go to the itunes store and rate and review the podcast because rating and reviewing the podcast helps us to be more visible which gives us a chance to have more listeners and then through sponsorships and we're looking into doing a patreon campaign here in the future and all of those things things will basically go towards achieving some goals that we have for the podcast and doing some things that we think would be like a really cool addition to this community and our great group of listeners so if you could go to itunes or stitcher wherever it is that you listen to podcasts and rate and review the podcast or recommend it if you're using it in overcast we'd really really appreciate that we're really thankful for our awesome listener base yeah we have a
lot of momentum we're growing in listeners we're trying to kind of ramp up quantity of podcasts here so yeah we definitely need to do this to sort of get to the next level so tim where can people find you on
the internets you can read my stuff my writings at thewritingarsenal dot com you can follow me on twitter writing arsenal and imwassum if you'd like that's my non exclusively stationary a twitter account where i probably talk about baseball and music a lot more than i talk about pens and pencils and then you can follow me on instagram thereriting arsenal how
about you johnny i am at pencilrevolution dot com and by the time you hear this you can enter the koola giveaway so definitely check that out you get to pick your color you can't beat that i am on twitter pensolution and i am on instagram at johnnygamber
and he is at stencilresolution too dot
net
i'm andy and i am at woodclinched dot com you can get me on twitter wealthley or oodclinched and you can find me what else on dot grid oh yeah grid nerduprising co dot grid i'll put a link to that in show notes as well or in your friendly itunes directory so this is erasable we are at erasable us you can find show notes and an episode for this at erasable us twenty two you can find us on our facebook group you should join that it's a very very cool active community it's i can't say enough about this community facebook dot com groups erasable or you can get our facebook page which just is kind of the official brand voice of erasable at facebook dot com erasable or on twitter excuse me the facebook dot com erasablepodcast somebody took erasable this is some guy that's weird yeah let's attack him it's probably the stencil revolution guy and we're on twitter raceablepodcasts so as tim said we would love you to rate us and give us a review on itunes recommend us on overcast however you listen to it and that's it for today thank you guys