“It’s not very pretty.”īy the 1830s, paper makers in France and Germany had developed a new industrialized processes called pseudo marbling. “If you just put pigments down and let it go at random, you save a lot of time and money, but you produce a sheet with no real pattern,” says Sidney Berger, an expert in decorative paper. Instead of using a comb or pick to create intricate watercolor patterns, paper marblers would dip a straw brush in pigment and splatter it over the water. “It actually helps offset the weight of the black spine,” Fay says.Įventually, marbled paper found its way west along the silk route, where artists would replicate the process in less painstaking detail. And the white, rectangular label, which includes hand-drawn lettering that spells out Comp, is right-adjusted rather than centered. He covered the exposed spine in a black Italian cialux cloth to increase its durability. Fay replaced the center-sewn binding with a high-quality lay-flat binding, which means no more paper bulge. The 148 pages (lined or unlined) are smooth and uncoated, with a larger header space for creating a clear visual hierarchy while writing.

He uses them ('it's sort of this thing-everyone on our team has one') he collects them (“I’m about to acquire two notebooks from France that are just exquisite”) and, for the past year, he's been working like hell to reform them.įay calls his reimagined notebook 'Comp.' The update, for which he's now raising funds on Kickstarter, looks like an old-school composition notebook, only better. 'There's no pressure to make every page a masterpiece.'Īron Fay, another designer at Pentagram, is obsessed with composition notebooks, too. 'I like the idea that they're not about sitting in a museum and sketching,' says Michael Bierut, a partner at design studio Pentagram who has filled- and kept-112 of the unpretentious black and white notebooks in the course of his career. The artist Roy Lichtenstein canonized the object with his Composition II painting. Eddie Vedder allegedly scribbles his lyrics in one. Jean-Michel Basquiat was known for writing in a Mead composition notebook. But designers and artists love them just the same. Their covers fray, ink bleeds through their whisper-thin pages, and it’s next to impossible to get them to lie flat.

Composition notebooks are not great notebooks.