Penny for Your Thoughts

When I was younger, I was famous for buying myself into hobbies I’d never actually engage in. I’d wake up one morning and decide that I wanted to throw clay pottery and, instead of seeking out some economically salient way of dipping my toes in the water, I’d start researching pottery wheels to buy. It wasn’t that I wanted to put the time or effort into earning the label of potter — I wanted to mail-order a new, more interesting personality; to rephrase: I was a budding little capitalist. When it came to purchases, the cart never failed to come before the horse. I sought to curate a new life, a new me, by overnighting it to my address. Say goodbye, boring Sam — you just got outbid. 

I’ve since grown out of that. But nowhere has it survived more thoroughly than in the world of luxury stationery, particularly the notebooks. They first appeared on my Instagram reels: glamorous young people with trendy trench coats and cashmere cardigans, flipping through their luxury traveller’s notebooks and explaining its importance to their lives. Their own words were elegantly scrawled on the £200 pages, highlighted and underlined to suggest a kind of profundity that only old-timey writers can convincingly wear. They had tabbed some pages, just to hammer home that this was a working person’s companion — just to dispel any doubt that they secretly ran a Google Calendar.

What did they actually write? Who knows! Not a single one ever explained what warranted the price tag, not a single one revealed how thought-filled someone actually had to be to warrant a £200 notebook. It was all ambiguous monologues referencing gratitude lists and intentional journal entries and mind-maps — points to be remembered for their small businesses, entries to be tastefully edited with the messiness of a mind so productive it must spill out onto a page. 

It's all too familiar to me: these expensive notebooks feel like, once again, putting the consumerist horse before the cart. If you're feeling anxious about your shortened attention span, or the sheer lack of interesting things to be documented over the monotonous course of a modern life, you can buy a fancy notebook. You can buy, as depicted, all those profound blocks of script and sloppily (yet tastefully, stylishly) highlighted points, and what’s more they’ll have come from you. Yes, you can be that person — that hyper-organised genius just waiting to be empowered by £200 worth of paper and leather, with custom charms dangling off of its spine. 

The stationery industry has trended toward appealing to this kind of luxury, probably because nowadays very few people do anything without the promise of some sort of glamour that can help them escape the cyber-boredom of modernity. Writing something down on the cold, cruel pages of a Tesco-brand, spiral-bound notebook is not profound-thoughts-core — except, it totally is. Joan Didion’s notebooks, for example, which were auctioned off in 2022, all seemed to be products you could buy for next to nothing at Ryman’s. She didn’t need an expensive notebook, the paper was just a sounding board for the commodity we’re all really trying to buy: that intellectual profundity, that seemingly inaccessible clarity of mind that a stack of vegan post-it notes or an extortionate notebook seems to promise is possible. 

The consumerist lie here is that talent is, first and foremost, to be purchased. This is so untrue it’s counterintuitive. Ballerinas, for example, break in their pointe shoes by unstitching them, restitching them, whacking them against the walls, snapping their soles, and beating them to a pulp. When it comes to their genius, it’s not the equipment that transforms you into somebody new, it’s the work you do with it. Cheap stationery is the aspiring writer’s pointe shoe; to learn the rhythmic, beautiful glamour of the written word, you have to have equipment you’re comfortable breaking in. The luxury stationery industrial complex hopes you won’t realise this, so they can continue to sell you the promise of instant genius-ification, when in reality the long road to knowing what to write down is paved with unglamorous, cheap notebooks. 

I just wish someone had told young me about this. I could’ve saved a lot of relatives' Christmas money.

Image from Wikimedia Commons