How the Sketchbook Project Inspired One Notebook User

Notebooks, journals and sketchbooks present a troubling challenge for me.

The shelves and drawers of my house are filled with Field Notes, Rhodias, Slates and other pads of all shapes and sizes. They’re lined up like volumes in a vast and varying library. They’re stacked in neat piles that go from largest to smallest, like miniature pyramids of paper and potential. Yet, not a single one is filled from cover to cover. And this troubles me.

It’s not that I don’t use them. I love to write poetry, doodle, keep lists and all other sorts of activities one might use a notebook for. It’s just that I have trouble seeing a notebook through to its inevitable conclusion. Perhaps my notebooks lack focus. Or maybe I’m attempting to stave off my notebooks’ mortality. Either way, last week, I purchased a notebook from the Sketchbook Project in hopes that this trend might change.

The Sketchbook Project is a Brooklyn-based organization that has created a global, collaborative art project based on a simple sketchbook. The concept is just as simple: buy a Sketchbook Project sketchbook, fill it up with doodles, musings, poems, treasure maps, shopping lists or anything else you can think of, and send it back to the Sketchbook Project, where it will be added to the collection at their Brooklyn Art Library. Over 30,000 sketchbooks call the Art Library home, and visitors can check out any sketchbook from the Library’s colossal shelves.

The sketchbooks themselves are rather non-descript: each 5″x7″ sketchbook features a craft paper cover staple-bound to 32 plain white pages. But that’s the beauty of the project; it allows you to create without any pre-conceived notions about what the sketchbook should contain. I’ve only filled one of my 32 pages, but I can’t help but feel like this sketchbook has a purpose, and that feeling is inspiring. I can’t wait to make the final mark on its final page and see it added to the Library’s shelves with its sketchbook brethren.