So Many Notebooks, So Little Time

I have never gotten over my childhood delight in stationery counters.

My first encounters were at the stationery counters at Newberry's five-and-ten. This was my special store when I was small, because they sold all the inexpensive (29¢) Whitman books down in the toy department. With great anticipation I would take the escalator downstairs to see if there was a new book based on Lassie or a new Donna Parker book, prepared to clutch it in my arms and plead "Please, Mom?" As I got older and learned to write, I would prowl the back end of the store as well, near the bakery, where they kept the paper and pens. Hardbound composition books, spiral bound notebooks in various sizes, lined pads of paper, account books, all stacked up in tempting piles, and overhead, hung on dull metal hooks on evenly-holed masonite board, were rows of pens: Bic, PaperMate, and more, and then lines of crayon boxes, eight, sixteen, twenty four of Crayolas and another off brand. One didn't buy the off brand; the waxy colors were insipid and greasy, and nothing smelled like a Crayola. I mostly didn't have any money, but I did stand staring at those notebooks and dreaming of all the stories I could write in them.

Once Newberry's has gone to the big department store in the sky, my new haunts were Grants and Woolworth's. After Newberry's their selections seemed tawdry, the pens and pads not so numerous, joined by flimsy plastic protractors and thin metal compasses that were required for school back then, and a few lines of rulers. However, one tradition remained: each Christmas I would set down 67 carefully hoarded cents and buy myself a new box of 68 Crayola crayons (because Mom could never quite understand why 48 colors were Just Not Enough). Across the street in Woolworth's another dollar or two bought me a blank calendar, which I would draw for the upcoming year illustrating my own stories. It was something fun to do in the sweet vacation days between Christmas and New Year.

Next I made the acquaintance of college-ruled notebooks, which meant whatever stories I was writing could be longer. I didn't abandon the wider-ruled notebooks, about 8x7, but after that they were relegated to short stories; the newer, smaller notebooks with their narrow lines, about 7x5, were for longer stories—real books, in my mind. These were, at first, very difficult to find, until I found a treasure trove at Thall's Drug Store on Reservoir Avenue. The original layout of the small store had the stationery on a curved aisle, where I could usually gloat over all the notebooks in peace. (Thall's remained a favorite until they closed, but I never did quite forgive them for going to the supermarket layout of straight aisles; the original was so much cozier.) They had a particular kind that worked the best. (When they stopped carrying them, I had to hunt further afield; thank goodness for Douglas Drugs!)

After picking out a notebook, then came the best part: evenings sitting cross-legged on my bed cozying up in the winter or with the windows thrown open in the summer waiting for a gasp of a breeze, or watching television on the sofa with my lap desk, writing a new story and illustrating it every few pages. I never wrote "girly" stories about clothes and boys, even when I reached the supposedly difficult teens. My stories were all proper adventures, populated by adults and kids, with spies, hairsbreadth adventures, impossible odds, and obligatory talking animals with great "Lassie to the rescue"-type endings. Not Beatrix Potter animals who wore clothes and recited rhymes, but dogs and horses who took part in the adventures but still acted like dogs and horses. All of them were friends, and, even more than that, were "family by choice." It didn't matter if you had a bad past and now wanted to do good, or had a physical problem, or were just having a bad time. Every one was ohana, as they later said in Lilo and Stitch, and that “...means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.”

And because it was a book, a real book, I made sure the story ended with two sheets of paper left in the notebook. When I was done writing I would unbend one end of the spiral wire that kept the pages together and unwind it. This way I could take the two spare pages to make a front and back cover, the titles carefully lettered with my happily hoarded Flair pens and the back cover with a short synopsis of the story, just like a proper book. I'd carefully letter the title on the spine in black and color it, then put the spiral back in and Scotch tape the covers on.

One of my rare stationery treats was the downtown store for "E.L. Freeman, Stationer." It was lettered in gold on the door of their store that was either on Weybosset or Westminster Street, away from the hustle of the department stores and the shoe stores and the five-and-tens. With the proliferation of Office Depot and Staples, I'm not sure stores like this even exist any longer. It was where the businesses downtown—the doctors, the lawyers, the accountants, City Hall, the department stores' business offices, etc.—ordered their personalized stationery and bought executive writing instruments. You wouldn't find Bic pens in Freeman's, no sir! They carried Cross Pens, fresh from the factory outside the city, or British and French fountain pens, and you could have them engraved, or purchase them with an elegant pen holder and have that engraved.

When you walked into the store the first scent that hit you was that delectable odor of fine paper, a beautiful perfume only equaled by that of a bookstore. Paper samples were arranged along one wall. You ordered letterhead stationery here, for your store typist to enter correspondence on, with matching envelopes, suitably return addressed. In the rear were leather-covered ledgers for both single and double-column accounting, appointment books, staff-lined music books, fine notebooks ready to be emblazoned with your company name. This is where I went on my yearly odyssey, when I outgrew the locked diaries they sold in Woolworth's, to buy a new datebook/diary for the coming year. They were bright-red covered, a whole map of empty days ahead to fill with events of your life, whether it be crowing over a week in Lake George or crying over the death of a pet. The important things of your life set down for remembrance.

The Flairs come from Sam's Club now, and the diaries and the "proper books" sleep in Xerox-paper boxes, but every once in a while a row of pens or a pile of notebooks will take me back to Newberry's shelves or the sweet, sweet scent of Freeman's.