My Writing Books & Planners Collection

Hello friends, fellow writers, especially fellow poetry writers, handwriting enthusiasts, planner community or random persons who stumbled in here on a Thursday!

For years I've been writing in and collecting some of the nicest, rare and most beautiful leather notebooks. I use them for my creative writing, my teaching materials, for organizing, planning and everything in between. My collection includes professionally made custom books, as well as non exclusive, but selected items and non leather items, unique books made by me(Hello my current wallet), not least a very many books, covers and planners modified by me! See, I had wanted to try everything and then I wanted exactly what I want & nothing else!.. so if the market didn't have it - I had to make it. 

All of this may be surprising for the ballet people visiting this site, but after some years spent as an observer, I've decided to put this page together for others whom I can help with my tips and experience. Since my collection is now embarrassingly large, and includes a lot more than I need, I periodically sell & gift some of it. The posts and videos here will be random, but at least in the beginning I'll be trying to highlight some experiences that I've been asked to share, and demonstrate some of the techniques I rely on. 

Happy looking, and writing :)!

V.

The whole thing began quite innocently, with a $10 spiral bound planner from Kinko's. Yes, I'd owned a ring bound organizer years before (pink, fluffy, pocket sized one I'd gotten more for the fluff than anything else), but never found how to best use it and replace the inserts frequently. So for years, I was using my black, boring and not quite optimal spiral bound, struggling mightily with thread bound notebooks for everything else. 

When my daughter was born, that changed, because all of a sudden the amount of time I had for myself was greatly reduced. I had no time to transfer information from one book into the next like I'd done in years before. I had to pick up a new one and go, without missing a beat. I needed rings badly. Amazon was obliging with a cheap, nice personal compact sized organizer. After a while I wanted a nicer one though, a leather one. Couldn't find a compact one right away, but eventually I did. And slim, and personal and pocket, A5, B5, every size, Filo, Covey and the like, I would see one and I would dive.

I ended up having a huge collection partly because I kept looking for my optimal solution. Our needs change though, so after thinking I'd found it, I had to do it again and again. It's not helpful that the variety and systems keep expanding, but at one point I had tried everything. Maybe not every single thing, strings are not for me, but everything that I liked. 

At this point in time my collection has grown to a size I am embarrassed by, so periodically I sell off chunks of it. I will be specifying which items are for sale, but feel free to email me about anything you like. Please be mindful if what you like is high end, designer or vintage, those cost me a pretty penny and I let them go for similar sums. Having said that, lots of items are extremely hard to find, some unique, and absolutely worth it, or beauties I let go for a bargain, just because they're not my size anymore!! So scroll around, find that unicorn and shoot me a message. Unless you're local and live in my hood, sales are done through PayPal.

INFORMATIONAL VIDEOS

In my videos, available on my YouTube channel, a few on IG, I do not advertise or highlight specific brands or products for compensation. Everything is my own things and things that I've done with tools in my house. I love learning new things, so occasionally I also look around, but part of the reason I decided to put this together is that I rarely see something new to me anymore, while people ask me to share my experience.

PLANNER PEACE WISDOM

A number of years in, still moving from size to size, I had to grow a pair, cut up an expensive piece of leathery and attempt to make what was JUST NOT AVAILABLE. 

Ta Daa!! I'd done it - planner peace! Until a few years later that is, when I found my book was again not meeting all my needs and was falling short of "optimal". What was available on the market was close, but not quite what I needed. Everything was in my hands again. Luckily, I had enough experience by this point, so I bought all the ingredients, like one does for a cake: leather, rings, glue I already had, plastic inserts to be cut and modified, etc. I can now confidently say, after achieving the elusive state twice, I have rediscovered the wheel: everything is temporary, chances are you'll need modifications again, embrace it and smile every day ; )!

CREDITS

My journey into the entertaining world of leather binders and planners really expanded after I became comfortable with exchanging and installing my own rings. And I learned how to exchange them from Steve Morton. My collector impulses were helped along by reading Janet Gustavson's blog. And my necessity for planner optimization was decidedly framed by my career and children.