On borrowed notebooks
Every notebook I own was a gift from someone whose workshop I photographed. I am not sure that is a coincidence.
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I have forty-one notebooks and I have bought perhaps six of them. The rest arrived from people whose workshops I had been in: a thatcher, two printers, a bookbinder who sent three at once with a note saying she had too many.
I noticed the pattern in about 2021 and have been slightly uneasy about it since, because it suggests something about the transaction I had not been counting.
A notebook is a strange thing to be given
It is an unusual gift because it is entirely potential. Nobody gives you a notebook without an implied sentence about what you might put in it, and when it comes from someone whose work you have just spent three days photographing, that sentence is fairly specific.
Marta Oyelaran, the bookbinder, was blunt when I asked. She said she gave them to people who wrote things down properly, and that most journalists did not. I have thought about that a great deal and I am still not certain it was a compliment.
(Two of the forty-one are still empty, six years on, because they are too nice, which is the least defensible thing in this essay.)
Forty-one notebooks, thirty-five of them gifts, every one of them carrying a quiet expectation from somebody who let me watch them work.
