I met Matt Kirkland at SXSW, and admired the notebook he carried, which he’d made himself from a discarded library book.

We exchanged cards, and a couple weeks later I checked his site and found that he’d opened an online store for library book journals: the novel novel. These blank books all have a story to tell—just check out the covers! You might recognize some of these from elementary school. Matt rebinds them by hand, and they’re super durable, which is good because I still drop things just as often as I did in second grade.

Matt also had a great quote on his site from the SXSW keynote we’d both seen:

“Tomorrow’s frontier is the wreckage of the unsustainable past.” — Bruce Sterling, 2006.