At the local Christmas Fayre amongst the usual mix of jewellry, sweet and tombola stalls, I was excited to find some rather fetching notebooks for sale. Rebound Books create journals, notebooks, sketchbooks and diaries from books destined for landfill and in doing so produce unique products for the notebook connoiseur while recycling long abandoned volumes of all kinds.

From their website:

Rebound books are individually and uniquely created from original publications. We remove the spines from the original book and using a quality reclaimed paper, intersperse (or interleaf as we like to say) blank pages with selected pages from the original book. These books are then wire bound (using the best wire binding available) into our very unique – Journals, Notebooks, Sketch books & Diaries. We always use the original covers. Our wonderfully unique books certainly make fantastic gifts – with our growing selection there is almost certainly something for everyone.

I spent ages browsing the selection at the fair, many of which felt deliciously tactile and, as the friendly lady running the stall pointed out, had that old book smell that bibliophiles love. Of course I bought one, walking away in the end with this, because the title immediately struck me as a neat metaphor for what goes on inside the covers of my writing notebooks:

Opening the book up I found Rebound Books had used the chapter heading pages to break up the blank pages of the notebook, which again spoke to me as a writer, many of them leaping out at me as possible story titles.

Of course, as soon as I got home I googled the book and found out the following.

Straight and Crooked Thinking, first published in 1930 and revised in 1953 is a book by Robert H. Thouless which describes, assesses and critically analyses flaws in reasoning and argument. Thouless described it as a practical manual, rather than a theoretical one. My notebook is made from, I believe, the 1953 edition, and the book itself is still in print (having been revised by Thouless’s grandson) and even has a Kindle edition. You can download the pdf of the 1953 edition here.

I’ve dipped into the book and had a blast through the Amazon reviews, even downloaded the sample to my Kindle. I plan to read it sometime soon as most reviewers seem to agree that it is a text that has maintained its relevance despite the decades passed since its first printing. Pretty much all the chapter headings struck me as great titles for fiction. So don’t be surprised if I start writing short fiction with titles like ‘All And Some’ and ‘On Drawing The Line.’

Rebound Books have a website store where you can have any of their stock books custom built into exactly the type of notebook you require. You can even send in your own old favourite to have it transformed. I’m already thinking about ordering a lined book made from this.