The notebooks where we learned to write

Descant magazine's blog recently published a post by Lesley Kenny about notebooks, a little hymn of praise for the ubiquitous Hilroy notebook (and notebook writing in general). 

"Hilroy cornered the market on lined “exercise books” for Canadian school-age kids. Remember those faint blue lines and how you had to learn to tame your squiggles between them? Some booklets — that’s what our teachers called them –  had horizontal dotted lines running between the darker lines, to guide the dots over our “i”s, the lines through our “f”s and “t”s. Sadly, there was nothing below the line to guide the crazy-making mirror image tails of those “g”s and “q”s. 

"Somebody should write a thesis on Hilroy’s role in 20th century Canadian handwriting. A kind of Foucauldian-homeroom-teacher mashup."