Here’s an admission: I’m addicted to notebooks. No, not the computing kind but the paper kind. I have so many of them, some I use and some I (try to) preserve. My favourite by far is the Helvetica Moleskine, which is a limited edition version of the popular Moleskine notebook. Moleskines have been used by many an intellectual or artist over the centuries, from Henri Matisse to Ernest Hemingway. I must admit it took me a long time to convert – I was originally reluctant to jump on the bandwagon.

But then I found the 500 limited edition Helvetica Moleskine. I love Swiss design (and most things Swiss actually), and typography in general, and Helvetica is one of the most iconic fonts of the modern age, designed in Switzerland. I saw the notebook on a blog a few months back but I couldn’t find it anywhere. That is until my wife Liliana tracked it down on the website of a Japanese art gallery. The site was in Japanese, but thanks to Google Translate, Lili managed to place an order for this thing! A few days later it arrived, covered in stamps from Hong Kong (somehow it came from Hong Kong instead of Japan).

And now it’s part of my collection, alongside many fine specimens from Muji, Clairefontaine and others. I’ve scribbled in it a bit, but I’ve barely touched it otherwise.