It’s the mid Eighties, and we like Kraftwerk, beige minimalist offices with no clutter and clean straight lines (preferably red lines to deliberately accentuate the rest of the blandness), and there’s a single IBM PC in the corner with a glowing green screen. The man in the shiny grey suit, white shirt and red tie (red for the aforementioned reasons) reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a notebook. And that notebook is called – *Conceptum*.
That’s the image that jumped into my head when I first read the name, but at that point, I hadn’t had lunch, so it’s quite possible I stood there and said all that out loud.
So other than the most efficient sounding notebook ever that also evokes, no, insists, that you fill it with ordered ideas, what do we have here?
A6 in size with a soft, flexible cover, There’s a small pocket inside the front cover and an index page, printed both sides.
The rest of the pages are numbered and plain, thin and creamy in colour but good quality. Wait, plain pages? Well, you could write or draw anywhere, that doesn’t sound like ‘Conceptum’ to me! But wait, there in the obligatory rear inside cover pocket is a piece of lined paper. Not for writing on, oh my no, but to use as a guide behind the page so your writing is as straight as the grid in Gibson’s Matrix.
Two nice final touches round off this splendid notebook. One is an elasticated pen loop, the other is not one, but two bookmark ribbons, so you can be in two places at once after all.
Now if you’ll excuse me, these floppy discs won’t catalogue and alphabetise themselves!
The Secret Notebook Hoarder 