I'm ready to admit it.
I love notebooks...a lot - I think it's becoming a problem.
I like handmade ones, ones made from recycled paper, sleek minimalist types, kind of silly, huge, tiny. This is just some of the notebooks I have. 
There are another 3 in my nightstand, 2 in the car, at least 2 stashed away in a purse somewhere. There's one on the bookshelf too - it's camouflaged.
My notebook compulsion started back in high school when I used to write a lot - poetry, short stories mostly. I found that having a notebook around was quite handy, and being in school - it really wasn't that difficult. I did have 2 notebooks that were dedicated to my writings - one for the initial scribbling and the fervent writing down of thoughts, phrases and ideas before they escaped...they other was for the polished, 'final draft' version. Painstakingly rewritten as neatly as I could bring myself to write (I have a tendency to write very quickly, even when I'm not in a hurry, which doesn't lend itself to neatness.)
Sometime in college - when I apparently decided I was no longer anti-purse, I started buying a few more, smaller notebooks to carry around. Of course I was still in school so backpack tethered and classroom bound I always had a notebook somewhere.
The craziness started to seep out after graduation. I bought a smallish notebook for jotting down things on the bus or during breaks at my (very isolated and lonely) job at Mills College in the conference center. But it would occasionally get left at home - so I made sure I had one in my desk at work. At this point it was all still manageable - we're talking about a few spiral bound small to medium sized notebooks I bought at Walgreen's while I was picking up chapstick.
At some point (and I'm not entirely sure when this happened) I started paying attention to what the notebooks looked like, what they felt like, whether or not it was a local designer, what it would be used for. I had notebooks for budgeting, for poems, for sketching, for business ideas...and now? Now I have a dozen or so notebooks who's use is "to be determined"
