The Orange Manuscript

November 29, 2018 5:12 AM

Handmade Sketchbooks Teeming with Colorful Calligraphy, Diagrams, Sketches, and Travel Ephemera by José Naranja. A facsimile edition of these notebooks can be yours for a mere €285. If that's too steep, enjoy some of the many images posted from it online. See also an interview with the artist.

The linked articles are by Kate Sierzputowski at Colossal (link #1); José Naranja at his own blog (link #3); Tasha Kleeman at The Guardian (link #4); Emma Taggart at My Modern Met (link #5) and the interview is by 'Nifty' at Notebook Stories (link #6).

posted by misteraitch (6 comments total)

Such philately!
posted by M-x shell at 5:42 AM on November 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

These are lovely, thank you for the inspiration! I wonder how much planning goes into them? I always think of my sketchbooks as something that's spontaneous and unfinished but these feel like finished pieces.
posted by Bunglegirl at 7:15 AM on November 29, 2018

These look AMAZING. I'd love to flip through a copy of this in my library if they had a copy. However, a few hundred dollars seems like an awful lot to spend to own one. I love traveling, and I have tons of old travel notebooks that are fun to revisit to see what I was thinking about at the time.

This does point out that my handwriting is horrible, I can't draw, and I put relatively no thought into mine.
posted by cliche_guevara at 9:10 AM on November 29, 2018

I'm even more floored because apparently he's using the "pocket size" notebooks, yet he's getting that much perfect, tiny writing in them.
posted by dnash at 9:52 AM on November 29, 2018

I love how he spelled zoológico in the first photo (with the flamingos) because that's how it always comes out when I try to pronounce that word . . .
posted by chainsofreedom at 10:48 AM on November 29, 2018

These are amazing, and for what kind of work he puts into them and how perfect they are I think if anything he should charge more. I've got a ton of sketchbooks going back 30 years and none of them are anything like this perfect, and certainly not for pages at a stretch.
posted by bile and syntax at 3:32 PM on November 29, 2018