Composition notebooks are not great notebooks. Their covers fray, ink bleeds through their whisper-thin pages, and it’s next to impossible to get them to lie flat. But designers and artists love them ...

Dog-eared and covered in ballpoint doodles, the humble composition notebook has been a mainstay of teenager knapsacks for the better part of the last century. And not just students love them.

The latte-sipping hipster sitting next to you at the cafe just pulled out his Moleskine to start jotting, and your buddy rolls her eyes and says the Moleskine's totally jumped the shark. Productivity ...