Inspiration notebooks

I'm going to address (finally) my inspiration notebooks that I keep. I refer to them in a couple of posts, and they really are the backbone of my image collecting. I started pulling images out of magazines years and years ago (try 20+ years ago - eek!). I'm not one to keep a whole magazine for one thing, so I pull out what I want and toss/recycle the rest. However, as the images started stacking up and things were getting lost and/or ruined I took action by taking said images and putting them in sheet protectors and then further filing them by category. Since my first love is fashion, most of my categories are designers, with some interior and color inspiration mixed in. What started as a little habit has turned into a massive collection - 37 notebooks in all with 16 different categories/subjects. And it keeps growing. I did a major purge early last year and got rid of a bunch of images and some subjects entirely, then tidied up what was left. Here is a quick snapshot of some of the notebooks on the shelves (they aren't usually kept this way - they are usually in my office, but with our house on the market they had to be out of the way).

And that's just some of them. Here are a few examples of what the insides look like - these pictures are from my Misc. Inspiration notebook (I could have scanned them, but hey I got lazy about pulling out the scanner - again stashed away to reduce clutter):
And that's just a few pages from one notebook! These are sort of a chronicle of what I've found interesting and archive-worthy over all these years. I love getting them out and taking a trip down memory lane. It's really a good tool to track what catches your eye or what is inspirational, you begin to see trends. Through these I've learned about what makes me tick design-wise. There are a lot of feelings in those books. I also learned during my massive purge, what things didn't stand the test of time. But I also ran across some images that have not only stood the test of time, but still amaze me (an ad for Yves Saint Laurent shoes with bows on them that I had pulled when I was a junior in High School comes to mind). I sometimes wonder what I will do with these books when all is said and done, who will want them. I'm not sure, but for now I will keep adding and sometimes subtracting. More and more my images are coming from the Internet and I'm filing them away there too. So my notebooks aren't growing as quickly as they used to. I wish I had been better about documenting what year and magazine some images were pulled from, but honestly I had no idea all those years ago that I would be still at it, I'm getting better about that these days. Hope you enjoyed!