Nic Garcia, politics editor for the Des Moines Register, has started a business producing notebooks for reporters, inspired by notebooks he used to buy from Stationers Inc.
Bill Lohmann, notebook in hand, interviews an injured Richard Petty at Richmond International Raceway in February 1982.
Columnist Bill Lohmann (left) scribbled in his notebook while listening to an interpreter translate a news conference in Havana, Cuba, in June 1984. Peter Ueberroth, head of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, had met with Fidel Castro in a last-ditch effort to convince him to send athletes to the summer games in Los Angeles.
Back in school, when I thought I might want to do this sort of work for a living, naturally I started paying attention to the people who already did: how they went about their job, how they interviewed people, how they hunched over their typewriters at the end of a game punching up their stories.
I was a sportswriter in my dreams and in my first few years, which were a long time ago — the mention of “typewriters” proving my point.
I also noticed something else back then: Many of the reporters carried little mustard-colored, pint-sized notebooks that fit in their pockets. I thought they were the coolest things; I guess I had a very low bar for “cool.” The spirals were on the top, not the side like the notebooks I was familiar with, and you just flipped over the pages as you wrote. So functional. So handy. They also said “Reporter’s Note Book” right there on the front cover, which sort of announced who you were and what you did.
Might sound silly — I mean, it’s a …. notebook, for goodness sake — but when I started using them as a young reporter, I really felt like I had made it and that I belonged.
“It’s a tool of our craft,” said Nic Garcia, politics editor for the Des Moines Register. “Any reporter knows having your notebook in hand is an invitation to talk to anybody about anything.”
Garcia held his first reporter’s notebook when he was in fourth grade and somehow convinced the editors at his hometown newspaper in Colorado to let him contribute to a monthly student supplement. Garcia, 36, loves those notebooks.
To paraphrase an old joke: I’ve got notebooks older than Garcia, as I’ve been using them for well over 40 years.
On those notepads, I’ve scribbled the words of people who are famous and those you’ve never heard of, and jotted notes about all sorts of stories from all sorts of places: ballgames and boring meetings; strangers’ living rooms and helicopters; hospitals and prisons; the 1996 Olympic Games and a 2000 family cross-country “vacation”; a news conference in Havana and space shuttle launches and disasters — my notebook and I were on the ground at Kennedy Space Center when Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986.
Over the years, I’ve filled thousands of these things.
I didn’t always have a fancy credit card with a catchy slogan, but I never left home without my reporter’s notebook. (And a pen. Don’t forget the pen, which I’ve done on occasion.)
I spoke with Garcia the other day because, besides being an editor, he has a new side gig: producing and selling reporter’s notebooks.
The reason? His longtime supplier (and friend) in Richmond is no longer with us, so Garcia’s filling a need and paying homage to Tom Edwards all at once. Or, as he put it, “I want every reporter to have the same feeling I got when I got Tom’s notebook.”
Edwards was the owner of Stationers Inc., a long-established Richmond office supply store started in 1945 by his father, Landon B. Edwards Jr., who developed its Reporter’s Note Book soon after opening. The shop became known nationwide among journalists and the notebooks familiar to an even wider audience when they showed up in places like the film, “All the President’s Men,” which is how Garcia came to know Stationers and Tom Edwards.
In 2013, the notebook made its Broadway debut in Nora Ephron’s “Lucky Guy,” which starred Tom Hanks, who played Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Mike McAlary. Hanks heard Stationers notebooks were the tool of the trade, according to the company’s old website, and placed an order. He also autographed a few and sent them back to the store.
So, Garcia was distressed when he called Stationers to place an order in 2021 and learned Tom Edwards had died and the store was closing.
He soon began working on the idea of starting his own notebook business early last year and in October launched First Draft Notebooks, which bear a resemblance to the Stationers notebooks. Full disclosure, The Times-Dispatch placed an order in January.
“Tom always said something that made him proud was if journalism was the first draft of history .. then history starts in a reporter’s notebook,” Garcia said. “I get all warm and fuzzy thinking about it.”
Stationers notebooks weren’t the only brand of notebooks reporters used, but they became popular, in part, because of their spirals at the top, the good quality paper and their sturdy covers — better for writing on as you stand and talk to someone and scrawl notes with one hand while holding the notebook with the other.
Tom Edwards’ father came up with the idea for the slender notebooks for reporters, according to a 1989 story in The Times-Dispatch, after buying a narrow, soft-cover World War II-era British notepad that he found in an Army surplus lot he bought from Fort Lee. A reporter for one of the Richmond newspapers — he didn’t recall who — saw the British notepad and asked Landon Edwards if he could cut a stenographer’s notebook lengthwise to create something similar. Landon Edwards said that wouldn’t work because the metal spirals would ruin the cutting device he would have to use. He gave the reporter the British notepad instead.
The same day, a purchasing agent for the newspapers called to ask Edwards if he could make notebooks the same size as the British notepad but with a stiffer cover. Edwards began producing the notebooks for the Richmond papers and anyone else who wanted to buy them.
About six months later, Tom Edwards said in the 1989 story, Winston Churchill visited Williamsburg and attracted reporters from national publications and broadcast outlets who saw the notebooks the Richmond reporters were using and wanted them.
“After that, he started getting orders from far-flung places,” Tom Edwards said. “It became an industry standard.”
The Stationers notebooks weren’t so ubiquitous that every reporter knew about them — though they knew they needed something like them.
Reporters covering the civil rights movement fashioned their own reporter’s notebooks for not just practical reasons but for their safety.
In their Pulitzer-winning book “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation,” authors Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote about how, when caught covering dangerous situations, reporters would cut standard stenographer’s notebook in half — as the Richmond reporter had requested of Landon Edwards — and stash them in their pockets to avoid being targets.
“You put one of the sawed-in-two steno pads into the inside breast pocket of your suit coat, and it could not be spotted by the mobs,” the authors wrote. “You put two into your breast pocket, and it bulged liked a shoulder holster. Then mobs would mistake you for an FBI agent and think twice before attacking.”
The makeshift notebook was referred to as “the Claude Sitton notebook,” a nod to the Southern correspondent for the New York Times whose coverage of the civil rights movement earned him praise and respect. Sitton and fellow reporter Karl Fleming fashioned the notebooks.
Sitton later “found a Richmond company that printed the narrow notebook,” according to the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., in a 2015 obituary about Sitton. The story quoted Roberts, saying, “Claude ordered a case and then kept on ordering them.”
The Richmond company presumably was Stationers.
Garcia was in the 6th grade when he watched “All the President’s Men” and saws Tom Edwards’ mustard-yellow notebooks in the hands of Redford and Hoffman, as they played Woodward and Bernstein. (He noticed that? “Being a budding journalist, I just loved office supplies generally,” he says.)
He started calling around to different newspapers — remember: he was in the sixth grade, which, I guess, proves he really was a budding reporter — and asked about the kind of notebooks they used. All roads led to Stationers, and his grandmother mail-ordered his first two dozen Stationers notebooks, which he found to be as high-quality as they appeared on the big screen.
“I’ve been using them ever since,” he said.
Over the years, he got to know Tom Edwards when he placed orders over the phone or by email. He met him in person one time, when he was in Washington for a conference and drove to Richmond to see where all the notebook magic happened.
“Tom Edwards was a gentleman,” Garcia said. “Just so hospitable. He took me and a friend to lunch. Showed me around.”
Edwards even took Garcia to the back of the store where he showed him what must have been hundreds of custom covers from the company’s various news organization customers. (Stationers also sold the same size notebooks, but marketed them as notebooks for police, firefighters, sheriffs and even game wardens.)
Garcia acknowledges he’s not likely to strike it rich with reporter’s notebooks, particularly in a digital age when the tools of our trade have expanded to include easy-to-carry recorders and smart-phone apps that can transcribe conversations as they happen. But notebooks still have their place in reporting, and, you know, there’s something tactilely satisfying — maybe even reassuring — about putting pen to paper and scribbling notes as you gather information for a story. Even if sometimes I practically need an interpreter to translate my handwriting.
But that’s another story.
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Nic Garcia, politics editor for the Des Moines Register, has started a business producing notebooks for reporters, inspired by notebooks he used to buy from Stationers Inc.
Bill Lohmann, notebook in hand, interviews an injured Richard Petty at Richmond International Raceway in February 1982.
Columnist Bill Lohmann (left) scribbled in his notebook while listening to an interpreter translate a news conference in Havana, Cuba, in June 1984. Peter Ueberroth, head of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, had met with Fidel Castro in a last-ditch effort to convince him to send athletes to the summer games in Los Angeles.
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