(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)
I recently finished copying Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince. It took me several years to do it, mostly because I didn’t work on it regularly. Don’t worry, this won’t be a book report about The Little Prince, but rather what I learned along the way.
The right book matters - I originally started copying an Italian translation of The Little Prince (“TLP”), but my Italian wasn’t very good back then (I am closer to intermediate these days), so it was pretty discouraging to write something I didn’t understand. It was so much better once I decided to give it up and switch to an English version instead.
What also improved the experience was that it wasn’t anything like the other book copying project I had started prior to TLP. Some of you may know that I’ve been copying Meditations by Marcus Aurelius in a typewriter font. I started Meditations in late May of 2020 and by the time August came around, doing primarily Meditations was kinda driving me nuts. Meditations is a difficult book to read and follow, and writing it in typewriter requires me to focus and slow down a lot, so it is fairly brain-intensive. TLP, on the other hand, is a very easy read and writing in my cursive at mostly regular speed was quite relaxing.
In addition, TLP is a good length for copying. For reading, it is a short book. But for copying, it’s long enough that it takes some time and effort to finish, but not so long that it ever felt laborious. I liked that the chapters were fairly short too, but I stopped whenever I finished one or a few pages, regardless of whether the chapter was done. If you’re thinking about starting a project like this, I’d suggest something short, like the lyrics from your favorite album, or a short children’s book, instead of Lord of the Rings or War & Peace, lol.
Related to this is that having the variety was good for me. I’m sure I could have made a lot more progress on Meditations if that was the only thing I worked on. But I’m also fairly certain that I would have given up on it too. Having several projects makes it more fun for my squirrel brain because I can work on whatever suits my mood that day.
The right notebook matters - When I started TLP, I was using the Hippo Noto A5 “slim” and I quickly discovered that I disliked it. No, I take that back, I HATED it because I realized that I really didn’t like super thick notebooks, and the Hippo Noto is 500 pages thick!! The A5 slim size meant that my hand was constantly “falling off the page” because it took half a sentence to get to the end of a line, and then the edge of the notebook would be digging into my hand. Ditto for writing on the bottom ⅓ of the notebook, which also got messier because my hand is falling off the edge. I got through 36 pages before I gave up. This is not to disparage this particular notebook, just that I realized that this size/format is not for me. Discovering what doesn’t work for you is just as valuable as finding something that does.
