William Taylor’s notebook

My heart leaped up when I read this passage in a short piece about William Taylor, ambassador to Ukraine:

Throughout his career, Taylor was rarely seen without a little green notebook, friends and colleagues recall. In it, he took meticulous notes of meetings, discussions, ideas.

A green notebook! Could it be this Memorandum notebook? It seems a good fit: well-made, durable, inexpensive, and with something of a military provenance. (Taylor served for six years in the United States Army.)

And then I saw this excerpt from Taylor’s October 22 deposition:

“Handwritten notes that I take on a small, little spiral notebook in my office of phone calls that take place in my office.”

Spiral. Drat.

But then I went to the deposition itself to look at that passage in context. Taylor is describing three sources he used in putting together an opening statement. One: WhatsApp messages.

“Number two. I’ve always kept careful notes, and I keep a little notebook where I take notes on conversations, in particular when I’m not in the office. So, in meetings with Ukrainian officials or when I’m out and I get a phone call and I can — I keep notes.

“The third documents are handwritten notes that I take on a small, little spiral notebook in my office of phone calls that take place in my office.”

So perhaps his traveling notebooks are, after all, of the Memorandum variety.

You can see the the top-opening version of the Memorandum notebook at work in the 2016 film 20th Century Women.

Related reading
All OCA notebook posts (Pinboard)