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# Notes on a borrowed notebook
- URL: https://thomasgravy.github.io/missive/notes-on-a-borrowed-notebook/
- Published: 2026-07-19T07:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-26T21:46:53.000Z
- Description: A friend lent me her grandfather's sketchbook from 1961. It is mostly letters, and mostly wrong.
- Author: Clara Moreau
- Tags: Studio

The notebook is small, bound in green cloth, and full of alphabets. Some pages hold the same capital R drawn forty times, each one a little less clumsy than the last.

What moves me is not the good letters. It is the bad ones he kept. He never tore out a page. The mistakes stayed next to the corrections, so you can watch him learning in real time.

## A practice worth stealing

I have started keeping my own failed drawings in a separate folder called "almost." It is already the most useful folder on my computer. When I get stuck, I do not look at my best work. I look at the almosts, and I can see exactly where I turned around.