Dog-eared and covered in ballpoint doodles, the humble composition notebook has been a mainstay of teenager knapsacks for the better part of the last century. And not just students love them.

Composition notebooks are not great notebooks. Their covers fray, ink bleeds through their whisper-thin pages, and it’s next to impossible to get them to lie flat. But designers and artists love them ...

There are some things that seem to come into existence fully formed, complete, and impossible to improve upon. Take the school notebook. Its actual form and functionality hasn’t changed in decades, if ...