John, Thom, and The (Il)legal Pad

When we were designing the Blackwing 24, our tribute to literary icon John Steinbeck, I had the honor of meeting John’s son Thom. Thom welcomed us into his home and, as we sat on his living room sofa, sipping coffee and marveling at the artifacts perched artfully on every shelf, bar, and bench, he told us about his father’s creative process and the tools he used to create some of his most influential and inspiring works.

John’s love for pencils is well documented. The other half of his writing formula, however, has received considerably less attention. In addition to 24 freshly sharpened pencils, John would start each day with a stack of yellow legal pads, which he would rapidly fill with his signature diction. Once a pad was saturated with script, he would file it away, and immediately move on to the next glue-bound bundle of pages.

As I left Thom’s Santa Barbara home that day, the story of his father’s infatuation with legal pads left an impression on me. We launched the Blackwing 24 later that month, the Volumes program took off, and I found myself spending most of my time designing new pencils and telling new stories. But this story always stuck with me, and I knew that we had a new chapter to contribute to it.

Three years later, I’m stoked to finally introduce our interpretation of Steinbeck’s favorite writing vessel: the (Il)Legal Pad.

Each (Il)Legal Pad is made with high-quality 80 GSM, ivory paper. If you like the paper we use in our other notebooks, you’ll love this. It comes in a set of 2 and has three paper type options: dot-grid, ruled, and plain. The pages of each Pad are also sewn-bound and perforated, so they only tear away when you need to use them.

Get one here, and write your new chapter.