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.

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Full transcript of the conversation included below.

The saddest thing was… to my father, as a writer… is the woman who had been doing his line editing, the woman who could actually read his handwriting, finally died.

At Viking, she was at Viking Press. And nobody else could read his handwriting.

And they sent him a letter saying, “John, we’re so sorry. We know you like to write by hand, but we can’t publish your handwriting. We can’t read it. You either have to find somebody who can type it up for you, or you’re going to have to get a typewriter.”

Well, this was a big drama in our house. Big drama. And he went out and he bought himself one of those gigantic IBMs. You know the kind that when you typed on it, all the paintings in the room moved.

Tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk. It was an unbelievable sound. 

He was a six finger typist. Tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick. And it was too slow, it would drive him crazy.

What he would do is… write by hand… finish his writing for the day and then he would have to spend the afternoon typing up what he’d hand-written. Because he knew what it said. 

So he went out and bought balls in every language. Remember they had the ball? And he got balls in Finnish, and balls in Russian. Just to see what they looked like, you know?

And just to get it back on his publishers, he one day wrote… sent them… three pages in Russian. Now he couldn’t speak or read Russian, he just used the Russian ball and made all these letters in Russian.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

And shipped it off and said “How’s this?”

And they said, “You’re kidding.”

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