A Tourist in My Own City, Writing My Own Guide

Despite my recent grum­blings about the paper qual­i­ty of Mole­sk­ines, I’m pleased enough with the design to have a few in my cur­rent rota­tion. I’m embar­rassed by how many note­books I have start­ed right now, each with its own ded­i­cat­ed pur­pose, at least vague­ly. The one that I’m most intrigued by as a project is the Mole­sk­ine City Note­book for San Fran­cis­co. The idea is sim­ple: they pro­vide the basic ingre­di­ents of a city guide, the rest is essen­tial­ly blank.

There are sec­tions for restau­rants and events and itin­er­aries, but this sug­gest­ed lay­out is fair­ly vague, and the sec­tions with tabs for easy ref­er­ence come with labels for cov­er­ing over the pre­fab choic­es with one’s own. The only parts that are spe­cif­ic to the cities the City Note­books cov­er are the maps in the front. The San Fran­cis­co City Note­book has a Bay Area free­way map, a BART map, a City streetmap, MUNI Metro sys­tem dia­gram and a 16-page street index ref­er­enc­ing the streetmaps. The City, as you can imag­ine, is too big to fit on one 3″ × 5″ page, or even a two-page spread. The City is there­fore sep­a­rat­ed into fif­teen submaps, each giv­en a two-page spread.

Well, hav­ing a map is always handy, right? I like the idea that I can have all my loca­tion-spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion and mus­ings and facts and things handy. I col­lect San Fran­cis­co triv­ia, so what bet­ter place to keep it? I’ve tak­en a few notes on restau­rants and cre­at­ed a tabbed sec­tion for motor­cy­cle shops so that I can keep the names of the peo­ple at those shops straight, even the ones I only meet in pass­ing. When I was col­lect­ing the infor­ma­tion for my recent 120 Years Ago/Sierra Street post I drew a rough map to try to get it all straight.

I don’t know how I’ll use it all, and I’m in no hur­ry to fill it up. I do admit that I real­ly like this lit­tle book and I hope to have some real­ly inter­est­ing SF-relat­ed stuff in it in the not too dis­tant future.