The Demise of Datebooks – NYTimes.com

Carrying a Filofax, with all the inserts that came standard with it, made me feel substantial, cliquish and secretive. British. Like a person who keeps close at hand many bankers’ private lines and Mandarin phrases and measurements for handmade shoes. The apparatus of the Filofax circumscribed and elevated my identity. 

A beautifully written ode to what I consider a lost and highly personal art. The datebook remains, in effect, a journal in reverse. Where as a journal is a catalogue of events past, a datebook is a diary of a future yet to come. Perhaps even more interesting is that it is one that is in flux, sometimes changing. Yet, with the passage of time, it in effect becomes that thing which it starts out in opposition to, a record of where you have been, with whom, and the days you celebrated a bit more than the rest.