The bleak, damp January weather has given way to crisp sunshine and birdsong this afternoon, auspicious heralds of the arrival of our new Softback Sketchbooks. The sketchbooks are landscape format, with 80 pages of 120 gsm drawing paper, perforated for easy removal, and a heavy patterned paper cover. The similarity was not intentional, but now they have arrived we notice how like the beautiful 1949 Penguin music scores they are. The Penguin scores are a lovely thing to find in a secondhand bookshop, and we have collected a few over the years, feeling slightly guilty about it as we are buying them purely for their good looks, not for their contents. Perhaps the desire to have and be able to USE such a book was driving us subconsciously as we developed these sketchbooks – though we thought we were just thriftily using up some heavy patterned paper of unusual dimensions.