DIARIES WERE DEAR to me in my youth, but lately I’d had difficulty keeping a journal consistently—until I discovered One Year of White Pages. Consisting of 12 small (approximately 4 ½” by 3 ½”), slim black notebooks, each with creamy blank pages, this masterful system (Italian, of course) identifies each month with a cool modern hole punch in the cover: one for January, five for May, and so forth. Ultraportable and too modest in size to be intimidating, the tiny diaries are perfection. I decorate the outside and the title page with a collage of fabric or paper, and sometimes I draw in them as well as write. Seek them out at the extremely tempting shop of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum ($35 at www.cooperhewittshop.org). If you use them I ask only that you do not also use journal as a verb. I am a language/usage/grammar curmudgeon (as are many former copy editors), and I hate that.