Fancy a scrap-paper notebook, ma'am?
I don't know exactly when it happened, though it was probably when I went back to visit relatives after my first semester of college. My mom handed me a small pile of sheets of paper she no longer needed, telling me they could be handy for me to write on; some of them had been ripped because they were printed wholly on one side and partially on the other, and others were just letters printed on one side. But they all were sheets of paper that had been written or otherwise printed on only one side. And I think that small event altered my brain chemistry irreversibly, on the scale that only era-defining moments such as the moon landing or the invention of the fountain pen could.
Fast forward a few semesters to find me just gathering all the photocopies and sheets of paper I no longer needed, and using a hole punching machine to tear two holes on the top. I would do exactly what she did: tearing it so that I only had the usable part of the paper in my hand and getting rid of the rest, then used a paper fastener to create a clipboard-shaped notebook, using a rigid notebook cover to give it structural rigidity. It was bulky and rather brutish (not to say brutalist in execution), but it worked and kept everything together, with the unintended upside that I had inadvertently set up a contraption to rip the used pages rather cleanly (though I had to frequently undo the fastener to take out the leftover paper, lest the ripping become messy with time).
It was very useful to carry all the junk paper and do math calculations on it during college, but I eventually graduated and took a sabbatical to study for an English certificate while I decided whether I wanted to play it safe and become a middle school teacher or risk it going to academia, just like one of my first-year linear algebra professor. In that time, I actually picked up on writing again after having mostly abandoned it alongside drawing to focus on my courses, and that made me wish I could make a more practical kind of scrap-paper bundle so that I could write on the go.
I initially experimented with the simplest solution: staple a bunch of paper sheets backwards, so that the clean back side is facing you instead of the printed front. The problem with this setup is twofold: on one hand, the crease gets thicker as you go along, meaning that you are leaving larger and larger chunks of paper unused; on the other, the stack gets thinner as you go, so the folded pages end up dragging the clean pages away.
My second iteration was a bit more promising: I found that you can buy binder rings (like the ones in a ring binder, but loose), and used the hole puncher to make the most rudimentary notebook imaginable. It is only recently that I came to learn how binder rings are actually used (to make a flashcard deck). Moreover, the rings had a thick hinge in the middle that accustomed to get stuck on the holes, mutilating the paper as I tried to open the notebook over and over again. I now know that you can get adhesive rings to reinforce them, but I have since found better ways to make notebooks.
Along these lines, I also experimented with sewing pages together by hand, using a needle to pierce through the stacks of paper like one would do to make journals. I never got to implementing this on actual scraps, thinking it wouldn't quite work as well, though now I wonder how far you could push the idea. Despite my complaints about the stapler method, I mostly stuck to it as it was the best compromise I could make on the cheap, and the stacks didn't get too unwieldy if you just stuck to smaller stacks.
The next year, I entered grad school, and was eventually granted a scholarship that allowed me to start working in my department. This meant, among other perks such as a salary, that I had a key to the department library. And there I found a notebook binding machine. It was a bewitching sight that struck me like thunder: I could now make an A4-size notebook using all the paper I had accumulated over the course of the years. And as luck would have it, I now had a ton more paper around: the professor that was sharing the office with us graduate students had retired that same year, leaving behind tons of photocopied books that were not even bound in any way, shape or form. Just three or four books on harmonic analysis and differential geometry that he had presumably used to prepare courses when he had first been hired, and were, put simply, junk to be thrown away.
So I got to work: being a night owl as I am, I went to the office by noon and left in the evening, so I had more than an hour in the late afternoon where the noise of constant perforation would not disturb anyone. It was great, having a professional solution to make notebooks left, right and centre, and the process was strangely soothing. It probably sounds menial, but there is something about the loop of perforating paper and the sting of seeing the final result that I cannot get enough of.
There was only one problem.
There are two types of notebook bind: spiral and comb. Spiral notebook binders make circular holes you can thread an aluminium or plastic coil through; comb notebook binders make rectangular holes that take binding combs, which are basically plastic ribcages. Comb binders tend to be a lot cheaper overall, perhaps because you cannot open them 360 degrees so they are less desirable overall. And I was really bothered by this fact, but I pressed on, not really knowing how realistic it was to just buy an actual notebook binder.
A few weeks later, I found myself browsing an office supply shop I had spotted in a mall. I had always known them to be there, but I had recently started to collect fountain pens, so I was looking everywhere around me to find what was available. And there it was, orchestrated by fate itself: a spiral notebook binder that went for 125 euros. That was no spare change, but it was much cheaper than what I had anticipated. So I took the plunge: I bought the machine, a pack of front and back covers and aluminium coils.
There is another advantage to using these binders: sometimes I will have paper that was printed on one side fully, and on the other side only halfway through, so there is a half-sheet worth of paper usable. Since you need to trim coils to size anyway (the ones that come in the package are a bit larger than A4 size), you are handed special pliers for trimming them to size. So you can make two A5 notebooks out of the same coil.
While they are no longer made from scraps, I have kept calling them "scrap paper" notebooks due to tradition. They are not notebooks made from proper blank sheets; they are notebooks made from whatever discarded paper I could find and amass. And while I sometimes like to tell myself that I have saved in notebooks by making them this way, the truth of the matter is that I probably did not, for coils come in packs of 12, and spiral notebooks tend to come in packs that make them pretty affordable. I just have to live with the fact that I found a very niche pastime.
1: He apparently had no idea what he wanted to do once he finished high school, but he thought of getting a math degree and "have fun for five years" (sic) because he liked math. That one statement may have been the deciding factor on me risking it and opting for academia in the end.