I have made a dozen notebooks so far this year, and I have not written in a single one. I thought that unlocking the power of infinite notebooks would be the cure for notebook fear. If there were always another blank book waiting in the wings, surely I would feel brave enough to begin. Instead, the opposite has happened. The more hours I spend folding signatures, stitching spines, and pressing covers flat, the more precious each book becomes. Time, it turns out, adds weight.

There is something quietly intimidating about a handmade object. Psychologists sometimes describe a phenomenon called the endowment effect, where we place greater value on things simply because we have invested effort in them. A hand bound notebook feels like a small archive in waiting.

Historically, books were rare and laborious to produce. Medieval scribes could take months to copy a single manuscript, and a large Bible might require the skins of hundreds of animals to produce its parchment. No wonder blank pages can feel momentous, yet even when the blank page has been pressed and made by a machine, I worry about sullying its pristine pages with my worthless thoughts, especially if, as it does often strike me, my handwriting is just ‘all wrong’ that day.

I also wonder whether the intended function of a notebook plays a role in my hesitation. Some are made with a clear purpose. The mushroom sketchbook, for example, is filled with thick cartridge paper designed for drawing. Fungi themselves are astonishing subjects. The largest known living organism on Earth is a honey fungus in Oregon that stretches for miles underground, and some mushrooms can release millions of spores in a single day. Do any of these mycelium marvels hesitate to release that first spore out into the world? Almost certainly not, and that is why I am less successful than fungus.

A book even decorated with such organisms feels as though it should contain something worthy of them, which may be why I actually made that for someone else who is hopefully less cripplingly precious than I am, and has hopefully not struggled with half a century of eldest daughter perfectionism as I have.

Some books are waiting for their moment. I have in my ever-growing collection of empty tomes an ‘egg book’, made to note down the egg production of our hens. Each of its six signatures are separated by a tabbed card divider with the hen’s name, a gaudily framed photo, the likes of which can only be deserved by a chicken named Dame Eggna Featherage, and with stats about each hen and it’s egg-spouting habits. I of course printed those bits because the self-loathing I have adopted as my entire personality won the battle that day.

I’ve been dropping some sizeable hints that I need some dedicated shelving for my (empty) notebooks, maybe so I can put them out of reach of myself and other destructive influences, to be slowly broken down by the ravages of time, maybe I should sell, trade or give them as gifts? I’ll make a list of ideas, just not (yet) in one of these.