Aside: ended up in a restaurant/bar across sea (which is apparently a perfumed meat market) and turns out the manager is the son of a former employee of the ancient regime's embassy in London. He asked me where I am from and you know my answer ;) and he said "I was just in Tehran -- skiing in Dizin" [2] Last I skied there was in 79, the year he was born.
Anyway, the idea here is that you pay 25 bucks and get a sketchbook and scratch scratch with the Chinese extract to your heart's contentment. And then you hand back the book to the project and they scan it; display it; and take it on a world tour.
I have a gazillion sketchbooks in storage. I think I have found my archival unit ;)
[1]: http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject [2]: http://dizinsnowboard.com/
Yeah, same here. In some ways, a few are also very private sort of performance art; literally knowing what tempo to flip the pages and read along; others completely lack the vital context (which I can still 'taste' and 'feel' even when I think about them). Regardless my notebooks took a decided dive after I allowed a pc to enter into my life. A huge mistake, and these days likely impossible to avoid. Never really fully recovered from that.