Composition notebooks are not great notebooks. Their covers fray, ink bleeds through their whisper-thin pages, and it’s next to impossible to get them to lie flat. But designers and artists love them just the same. Jean-Michel Basquiat was known for writing in a Mead composition notebook. Eddie Vedder allegedly scribbles his lyrics in one. The artist Roy Lichtenstein canonized the object with his Composition II painting. "I like the idea that they're not about sitting in a museum and sketching," says Michael Bierut, a partner at design studio Pentagram who has filled—and kept—112 of the unpretentious black and white notebooks in the course of his career. "There's no pressure to make every page a masterpiece."

Aron Fay, another designer at Pentagram, is obsessed with composition notebooks, too. He uses them ("it's sort of this thing—everyone on our team has one"); he collects them (“I’m about to acquire two notebooks from France that are just exquisite”); and, for the past year, he's been working like hell to reform them.

Fay calls his reimagined notebook "Comp." The update, for which he's now raising funds on Kickstarter, looks like an old-school composition notebook, only better. The 148 pages (lined or unlined) are smooth and uncoated, with a larger header space for creating a clear visual hierarchy while writing. Fay replaced the center-sewn binding with a high-quality lay-flat binding, which means no more paper bulge. He covered the exposed spine in a black Italian cialux cloth to increase its durability. And the white, rectangular label, which includes hand-drawn lettering that spells out Comp, is right-adjusted rather than centered. “It actually helps offset the weight of the black spine,” Fay says.

But the most impressive upgrade of all is the cover. Fay wrapped the thick cover boards in micro-embossed paper to protect the corners and lend them a hardcover feel, and updated the ubiquitous marbled pattern with a hand-drawn version that balances the black and white specks. “Literally every single dot on here has been obsessively placed to create a very consistent pattern,” he says. To make that pattern as authentic as possible, he drew on the composition notebook's legacy as a design object— which, it turns out, has surprisingly deep roots.

The composition notebook's trademark black and white marbling pattern has its origins in 12th century Japan, when artists designed decorative marbled paper by floating concentric circles of watercolors on the surface of water and blowing on the pigments to create swirling patterns. This type of decorative paper-making, called Suminagashi, is the oldest ancestor to the composition notebook’s famous speckled pattern.

Fay began collecting old composition notebooks. This one was made in

1893 in Massachusetts. Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures made this notebook in 1860. This blue and black speckled notebook was made in France in 1870. Another notebook from

Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, made in 1887. A notebook from France, 1968. The pattern on this modern-day notebook hasn't changed much, but the printing is higher quality. A notebook from from the 1950s.

Eventually, marbled paper found its way west along the silk route, where artists would replicate the process in less painstaking detail. Instead of using a comb or pick to create intricate watercolor patterns, paper marblers would dip a straw brush in pigment and splatter it over the water. “If you just put pigments down and let it go at random, you save a lot of time and money, but you produce a sheet with no real pattern,” says Sidney Berger, an expert in decorative paper. “It’s not very pretty.”

By the 1830s, paper makers in France and Germany had developed a new industrialized processes called pseudo marbling. This cheaper, faster method led to the widespread use of marbling pattern on blank notebooks and book covers. Pseudo marbling was less expensive than covering a book in leather and looked nicer than leaving the cover pages blank. "The people producing them wanted to produce them as cheaply as possible, but they also wanted them to have some artistry," Berger says. By the time companies like Roaring Spring began manufacturing marbled notebooks in the early 20th century, the pattern was deeply ingrained in notebook culture.

Today you can find the notebooks in office supply stores for a couple bucks, their design largely unchanged since the early days of pseudo marbling. Jim Lucey, Roaring Springs’ head of marketing, says the company’s marbled pattern, which was designed more than 80 years ago, looks more or less the same today as it did in the 1930s. “There was never any pressure to change it,” he says. For going on a century, composition notebooks have been acceptable. Passable. Fine.

With Fay’s remake, devotees of the form now have a high-performance option—something with the look, history, and charm of a traditional composition book, but without the wimpy materials and stubborn binding. At $19, it's a pricey upgrade—but it's a solid choice for when you need a notebook that's better than good enough.