Throwback Object: Telephone Memo Pad Holders
The article discusses the nostalgic concept of telephone memo pad holders that were common in the 20th century. It highlights a modern interpretation of this item, the Note Roller by George & Willy, which is no longer in production. Additionally, it mentions a current product, the brass Desktop Roll Note Pad by JoplinWorks, available for purchase in the U.S.
- ▪Telephone memo pad holders were a common household item in the 20th century.
- ▪George & Willy produced a modern version called the Note Roller in 2017, which is no longer available.
- ▪The only current product resembling this concept is the brass Desktop Roll Note Pad by JoplinWorks, sold for $200.
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Record
| Original publisher | Core77 |
| Canonical URL | https://www.core77.com/posts/143910/Throwback-Object-Telephone-Memo-Pad-Holders |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 12:30:06 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T12:37:59.438Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T12:37:59.438Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | pe5pc3uDAbNu |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This would be difficult for Gen Z to picture, but in the days of landline phones, those were the key source of remote-person to at-home-person information sharing. It was common in the 20th century to have a dedicated memo pad next to the house's most prominent phone (ours was in the kitchen). Sometimes this was just a stack of paper, but there was also a product category in its own right:While those disappeared decades ago, in 2017 George & Willy, a New-Zealand-based signage design studio, produced this throwback aluminum Note Roller as one of their inaugural products. Obviously it wasn't designed to be paired with a phone, but to provide a handy place to jot notes on an ergonomic surface.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Core77.