found the solution to what I wanted to do for my master notebook and getting notebooks info in @Fil’s post here:
see my observablehq notebooks inception code bit here 
with total, original, forked and total liked notebooks count breakdown
Just plugin your observablehq userName if you want to see your stats…
@tom & @mbostock can we use your api endpoint freely, or do you want to add some user keys for that later?
also, can we use this solution for creating custom user notebooks collections we can link to for now?
I know it’s a bit hacky, or hacky AF, but I’d like to use it to replace this master notebook bit