“This is a company that took a famous novelist/travel writer’s (Bruce Chatwin) description of his favorite non-living travel companion (the brandless, black-covered, elastic-banded, ribbon-bookmarked notebook) and from it built a brand that is extraordinary in its implied history and prestige.

…the company only came into being in 1997, believe it or not, though the style of notebook they make has been around since at least the 19th Century…”

But he still appreciates Moleskine for what they’ve gotten right:

“It’s simple (you’re not going to find any decorations or images on the cover of a Moleskine), it’s super-practical (the cover is rugged, the materials high-quality, the elastic band holds it shut and makes it perfect for carrying with you everywhere, the bookmark makes whipping it out for note-taking a breeze, and the pocket in the back adds all kinds of versatility) and it reeks of good taste, modernity and class.

Let me explain that last claim.

Take a look at almost any high-style, high-class brand, and you’ll notice some things they have in common.

They are minimal. Incredibly so, in fact. They utilize white space in ways that would make any Minimalist envious, and this allows them to stand out from the unwashed masses (if you don’t have much money, you try to cram as much information and advertising onto a billboard or ad as you can…if you have money, you don’t).

They use simple colors (in many cases, black and white with maybe one extra…red is especially popular because it combined with the other two colors make for the most drastic contrast available), shapes (the Moleskine is a near-perfect Golden Rectangle) and form-factors (the sizes available are all chosen very carefully to make them the optimal size for carrying around, creating sketches, etc, without any unnecessary added bulk).

They use slightly higher-quality materials than their competitors. True, there are some excellent copycats on the market right now (the Piccadilly Essential Notebook is a particularly solid and relatively cheap imitator, although their other products are pretty damn ugly), but the Moleskine it still my notebook of choice at the moment, due to their overwhelmingly awesome design and wide variety of options.

Oh yes, the options. There are large notebooks, small notebooks, notebooks for drawing, notebooks for watercoloring, notebooks for keeping track of your schedule, notebooks for keeping in your back pocket, notebooks for designing, notebooks for composing, notebooks for keeping your contacts straight, notebooks for sorting your receipts, notebooks for creating epic Japanese landscapes or poems, notebooks for tourists, oh yes, and notebooks for taking notes.

I defy you to find a more practical, well-rounded bundle of bound paper..”

Read more at Moleskines Have Legit Quality and Design, Faux History | Flashpack.

When I bought this notebook, I almost grabbed two more, but I held off, thinking that A) I hadn’t used it yet and might not like it, and B) I had about a dozen other notebooks ready for future use, including 4 squared Moleskines that I managed to snag for about 50 cents each, and C) who knows what other exciting new notebooks the future holds? The minute I stock up on one thing, I might fall in love with something else!

I can be fickle with notebooks– though I generally know what I like, some notebooks’ charm can fade a bit after a short period of use. I loved my Markings notebook when I first started it, but then the back cover started tearing (below is how it ended up, way too soon after I started using it), and I never felt like the semi-leather cover broke in the way I wanted it to. I might have bought 5 of those based on first impressions, but now I’m glad I didn’t.

I will be buying a few more Piccadillies soon– if Borders has them, that is. I think they buy large lots of them periodically rather than re-ordering in small batches, so the stock levels seem like they can be unreliable. And Borders as a company is reputed to be a little shaky, so what if they stop carrying them or their stores close? I could order directly from Piccadilly but that gets a bit more expensive. And if they lose Borders as a major customer, will they still produce these notebooks? There is always that paranoia that the perfect notebook will cease to exist, a fear that Moleskine has exploited nicely with the story of Bruce Chatwin’s Paris stationer ceasing to carry the type of notebook Moleskine later resurrected under their own brand.

How about you? Do you buy multiple notebooks when you find a type you like? Does it make you nervous not to have a few spares ready to be written in? How many unused notebooks do you have stockpiled?

The Pen & Ink sketchbook can be opened quite far, though unfortunately I did split the last signature from the binding a little by doing this– oops! None of the other notebooks would open this far:

The inside front cover of the Derwent is totally plain, and offers a nice extra pocket where you could stash a few receipts or business cards.

The Derwent has a very wide-opening back pocket, inside of which there is a sticker, seemingly indicating the date the notebook was made. (Maybe it will go bad if I don’t use it by a certain date…)

Here’s the inside front cover of the HandBook journal: a shaded box where you can write your info if desired, and the address of the manufacturer. Unlike other notebooks, they intend you to write your details on the inside front cover, not the facing page.

The HandBook journal can be opened quite wide, but the way the spine sticks out doesn’t exactly qualify it as “lay flat.” Unlike most other notebooks, the pocket in the back is made of clear plastic, with a flap on the opening, which faces the outside. This is quite nice for stashing things you might actually want to look at: in the HandBook I used on my safari trip, I saved a beautiful leaf as well as some ticket stubs in the pocket.

The shots below give you an idea of the paper color of each notebook as well as showing how some different pens, pencils and watercolor performed. The Pen & Ink and Moleskine notebooks have creamier looking paper. The HandBook paper is a somewhat cooler white, while the Derwent is a VERY cool white– it’s almost unpleasant, kind of like the difference between some of those compact fluorescent bulbs and regular incandescent light!

Most of these papers are too smooth for soft charcoal, except the somewhat rougher HandBook. All work well with rollerball pens– even the HandBook went fairly smoothly. All took watercolor nicely too– this surprised me a bit as in past Moleskines I sometimes found that watercolor could bead up a bit. Unfortunately I don’t have a good macro lens, so you won’t quite be able to see that none of the rollerball inks got feathery in any of these notebooks except the Uniball Vision Micro, which performed slightly better in the Moleskine & Pen & Ink journals than in the others.

Pens used, top to bottom:

• Super Sharpie
• Uniball Vision Micro
• Pigma Brush Pen
• Ballpoint
• Uniball Signo 207 Micro
• Uniball Signo RT 0.38
• 2H pencil
• Soft charcoal pencil
• Watercolor paint

Since all of these notebooks have thicker paper than a standard Moleskine, they tend not to let inks show through too much. The Derwent (upper right) scored best in this respect:

The lighting isn’t exactly equivalent in each photo (I try to be scientific, but I’m not Consumer Reports here, folks!). However, when the pages are held flat with no backlighting, the Derwent shows nothing at all on the other side except for the Sharpie.

So which notebook wins on its interior factors? Again, it all comes down to personal preference. The Derwent has the nice little extra pocket and its back pocket is easier to get into with its wide opening. It also has very smooth paper that won’t show bleed-through from most pens. But if you’re used to the color of Moleskine paper, you might find the Derwent’s deathly pallor a bit unnerving.

The HandBook will please artists who like to use pencil due to its slightly more textured paper, and the clear plastic pocket can be handy.

The Pen & Ink journal and the Moleskine are almost identical on the inside. The only real difference is that the Pen & Ink’s inside front cover is totally plain– no lines for info or a reward amount, no company address, no nothing.

Stay tuned for one final installment in this multi-part review, where I’ll cover bang for the buck, where to buy, and wrap up the pros and cons.

For several years, I’ve been using the Moleskine sketchbooks quite happily, but more recently I’ve started to explore other options. Here are a few that I’ll be talking about in this post:

• Derwent Journal
• Pen & Ink Journal Sketchbook
• HandBook Journal

As you can see, they all come packaged more or less the same way, with a removable paper band.

They are all almost identically sized at approximately 3.5 x 5.5 inches:

The Moleskine is the thinnest of the bunch, while the HandBook is noticeably chunkier. The Derwent is slightly smaller than the rest, which I rather like. The Pen & Ink has the most cover overhang (at top in photo below), whereas the Handbook has almost none.

In terms of how each one feels in my hand, I lean towards the slightly smaller and thicker form of the HandBook and the Derwent.

Each notebook has a distinctly different cover feel. The Moleskine cover seems thin and rather hard in texture. The Pen & Ink has a softer, more leather-like feel– I assume it’s not real leather, but it feels like it could be. When I first touched it, I involuntarily said “ooh!” I can imagine it getting scratched and dented easily.

The Derwent has a suede-like cover with a bit of nap to it. You can see the light reflected differently if you draw stripes in the cover with your finger.

The HandBook journal is cloth-bound, which I also find has a nice “touch” to it. It’s hard to describe, but the HandBook, Pen & Ink and Derwent books all feel a bit more “warm” than the “cold,” hard Moleskine.

One thing I really don’t like about the Derwent journal is its contrasting beige elastic– to me, it’s just ugly. They could have at least made it a nicer color if not black! The HandBook journal has an unusual elastic– I’m not sure what it’s made of but it seems to be woven of a couple of different materials, including some kind of clear fibers. It seems durable and I’ve used a couple of these books now without the elastic ever seeming to loosen, but I can’t say I’m crazy about the look– it seems a bit too high-tech-looking to go with such a traditional cloth binding.

Each notebook has the brand embossed on the back, similar to a Moleskine:

As for ribbon markers, all these notebooks are pretty similar in terms of material– the Pen & Ink and Derwent have slightly thinner ribbons which strike me as being less likely to unravel than a Moleskine’s. I LOVE the orange marker in the HandBook journal, and though the material seems identical to that of a Moleskine, the ends are sealed off so they don’t unravel, and the marker is slightly shorter so it doesn’t flap around too much at the bottom.

As for color, obviously these are all black but the Derwent also comes in a beige color (with a contrasting black elastic), while the HandBook comes in pleasing shades of blue, red and green (all with orange markers). The Moleskine and Pen & Ink sketchbooks only come in black.

So based on exteriors alone, does any of these notebooks emerge as a clear winner? No, and it all depends on your taste anyway. While the Pen & Ink journal gives the impression of good quality, it may seem a little too soft for daily use, and it’s ever so slightly larger than the others due to the cover overhang. The Derwent’s suede can pick up a lot of lint and crumbs and that beige elastic really bothers me. I think the Moleskine and HandBook win for me, even though they are quite different from each other. If I had to pick just one based on appearance alone, I think the Handbook is my favorite though I’d trade its strange two-tone elastic in for a plainer one.

In the next part of this review, I’ll open up these notebooks and look at what’s inside!

I like pocket notebooks. During my years as a young professional who still harbored some little sliver of a dream of someday becoming a writer, I would often pick up a wonderful, shiny, expensive new Moleskine pocket notebook. I’d keep it with me for a while, sitting down at coffee shop tables and opening it up before me, dreaming little dreams of being a great writer. On occasion, I might even write something down in that notebook.

But, after a while, I’d put it aside somewhere – in a dresser drawer or somewhere else – and then a few months later, the bug would strike me again. So I’d buy another nice, shiny, new notebook and fill up a few pages with jottings, only to eventually add it to my ever-growing pile of journals and pads here and there around the house.

Skip forward to today. Today, I keep a tiny, dirt-cheap Mead memo notebook in my pocket at all times. And I use it and abuse it. I fill that thing from top to bottom with notes, and it’s often a race with time as to whether I beat the notebook to death before I fill it with my notes….

What good is a notebook if it’s not collecting your thoughts? What good is a pair of running shoes if you’re not out running? What good is a keyboard if you’re not practicing your music?

A lot of us want to accomplish something great. We want to read the great works of Western literature. We want to train for and run in a 5K. We want to write the “Great American Novel.” We want to have the perfect home for our family.

The truth is that no product on earth will ever make these things happen…. You can have all the slick notebooks in the world, but if they’re just filled with empty pages, they’re useless.

Do you agree? Is a notebook obsession sometimes a symptom of creative paralysis, and of throwing money at a problem to try to solve it? Or does a nice notebook stimulate creativity in a way that a beat-up Mead memo pad wouldn’t, making the money spent on expensive journals a good investment?

A reporter talks about his favorite pads.

Funny to see that everyone has a blog now. I used to use Quo Vadis planners for a couple of years when I was in college. I loved them, but who would have guessed I’d be reading their blog 20 years later!