If you love looking at other people’s travel journals, check out Notes from the Road. Erik Gauger has traveled to some amazing places, and filled lots of travel journals with sketches and notes.
Erick Gauger, Sicily sketchbook
Instead of carrying around dozens of heavy guidebooks when I travel, I condense my useful information into a small size Moleskine travel journal.
I use Moleskine journals to organize all my travel ideas, travel plans, make notes, record my conversations, draw travel sketches, make notes on animal plants, and draw people and street scenes.
Erik Gauger, Morocco sketchbook
You can see more of his journals here, but be sure to check out the rest of his travel blog, which is more long-form writing and incredible photography.
One of these days, I will use one of the Paperblanks notebooks I’ve been hoarding. I have a few of them that I’ve picked up over the years (usually during a once a year visit to a wonderful little bookshop in Lewes, Delaware called Biblion), and I’m always very impressed by their quality. I’m also shocked that I don’t see more buzz about them from the fountain pen community, as some of them have wonderful paper.
This Paperblanks notebook is the Solis Mini, from a series called Nova Stella. It is designed to look like an antique leather bound book with gold embossing. What makes it even more elegant is the faux marbling on the page edges! It feels like a sumptuous hand-bound book– up to a point, at least. The cover material is smooth and not leathery, but there is embossing all over that gives it a nice texture. The look is spoiled a bit when you use the elastic closure– I would have used a different color, maybe gold or brown, so it would clash less than the black does. But the nice thing about Paperblanks elastics is that they tuck away invisibly next to the back pocket when you’re not using them.
At 240 pages, which is higher than usual for a pocket size notebook, it is chunky and has a nice weight to it, without being so heavy you wouldn’t want to carry it around. The spine is rounded and the page edges follow this curve. In the photos below, the black notebook is a pocket size Moleskine for comparison.
There are black and white headbands that seem to be integrated into the sewing of the binding, which is very unusual for notebooks these days. Usually the headbands are glued on bits of braided yarn and you can see the frayed edges where they are just cut at the ends– what is supposed to mimic a fine bookbinding detail ends up looking cheap and tacky. But in the Paperblanks notebook, they seem tightly woven in to a sturdy, reinforced spine, though I’d have to dissect the whole notebook to really figure out how it’s made. And once more, I do wish they had used a different color for the headbands!
One other thing I really like about the exterior: very minimal cover overhang, with tight corners.
Inside, there are brown endpapers, and a red ribbon marker (which, again, might have been nicer in gold). Inside the back cover is an expanding pocket, and a note about the inspiration for the design. I really like how they give you this background on the historical source.
The paper inside is creamy white and feels thicker than average. No paper weight is specified on the notebook, but the Paperblanks website says it is 120 GSM. It is unlined, which I have found hard to find in Paperblanks displays in stores, where most of their notebooks seem to be lined. This paper is really great and truly fountain pen friendly, with no bleed or feathering and a nice glow to colored inks. Show-through and bleed-through are much less than average in general.
The paper is so good, I decided to also test some watercolors to see how this would work as a sketchbook. The paper actually does fine with light use of watercolors– it buckled when it was wet but flattened out after it dried and the notebook had been closed for a few minutes. I wouldn’t recommend a lot of scrubby wet brushwork in this notebook but it will do fine with moderate use of watercolors or markers– I also tested some grey Pitt Artist Pens at the bottom of the watercolor page. (You can see the back of the watercolor test page facing the front of the fountain pen test page.)
Note: not all Paperblanks notebooks use this same paper. Their reporter style notebooks offer a grid page option, but the paper is only 80 GSM– I’ve tested one and it did not perform as well as the Solis. Also see 2013 Paperblanks notebook review here– another unlined paper that did well with fountain pens. Other Paperblanks notebooks range from 80 to 100 or 120 GSM, so if you are looking at buying one, check their website to see which paper is inside.)
The suggested retail price on this notebook is $16.95, which is slightly higher than average for most hardcover journals this size. But to me the extra page count, fountain pen friendly paper and high quality construction make it worth the price. And as of this writing the mini size is only $13.63 on Amazon. Other sizes are also available.
I really love the Paperblanks Nova Stella Solis notebook and will be keeping a closer eye on what Paperblanks is up to. My personal preference tends to be more minimal cover designs but when I see things like this Solis design or the Old Leather notebook I bought years ago, I am inspired to mix things up and add a little more pizzazz to my collection! This one is definitely going in the “use someday” pile.
I am SABLE (Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy) on almost all stationery products, particularly with Field Notes.
What a handy abbreviation! I myself am probably not SABLE on notebooks, though I may need to reassess since I’ve lost track of where things stand after this past year’s acquisitions. As noted in this post and this post, I do make calculations about how long my notebook stash will last vs. my typical usage rate:
56 sketchbooks divided by 3 a year is a little less than 19 years, and I’ll only be about 67 years old at that point. The squared ones, if extended with the plain and ruled notebooks, will last up to 32 years, when I’ll be 81. I can probably ease off buying any more of those (unless I spot any really good cheap ones!) but I think I’m allowed to buy some more sketchbooks. Yay!
But I have to note that all but one of my grandparents lived well into their 90s, so it would seem that longevity is in my genes. I’m very healthy and hoping I stay that way for many years to come, thus I feel it’s only prudent to make sure I have enough notebooks to last me until the age of 95, or maybe 100.
I am unable to count all my spare notebooks right now because many of them are in a storage unit. So to be on the safe side, I probably shouldn’t stop buying more until I have a fully accurate grasp of the situation. Right?
And what if the singularity really is near? Radical life extension could really mess up my plans. The safest thing is to be prepared… by buying more notebooks.
Just part of my stash of spare notebooks to be used someday.
I found this image on the School of Visual Arts website, as part of a feature on artists’ journals. Carl Titolo teaches at SVA and has been keeping sketchbooks for over 50 years. I love the dense pages full of patterns and details. It’s also interesting to see that at least in this case, he used a sketchbook where pens bled through to the back of the paper, adding another version of each page with a different tone and texture. There is a video in the linked article where you can see a flip-through of this entire sketchbook.
Carl Titolo’s sketchbook
If you were to open a flat-file drawer in the Manhattan studio of Carl Titolo (G 1967), you should pull up a chair—you’re probably going to want to stay a while. The drawers are filled with layer upon layer of sketchbooks; each opens to a spread carpeted with minute, jewel-toned paintings, delicate pen drawings and jottings about art, food and architecture. Titolo calls these sketchbooks, which he has been keeping for more than 50 years, “appetizers.” For any visually minded person, they amount to a feast.
When I first heard about the Endeavor Notebooks Kickstarter campaign last year, I was excited enough to take the plunge and pledge almost $50 as an early bird. I loved the aesthetics of the notebook, and the unusual method of attaching a refill notebook that could stand alone to a simple leather cover. So did the finished product live up to expectations? Let’s take a look.
Endeavor notebook, pocket size, black leather cover
I ordered a black leather pocket size cover, with a grey plain paper refill notebook, plus one extra refill in brown with dot grid paper. Each comes packaged with a paper belly band with branding info. The design is elegant and simple. When I unwrapped the leather notebook cover, I found it a little softer than I had expected. It’s not the most luxurious leather I’ve ever encountered, but it’s supple and smooth and without flaws, other than slight unevenness in the sealing of the edges, which really didn’t bother me. The screws that show on the spine give it a bit of industrial detail. There is a subtle logo on the back. The cover is about 4 x 6″ so it overhangs the refill notebook more than I’d wish. (Shown with a pocket size hardcover Moleskine for comparison below.) Otherwise, the cover is fine– not exciting like “ooh I love this luscious leather notebook,” but fine.
Endeavor notebook screws on spine to attach refill
Endeavor notebook leather cover
Endeavor notebook refill attachment at spine
Endeavor notebook back cover logo
Endeavor notebook compared to Moleskine
Endeavor notebook cover overhang
Endeavor notebook compared to Moleskine
But what bugged me is that for some reason, the way it attaches to the refill causes it to go a bit askew. I can’t quite figure out why it’s happening, but I think it is that the spine of the refill is a bit off square. Since the cover attaches via screws to a metal strip that you slide into the spine of the refill, the crookedness of the refill throws off the whole thing. It’s not off by a huge amount, and it doesn’t affect the function of the notebook, but I do get annoyed by things like this.
Inside the Endeavor notebook
Endeavor notebook cover with charcoal grey refll
Endeavor notebook refill inside front cover
Endeavor notebook refill opens flat
Endeavor notebook refill inside front cover
When you open the notebook, you see the front cover of the refill. Unlike most refillable notebook covers, the attachment at the spine means the refill covers aren’t tucked in a pocket. I love the color scheme of the refills, especially the charcoal grey with black spine. The cover cardboard has a nice texture to it as well.
Endeavor notebook refill
Endeavor notebook refill
Endeavor notebook refill with dotted pages
Endeavor notebook refill spine and cover curling
Endeavor notebook refill spine
Unfortunately, I think the refill design has some flaws. The endpapers are glued to the single sheet of cardboard that forms the cover. I think these two different papers absorb humidity differently, which makes the cover curl, and you can see some wrinkling of the endpapers. I guess they’ve gotten a lot of complaints about this, as they now have a disclaimer about “dry climates” on their website. For what it’s worth, my notebook curled up during a fairly humid summer when I had no A/C, and is still curled over a winter with forced air heating.
Endeavor notebook website warning about cover warping/bending.
There is a ribbon marker, and the refill opens nice and flat. Its flexibility makes it a nice stand-alone pocket notebook, but when it’s not in the cover, the extra room in the spine looks a bit odd, and of course you see the holes for the screws.
Then there is the paper. Oh dear. Endeavor Notebooks are claimed to have 80 GSM fountain friendly paper, but this paper is not very fountain pen friendly. It’s a bright white with a smooth texture, not so very different from standard printer paper. It works fine with pencils or fine gel ink pens, but some of my fountain pens and other wet pens bled through, and several fountain pens were also feathery. Very fine nibs and certain inks were ok, but the paper performance is definitely disappointing. I did not test the dot grid paper, but it feels the same. I also found the dots a bit too big and bold for my taste.
Front of Endeavor notebook pen test pageBack of Endeavor notebook pen test page
“Disappointing” is the word I’d have to use for this notebook overall. It’s not a terrible notebook– a lot of things about it are quite nice, but it doesn’t really live up to what it was promised to be, and doesn’t seem worth its rather high price. I guess that is the risk you take with Kickstarter projects. I do like the concept, and I’m curious to see how I might be able to adapt the cover, perhaps finding a way to insert the metal spine bracket into some other notebook with a looser spine. (I recently noticed another notebook maker is offering this same concept: Murdy Creative’s No. 2 leather notebook cover attached via a metal bracket and screws on the spine, and comes with a Piccadilly notebook inside. They say it can be used with any other A5 Moleskine-type notebook, but you do have to punch holes in the notebook spine for it to work.)
Endeavor Notebooks are still available via their website, in large and small sizes, and 3 colors. The current price for the basic starter kit of a cover with one refill is $49 for this pocket size, and $69 for the 5.5 x 8.5″ larger size. Additional refills are $9 for pocket size and $12 for large. I try to factor in the value of supporting independent small businesses, but I still feel like those prices are just too high for what you get. I’m not sure if they plan to produce any other products, and I wonder if they will be successful enough to go on producing their refills, given that they’ve marketed their notebook as a buy-for-life, “heirloom quality” product. I do hope they are able to address the problems with their initial run in terms of paper quality and the binding of the refills, but until then I can’t really recommend it.
Today’s review is another foray into the world of school and business oriented notebooks. I think it’s also the first time I’ve reviewed a notebook that is designed to work with a digitizing app.
Hamelin is a French company that owns various brands including Oxford and Black n Red (though Black n Red is distributed by Mead in the US). Their notebooks are designed to appeal to a variety of users, from students to businesspeople to everyday journalers and jotters. The samples they kindly provided to me for review are wire-bound notebooks offering some upscale features that go beyond anything I used in my own student days.
First Impressions
The Hamelin notebooks have bright primary colored covers with a glossy surface. The glossy material wraps around a sturdy board, so they should be quite durable compared to a standard wire-bound notebook with a thin cardboard cover. A half sheet contains product and brand info, and can be removed so you have a nice minimal cover front and back.
Inside the notebook, there is another half sheet containing stickers you can use as tabs to create sections within the notebook, as well as a couple of labels you can use to add your contact information. Then there is a front page with another space for contact information, backed by information about Hamelin’s app, Scribzee. (More on Scribzee below.) Then you get a two-sided pocket where you can tuck loose sheets.
Optik Paper
Then we come to the body of the notebook, 150 pages (75 sheets) of college ruled paper. These are Optik paper, Hamelin’s trademark paper used in other Oxford and Black n’ Red notebooks I’ve reviewed. The pages are perforated for easy removal, leaving you a full 8 1/2 x 11″ page when it’s torn out. (The perforation and wire binding add about an inch to the width.) As expected for Optik paper, fountain pens perform very well with no feathering or bleeding, and show-through is less than average.
Scribzee App
At the corner of each page, you’ll notice some small icons– these work with the Scribzee app to enable it to capture a photo of the page and crop it to the 8 1/2 x 11″ dimensions. No rings or background shows around the edges, although the 3 holes in the margin do show. The app also has handwriting recognition capabilities, but only for what’s written in the top margin of the page. I did not find this very successful– most of my block capitals are pretty legible, I think, and yet it didn’t come close to recognizing the word “HANDWRITING.” My lower case letters are not as clear, so I’m not surprised it didn’t get those. (The handwriting recognition is supposed to use machine learning, so presumably it will learn to recognize individual handwriting better over time after you correct it, but that is not something I could test within the scope of this review.)
Notebook page as captured with Scribzee appList of notes in Scribzee app
Other than the handwriting recognition, the app does what it does pretty well, though I did not always find the icons intuitive. Also, if you write a title on the top, it doesn’t automatically give the note that title– you have to go through a couple of clicks to switch to the recognized text, and then correct it, most likely. If you don’t want to use the Scribzee app as your main note storage site, you can also set it up to sync with your Evernote account. I would guess that most Evernote users would just capture notes using the camera within Evernote rather than using a separate app, but the Evernote app doesn’t strip out the background around the page. (Evernote’s handwriting recognition was good enough to read my block capitals when I searched “handwriting” and even picked up the word “recognition.”)
Evernote search result for “handwriting”
Evernote search result for “recognition”
Evernote imported from Scribzee app, showing search results for “metropolitan” highlihgted
Direct import to Evernote via phone camera doesn’t crop out rings or background.
The app has a few typos, probably from being translated into English by native French speakers. And there are a few other things about it that I just find odd– why is the gear icon used with the “Pending” button? To me, gears mean “Settings.” I’m also not sure why you’d have a separate place for Pending, as in offline and unsynchronized, notes (I guess that is what it means), rather than just having one overall list of notes with some sort of color or icon to show which ones haven’t uploaded to the cloud. The cloud icon on the home page didn’t seem to do anything when I clicked on it.
There are other functions to the app like adding photos to notes or rearranging their pages that I didn’t test. Ultimately, I am not really the audience for an app like this. I tried to get into Evernote several years ago and even though it has some useful features, especially character recognition and searchability, it still seemed like more trouble than it was worth for my purposes. I use Google docs, Simplenote, and occasionally the iPhone’s built-in “Notes” app to save notes I want to access from my phone and computer. And sometimes I just snap a photo of a page in my paper notebook if I think I’ll need to refer to it. I’ve never had a need for anything more sophisticated in my work or personal life. But that’s just me.
Conclusion
I’m sure other users will have different systems for merging their paper and digital lives, and if automatic cropping of pages is important to you, you may find Scribzee a good solution. I haven’t tried any other paper/digital solutions like the Evernote Moleskine, or Livescribe notebooks, so I can’t compare the functions of those apps to Scribzee. But I can say that Optik paper is better than Moleskine paper if you like using fountain pens. And these Hamelin notebooks should be durable and stylish enough for any school or office situation. I expect to put this one to good use, even if only in the old-fashioned, non-digital way!
You can also try your luck in my giveaway! Three winners will each receive one Hamelin notebook. Winners will be randomly selected from entries received in any of these ways:
On Twitter, tweet something containing “Hamelin Scribzee Notebook @NotebookStories @Hamelin_notesâ€, and follow @NotebookStories and @Hamelin_notes
On Facebook, “like†the Notebook Stories page and the Hamelin page, and post something containing the words “Hamelin Scribzee Notebook†on the Notebook Stories page.
On your blog, post something containing the words “Hamelin Scribzee Notebook†and “Notebook Stories†and link back to this post, also leaving a comment below with the link in case the trackback doesn’t work.
On Instagram, follow @Notebook.Stories and @Hamelin.be_noteworthy and comment on my Hamelin notebooks post, tagging a friend and adding a hashtag of your favorite adjective describing the Hamelin notebook. (Example: “@myfriendsally #fountainpenfriendlyâ€)
The deadline for entry is Friday May 17, 2019 at 11:59PM, EST. Good luck everyone!
Notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, diaries: in search of the perfect page…
