Notebook Stories

The folks at Cool Material sent me a nice batch of their recently introduced “Word.” notebooks. These are a staple-bound notebook in the vein of Field Notes and the Moleskine cahiers, but with a unique page format. First impressions: I love the cover designs, in cool colors and camouflage patterns. They came packaged very beautifully [...]

This is another notebook I bought about 3 years ago and then immediately shelved. When I first examined it after buying it, I pretty much hated it. I bought it because it was cheap and I’d never tried a softcover Piccadilly, though I’d liked using some of their hardcover ones with graph or plain paper. [...]

I think I first came across this notebook on the Blick website. It comes in several sizes, and I was excited to see that one of them was 3.5 x 5.5″, a rare size for sketchbooks. I went to the Blick retail store in Manhattan to see if I could check one out in person, [...]

I’ve been rather fascinated by field books lately. I first owned one when I was in college– I forget where I bought it, but I stumbled on it in a store, thought it looked cool, and ended up using it for some art classes where its durability came in handy. I hadn’t thought about it [...]

It’s been a while since I actually reviewed a Moleskine notebook, and with all the concerns about quality going downhill, I thought it might be a good time to look at one I am currently using, a plain pocket size notebook (with regular paper, not sketchbook weight) which was purchased in recent months. This is [...]

I spotted these at my favorite local stationery store (NYC’s Paper Presentation, on 18th St.) and immediately fell in love with them. I was thrilled when the nice folks at OrangeArt agreed to send me some samples to review. The format of these notebooks is hardly unique, but the letterpress tattersall design on the covers [...]

This notebook is for all the fountain pen and ink fanatics out there: the Ink Journal. It was created by Tom Oddo of Goldspot Pens, who I am sure tests a lot of pens and inks, and as such, must have put a lot of thought into what a perfect ink-testing notebook would be. A [...]

It’s funny, I’m not a big user of prompted journals nowadays, but I remember having a few of them as a kid that I diligently filled out with answers to questions and information about my life. They are fun to look back at now, though the questions were pretty basic and not really very creative [...]

The nice folks at Pencils.com sent me the samples below. In 2010, they relaunched the popular Blackwing pencil, and in late 2011, they followed it up with a selection of notebooks paying homage to the pencil. I was excited to see that they partnered with the Turkish company behind the Fabio Ricci brand of notebooks [...]

Banditapple was launched a couple of years ago as a new notebook manufacturer focused on providing a quality handmade notebook at very affordable prices. I’d read reviews of them on other blogs and was thrilled when they contacted me to offer some samples for review. The notebooks are similar to the Moleskine Cahiers or Field [...]