I bought these Logical Prime notebooks at Nota Bene in Montreal, a great destination for stationery shopping. These wire-o bound notebooks have a snazzy design that stands out from many of their competitors.

I chose a B5 size notebook with a green cover, and an A5 size in grey. The covers are made of a nice weight of cardstock. The grey has the same subtly speckled color on both sides, but the green is only green on the exterior, and plain grey inside. The covers have all four corners rounded, and they extend a bit beyond the page edges. I don’t usually like cover overhang on notebooks, but in this case it seems like a detail that required extra work and makes the whole design feel more thoughtful. But I also wonder how it would hold up over time– the edges might get bent and battered if the notebook is carried around in a bag.

Each Logical Prime notebook has 50 sheets, so they are pretty thin, with small rings. The binding is unusual, with short spans of 6 double wire rings at the ends of the spine, leaving the middle unbound. But like any other wire-o binding, the cover can be folded back 360 degrees, which I love. The color of the wire rings nicely matches the hold stamped branding on the covers. The gold stamping on the front is the only branding on the notebook itself. They say “special edition” but I’m not sure what that refers to. Other product details are on a sticker on the back cover, mostly in Japanese. From picking at a corner of the sticker, it seems like it should come off cleanly.

Inside, the green notebook has rule/dot grid pages, and the grey has squared pages. Both have a page layout that features a header where you can write the date and subject of your notes. This can be a nice feature, but for me, it can be a negative, as I sometimes use notebooks like this in landscape orientation as they fit my desk space better that way. At 6mm, I found the squares to be a bit wider-spaced than I prefer. The ruled/dot grid paper is different from anything I remember seeing. There are solid lines 7mm apart, with two dotted lines between each solid line. There are also vertical dotted lines at 7mm. This layout was also a little odd for the size of my typical handwriting, but it’s an interesting format that could be handy if you’re practicing calligraphy, perhaps.

The paper is quite luscious and smooth, and it works very nicely with almost every pen, with almost no bleed-through except with my juicy Pilot Justus where it feathered and bled a wee bit, especially when I was flexing the nib. But otherwise, fountain pen users should love this paper.

Logical Prime notebooks are made by Nakabayashi, a Japanese stationery company that was founded in 1923. The notebooks are available in a few other versions, but most of their catalog features markers, scissors and other attractively designed desk accessories.

You can buy Logical Prime notebooks from various independent stationery sellers such as The Gentleman Stationer, as well as on Amazon. The price stickers on mine are in Canadian dollars, but in USD, the A5 seems to go for around $7.00-7.50, and the B5 is about $8.00-9.00. These prices seem quite reasonable, and comparable to the Nebula Casual Note wire-o bound notebook I reviewed a couple of years ago, on a dollar per page basis. To me, these have better paper than the Nebula notebook, and a more elegant design, so I think the Logical Prime notebooks win on value! They are definitely worth a try if you want a nice-looking fountain-pen friendly notebook with the convenience of a wire-o binding.