A fascinating article from the BBC about Japan’s traditions around the use of paper. Towards the end, there is a mention of the popularity of using planners such as the Hobonichi Techo:
There are also still strong advocates for paper’s analogue charm in a world that is becoming increasingly digital. Japan’s so-called “techo culture†celebrates the pleasure of organising and documenting ones life in a planner, or techo. Few companies represent the culture better than Hobonichi, whose techos have developed a cult-like following.
That’s thanks to their obsessive attention to detail and some clever design features. The spacing between lines has been tweaked by fractions of a millimetre several times and the planners include a full page for every day of the year. Ensuring a book with more than 400 pages was slim enough to fit in a pocket even forced them to source the perfect paper from Tomoe River, which makes speciality papers for industry.
Customers use the techos for all kinds of reasons, the company says, from planning to journaling to documenting hobbies, but they are also miniature pieces of art and a revealing window into the inner lives of their authors. There’s a growing trend for people to share their beautifully constructed techo pages on Instagram, a vision of paper and digital technology merging.
But in a world where so many aspects of our lives are mediated by our smartphones the techos also provide a more concrete record of our lives, says Yuri Kimura, who like most of Hobonichi’s staff is an avid user. “As long as our life is offline, we need this,†she says. That’s a trend that’s shared with people all over the world as seen in the rise of the hugely popular pen-and-paper organisation system of bullet journals.
I spotted the Tru Red notebook on one of my periodic trips to Staples. This is a house brand for them, manufactured in Turkey, with a variety of notebook styles, page formats and sizes available. When I saw that they had pocket size notebooks with dot grid and squared pages available, I decided to add yet another to my collection of Moleskine clones!
The Tru Red notebook has a nice feel when you pick it up. It feels a little chunky compared to a Moleskine (shown in comparison shots below), and the cover material is softer and more leather-like. The cover boards are somewhat flexible. There is some cover overhang but not the worst I’ve seen. For the most part, everything seemed solidly constructed and square except for the back cover overhang being a little uneven. The corner tucks were a bit ragged, with some raw edges showing.
The exterior dimensions are a little larger than a Moleskine– it is interesting that the dimensions they list on the packaging are 3.5 x 5.5″ / 8.8cm x 13.9 cm, as that seems to be the dimensions of the paper, not the cover, which is actually 9.3 x 14.5 cm.
Inside, you get fun patterned endpapers with a space for you to write your contact info. The inside back cover has a Tru Red logo, but no back pocket. There are two ribbon markers, which is a nice touch, and the usual elastic closure. The notebook opens quite flat, though there is some sort of stiffener in the spine that prevents it from tucking in, which would help it open even flatter when sitting on a desk surface.
The paper is an ivory color and pleasantly smooth. At 128 sheets/256 pages, you get more pages than in most pocket notebooks, which are usually 192 pages. The paper weight isn’t specified, but it feels a little thicker than average. I had high hopes for fountain pen friendliness, but was disappointed– most fountain pen inks feathered a bit and showed spots of bleed-through. Show-through is a little better than average, though. If you are using fine gel pens or pencils, you’ll probably be quite happy with it
I paid $8.99 for this notebook, which is a lot less than a comparable Moleskine or Leuchtturm notebook. (It is available in Staples stores, and on their website, but the price there is $10.99. If you just search “Tru Red” not all products come up, so you may need to dig around more using the category search.) The Tru Red notebook offers more pages and a double ribbon marker, but it lacks a back pocket and the quality control may be a bit less rigid. Whether it is a good value will depend on individual users’ preferences. If you want something inexpensive and fountain pen friendly, the Taotree Notebook available on Amazon is a better bet.
I recently came across a mention of notebooks used by Beethoven:
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is recognized the world over as a composer of musical masterpieces exhibiting heroic strength, particularly in the face of his increasing deafness from ca. 1798. By 1818, the Viennese composer had begun carrying blank booklets with him, for his acquaintances to jot their sides of conversations, while he answered aloud. Often, he himself used the pocket-sized booklets to make shopping lists and other reminders, including occasional early sketches for his compositions. Today, 139 of these booklets survive, covering the years 1818 up to the composer’s death in 1827 and including such topics as music, history, politics, art, literature, theatre, religion, and education as perceived on a day-to-day basis in post-Napoleonic Europe.Â
Only the biggest stationery geek in the world goes around saying things like “I LOVE MOTTLED PRESSBOARD!” Only the biggest stationery geeks probably even know what it is… in fact, I myself didn’t know what it was until just recently. Or rather, I knew what it was but I didn’t know what it was called. I always thought of it as “that cool, kind of smooth, not-too-thick cardboard that has a blotchy look to it, that they used to use on report folders and notebook covers.” This is the kind of report cover I’m talking about, which I’m glad to see you can still buy:
I guess technically the material is just called pressboard. Clairefontaine may be the only notebook maker who specifically refers to it as “mottled pressboard,” though I’ve found a few places online that also use that adjective, or “marbled” to describe the variation in color. Clairefontaine is how I happened to come across the term, as I was browsing their website looking at versions of my favorite “Age Bag” notebooks that use a similar cover material. The ones I’m referring to are small cloth bound notebooks with squared paper, which are hard to get/expensive for US delivery (via Amazon). I bought mine in Paris— the notebooks themselves are pretty cheap.
The Age Bag notebooks I bought have a sort of wrinkled, leather-like texture to their pressboard. (Similar notebooks are sometimes branded “Life Unplugged” or “Essentials” in the US.) Other Clairefontaine notebooks in the Europa series seem to have a more traditional smooth texture, though it’s hard to be totally sure from online images.
The February 29th New York Times has a piece by Tess Taylor, talking about her pilgrimage to California, to visit as many places photographed by Dorothea Lange as she can. She also read Lange’s pocket notebooks, now archived at the Oakland Museum of California.
Ms. Lange, best known for her Depression-era photographs of migrant laborers, began photographing bread lines and labor strikes near her San Francisco studio in 1932. In the 1920s, she had made her living as a society portraitist, photographing San Francisco’s wealthiest families — the Levi Strauss and the Haasfamilies among them.
As the Great Depression worsened, she began photographing people she saw on the streets: men curled up sleeping or in line for food. In 1935, she married the economist Paul Taylor; they left San Francisco together to photograph the living conditions of agricultural laborers up and down the state, from Davis and Marysville all the way to Imperial County. The Farm Security Administration supported their work.
In 2017, I started reading Ms. Lange’s notebooks, now held at the Oakland Museum of California. On lined 3 by 5 inch pages, in penciled-in cursive, she captures American history in staccato fragments, jotting down what laborers paid for gas, rent and food; how much they could make picking a day’s worth of potatoes. On one June trip following the melon harvest in El Centro, under a heading “The camp,†she notes someone saying: “This is a hard life to swallow, but I can’t just rest here.â€
The image below is the only page of notes pictured in the article, but it’s written on government stationery, not in a notebook. I haven’t been able to find any other images of the notebooks online, unfortunately!
Here’s another story found via a reader tip. (Thanks Nicholas!) In a new book called Facebook: The Inside Story, author Steven Levy talks about Mark Zuckerberg’s notebooks, and it turns out that Levy even has some pages from one of the early notebooks. Zuckerberg has supposedly destroyed the rest.
THE YEAR IÂ first met Zuckerberg, he was living in a one-Âbedroom apartment a short walk from the Facebook offices, which were spread among a few buildings in downtown Palo Alto. Always with him was one of his notebooks. Those who visited his apartment, with its mattress on the floor and barely used kitchen, might spot a stack of completed journals. But most of his time was spent in the crowded, chaotic Facebook offices, where he could be seen, head down, scrawling in his crabbed, compact script. He sketched out product ideas, diagrammed coding approaches, and slipped in bits of his philosophy. Page after page were filled with straight lines of text, bullet-pointed feature lists, flow charts.
Zuckerberg was no longer doing much coding; he was focused mostly on the big picture. The notebooks allowed him to work out his vision in detail. When Facebook engineers and designers rolled in to the office, they would sometimes find a few photocopied pages from the notebooks at their workstations. The pages might contain a design for a front end or a list of signals for a ranking algorithm. He was still finding his way as a communicator, and the pages often opened up a conversation between the recipients and their boss. They also imbued ZuckerÂberg’s thoughts with a kind of inevitability. The printed page can’t be deleted or altered, or forwarded in infinitely duplicable digital form. Whiteboards appeared in abundance in every Facebook office, and employees couldn’t survive without excellent dry-eraser skills. But a Zuck notebook carried the sanctity of a papal decree.
The notebooks have now mostly disappeared, destroyed by Zuckerberg himself. He says he did it for privacy reasons. This is in keeping with sentiments he expressed to me about the pain of having many of his early IMs and emails exposed in the aftermath of legal proceedings. “Would you want every joke that you made to someone being printed and taken out of context later?†he asks, adding that the exposure of his juvenile jottings is a factor in his current push to build encryption and ephemerality into Facebook’s products. But I discovered that those early writings aren’t totally lost. Snippets, presumably those he copied and shared, present a revealing window into his thinking at the time. I got ahold of a 17-page chunk from what might be the most significant of his journals in terms of Facebook’s evolution. He named it “Book of Change.â€
Dated May 28, 2006, the first page has his address and phone number, with a promise to pay a $1,000 reward for return of the book if lost. He even scrawled an epigram, a message to himself: “Be the change you want to see in this world.†Mahatma Gandhi.
The writing reveals an author with focus and discipline. He dated nearly every page. Some of the entries seem to have been created in a single burst of energy. They cover three or four pages of detailed road maps with neat sketches of sample screens. Nothing is crossed out. This is the work of someone in a maximum state of flow.
This look at the Pen & Ink Sketchbook is the 2nd post in my “Then and Now” series, examining various notebook brands that have been around for a while to see how they’ve changed. (See my “then and now” post about the Rhodia Webnotebook). I am always griping about how Moleskine’s notebooks have declined in quality, but the changing costs of manufacturing and materials are affecting all brands, so it seems fair to see how different companies are able (or not) to uphold their standards.
When I first started looking at alternatives to Moleskine notebooks, Pen & Ink from Art Alternatives was one of my favorite brands. They offered a variety of page formats, and even offered a sketchbook with heavyweight paper in both portrait and landscape styles. I didn’t love Pen & Ink squared notebooks because the lines were too dark, but the heavyweight sketchbook was the best (and maybe the only) alternative to the Moleskine sketchbook for users who wanted a pocket size hardcover with heavier, smooth paper. And the prices were great. (See Four Notebooks Reviewed Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.)
Art Alternatives Pen & Ink Heavyweight Sketchbook, 2008
Back then, I wasn’t thrilled that the cover edges on the Pen & Ink notebook had more overhang than Moleskine, but nowadays pretty much every notebook seems to have at least that much overhang. But otherwise I liked the soft feel of the cover and found it well-made, with the paper performing similarly to Moleskine’s sketch paper. I used one Pen & Ink sketchbook as a daily carry journal in 2014, and have another spare that I had used for pen tests in the 2008 review.
You can see at first glance that the packaging looks very different. Most importantly, the elastic closure now wraps diagonally around the corner, which I don’t like. The cover material is pretty much the same. They’ve added “Art Alternatives” and “blank” to the branding stamped on the back cover, where the old version just had “Pen & Ink” and called it “sketch.” Overhang is pretty much the same, maybe just slightly more… but the corners aren’t tucked in as tidily on the newer version. Although the page count is still 96, and paper weight is still 145 GSM, the notebook seems a bit thinner, and not as evenly squared off (perhaps that diagonal elastic pulls it off-kilter).
The paper is still a creamy ivory, but very slightly brighter white in the newer notebook. (The endpapers are even whiter, while in the old version, they are the same shade as the pages.) It is still quite good on bleed-through, with only the wettest markers soaking through to the back of the page. Show-through is actually a little better in the newer Pen & Ink notebook. The newer version is also better in terms of fountain pen feathering, though neither is really perfect. In both cases, I would still say these are great for drawing with gel pens, Microns, and pencils, when you want nice straight lines undisrupted by toothier paper. Despite the design changes, Pen & Ink sketchbooks have not declined drastically since 2008 in terms of manufacturing quality, and the paper has actually improved.
In 2008, the list price was $9.99 for the Pen & Ink Sketchbook. The suggested retail is now $10.75, though JetPens has them for $8.00, Amazon’s price is $6.34, and Blick’s is $5.84. For the features you get, I think these are great prices, but the diagonal elastic makes it a no-go for me. (On many of the websites where they are sold you will still see the old product image, but what you’ll get, at least in my experience, will be the new version.)
As for other options that have all or at least some of the features of the Pen & Ink sketchbook:
Moleskine’s pocket sketchbook prices have always been much higher, from $10-15 in 2008, and most recently listing at $17.95, but that’s a moot point now that they are discontinued (Moleskine confirmed to me that they have no plans to keep making them in the 9 x 14cm size, so if you still like them, snap them up while you can).
Stillman and Birn’s Epsilon series offers high-quality smooth paper in a pocket size, but without the hard cover, elastic closure, or back pocket. Their list price is $11.99, though they are discounted to $9.59 at Jerry’s Artarama.
Leuchtturm’s sketchbook (reviewed here) is also a great option if you don’t mind the size being slightly taller, but list prices are closer to Moleskine’s and discounting doesn’t seem as prevalent.
Tim Ferriss: You mentioned distraction earlier and your dangerously adorable son, which I certainly agree with. I had read somewhere, actually, before I get to that, this might seem like a very, very mundane question, but what type of notebooks do you prefer? Are they large legal pads or are they leather bound? What type of notebooks?
Neil Gaiman: When they came out, I really liked — I’ve used a whole bunch of different ones. I bought big drawing ones, which actually turned out to be a bit too big, though I liked how much I could see on the page. Those are the ones I wrote Stardust and American Gods in, big size, but they weren’t terribly portable. I went over to the Moleskines, and I loved them when they first came out, and then they dropped their paper quality. Dropping paper quality doesn’t matter, unless you’re writing in fountain pen, because all of a sudden it’s bleeding through, and all of a sudden you’re writing on one page, leaving a page blank because it’s bled through and then writing on the next page.
Joe Hill, about six or seven years ago, Joe Hill, the wonderful horror fantasy writer, suggested the Leuchtturm to me. My usual notebook right now is a Leuchtturm, because I really like the way you can paginate stuff in them and the thickness of the paper, and they’re just like Moleskines, but the Porsche of Moleskines. They’re just better.
I also have been writing, I wrote The Graveyard Book and I’m writing the current novel in these beautiful books that I bought in a stationery shop in Venice, built into a bridge. Somewhere in Venice there’s a little stationery shop on a bridge, and they have these beautiful leather-bound blank books that just look like hardback books, but they’re blank pages. I wrote The Graveyard Book in one of those. I bought four of them, and now I’m using the next one on the next novel, and it may well go into another one. I’m not sure….
I love getting tips from readers, and this is a really special one. (Thanks Matt!)
Itsuo Kobayashi, a former Japanese soba chef born in 1962 … has recorded his meals in painstakingly detailed, hand-drawn food diaries of sorts for the past 32 years. In addition to recollections about taste, Kobayashi’s pen has accounted for every last spring onion and grain of rice, for the sheer pleasure of tasting life twice…
My Nolty addiction went a little overboard this year. I was so intrigued by some of the 2020 formats that I ended up buying 4 diaries, including the new Nolty Daily Book. I’m not totally sure how I’m going to use all of them!
2020 Nolty Diaries
2020 Nolty Diaries
First, the Nolty Efficiency Notebook Gold. This is my second year using the Nolty Gold (click that link for more details). It is an indulgence, but the leather cover is so lovely. I also love that it comes with extra lined booklets that can be tucked in the back– handy for long-term lists like books to read or movies to watch. This notebook is a daily carry, where I track various habits, note appointments, daily exercise and meals, and weekly to-do and shopping lists.
Nolty Gold Efficiency Notebook 2019 and 2020
I also got a regular Nolty Efficiency Notebook model 1221 (see my detailed review of my first 2019 Nolty Diary). This one has the standard vinyl cover and black page edges. I got the version with the extra Japan railway maps, for no particular reason other than that they are fun to look at, and because the version that includes these maps has a slightly different texture on the vinyl cover. I am using this as my 2020 “image diary.”
This year was the first time I tried model #1181, which they seem to call the “Lights Memo.” (Google’s translation calls it that, anyway.) It is the smaller size, which fits in a passport Travelers Notebook. I was interested in the week-on-2-pages layout with small blocks for the days across the top and free-form squared space underneath. But once I had it in my hand I felt like the daily blocks were too small to really be useful. This Nolty has a removable vinyl cover. The inner notebook tucks into clear plastic vertical pockets in the front and back. There is a plastic pen loop on the cover. A supplemental graph paper booklet is included in the back. I may just use this for handwriting practice and doodles, and don’t plan to buy another one next year.
Nolty “Lights” Model 1181
I ordered those 3 diaries last fall. Shortly thereafter, Nolty announced some additional new products celebrating their 70th anniversary. When I saw the Nolty Daily Book (model #1227, also available with a red cover as #1228), I totally fell in lust. A chunky day-per-page Nolty was my dream, the perfect alternative to the Hobonichi Techo, which is a bit too big for me. I kept hoping I’d be able to order the Daily Book from the Rakuten Global seller where I bought my other Nolty diaries, but they didn’t have it. For a while, it looked like the Daily Book was out of stock, and I wondered if I’d missed my chance. But I kept checking, and saw stock was available on Japanese sites, but not anywhere I could understand how to order. After lots of waffling, I finally special ordered it in January through Kinokuniya, even though their price was rather high ($36.99 plus tax, for pickup in their NYC store. The Japanese price on Nolty’s website is 2420 Yen, or around $22, but shipping direct from Japan would add cost. For context, Kinokuniya I think was charging around $45 for the Hobonichi Techo. JetPens charges $37 for the Hobonichi.).
When I got my Daily Book, I wished I had pulled the trigger earlier. and not missed being able to use it all through January. It is quite adorable. I love the extra thickness. I love the page layout, with some blank space at the top and grid lines underneath. The paper seems to be the same as in the Efficiency Notebooks– thin, creamy, smooth and fountain pen friendly– writing does show through somewhat, but no bleed-through or feathering. For some reason, this Nolty has a big red headline saying “REMARKS” on the page that seems to have space for you to write your name and contact details. (Kinokuniya didn’t put their price sticker there, I just decided to save it there myself.)
With cover removed
Here’s a few shots comparing the Nolty Daily Book to the Hobonichi Techo:
Nolty Daily Book vs. Hobonichi Techo
There are a couple of things about the Daily Book that I wish were different, though. This has a removable cover with a pen loop, similar to the #1181. It’s nice to be able to tuck things in the front and back, but it makes the cover overhang a bit wider, so I think I prefer the glued-on cover of the regular and Gold Efficiency Notebooks. (But on the other hand, a removable cover means the interior block could be put into some other cover. I checked to see if it would fit in my emptied out Moleskine City Notebook cover, but it’s a little too fat. It might work if I ripped out the endpapers and back pocket. It would fit in an emptied out Moleskine Daily Planner cover, but there might be too much extra room…)
Nolty Daily Book vs. 2001 Moleskine Daily Planner
I also wish the monthly pages in the beginning were the Gantt chart available in some of the Efficiency Notebook versions. The Daily Book only has the month-on-2-pages layout. The Daily Book doesn’t include any supplemental booklets to tuck in the back, and it’s not really designed for that extra thickness, although you can add a booklet from another Nolty without it causing any problems. And a supplemental booklet might be needed with the Daily Book, because it only has one lined sheet and one graph paper sheet in the back for extra notes. (The Daily Book has a yearly layout and monthly pages in the front, then the daily pages, and at the end, the lined page, the graph page, and then a few pages of Japanese info and transit maps.)
So now my new dream is that Nolty will make a Daily Book Gold. The leather cover would be glued on, without too much overhang. And they’d add a supplemental squared booklet in the back.
How am I going to use the Nolty Daily Book? I’m not sure. I’ve owned a couple of Moleskine Daily diaries and never really formed a habit of using them, but I never liked their lined page format. Using both the Daily Book and the Efficiency Notebook Gold might be kind of overkill. I’m thinking it may be nice to use for a daily doodle and drawing, and maybe more detailed notes about what I did each day, since there’s not as much space for all that in the Efficiency Notebook. But the Efficiency Notebook is thinner and more portable. I might prefer to leave the chunky Daily Book on my bedside table or desk… though I think I’d miss having it with me! My daily carry is ballooning…
If they continue to offer the Daily Book in future years (and I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t), I’ll have to decide how best to justify buying all my favorite models!
Notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, diaries: in search of the perfect page…
