I love finding out about notebook brands I’ve never heard of, this time via a fun article from Buzzfeed, by Josephine Wolff. She first talks quite a bit about her notebooking habits:
As far back as I can remember, I have been an obsessive keeper and collector of notebooks, devoted to filling them with lists and notes and doodles — but I have never been good at keeping an actual journal. I first remember trying when I was 10 years old, but somewhere around day three or four of yet another entry beginning “I went to school and then I came home…†I would inevitably throw in the towel and decide that diaries were meant for people with more glamorous and exciting lives than mine.
My inability to keep a journal has not in any way hindered my notebook consumption over the years…
I totally identified with that! For most of my childhood, I was always craving a new notebook but never that good about actually writing much in them because my life didn’t seem that interesting! Wolff continues, talking about various notebooks she used over the years, until:
In March 2015, my mother discovered Fantasticpaper notebooks, manufactured by the German company Authentics, in a department store in Berlin. She brought me back two gray Fantasticpapers and I fell in love.
Wolff goes on to describe why she loves the Fantasticpaper notebooks, which she ended up buying in bulk from a store in Belgium:
They have a sewn binding that lays perfectly flat when open, paper so thick that absolutely no ink bleeds through the page, a durable cardboard cover that doesn’t peel after months of intensive use, and a modern geometric industrial design aesthetic that is pretty without being too precious. It is as if the designers heard every complaint I’d ever made about a notebook — curling covers, too-bright grid lines, too-large graph paper squares, thin paper, unsatisfactory binding — and designed this notebook just to meet my particular specifications.
Looks like she’ll be set for a while! (Maybe this should be a Notebook Addict of the Week post!)
The Fantasticpaper notebooks do look rather nice– they come in some nice color combinations, in A5, A6 and XL sizes, with lined, squared or plain paper. The company’s website takes you to this online shop, where they start at €7.99 for the A6 size. But I’m not sure if they ship outside of Europe. Something to add to my list of notebooks to try someday!
Be sure to read the full article, which is full of wonderful insights about keeping notebooks: How Finding The Perfect Notebook Made Me Less Anxious About The Future. Wolff feels happy about her new-found notebook writing habits, and secure because she’s stockpiled enough Fantasticpaper notebooks to last her a decade. But I’ll admit that had me worrying on her behalf: “only a decade?”
