I bought this adorable little notebook from JetPens. Although “etranger” is a French word, “di” is an Italian word, and Costa Rica is in Latin America, the company is Japanese. I guess it’s just that enjoyment of slightly absurd foreign phrases that you sometimes see on Japanese products, as there is also French text on the cover of the notebook. “Foreigner from Costa Rica. Put the mail in the post office, the mail has arrived…” whatever! Let’s take a look at the notebook.
This is a lovely little softcover notebook with a plastic outer cover– I chose lime green but other bright colors were available. It is slim like a Field Notes or Moleskine cahier, so it will slip right into almost any pocket, while being somewhat protected by the cover. It is very close in size to these other notebooks with the cover on, which measures 140 x 87mm, but the notebook without the cover is only 135 x 83mm. This unfortunately means you can’t refill the cover with a Field Notes or most other similar notebooks.
The cover is white underneath, with black endpapers. On the back there is a removable sticker. Underneath that there is a similar small barcode on the notebook itself but otherwise there is no branding other than the “courrier” logo on the front.
Inside you get a single stitched signature of 64 lined pages. The lines are spaced at 5mm, except for a wider space at the top. I love the red lines at the top and bottom of the page.
The paper itself is not as good a quality as what you find in some Japanese notebooks like the Hobonichi Techo shown below for comparison. It feels nice and smooth and works well with pencil or fine gel ink pens, but I had some bleed-through and slight feathering with wetter fountain pens. Show-through is a bit more than average.
Bottom line: the paper won’t rock your world, but if you want a cute little flexible jotter to add to your collection of pocket notebooks, this is a fun one! At $2.95 each from JetPens, why not? They even sell the refills separately at only $1.50.
