As with Pens, so it is with Notebooks, you keep looking for combinations of things till you have exactly what it is you're after. For the most part, it's significantly easier with pens, you can get light or heavy, EF to stub nibs, plastic to metal casings, and all in between.
Notebooks however, Notebooks are a little different, particularly if you're wanting a very specific combination of things. This week just gone, I had an opportunity to get in early on Rob de la Porte's latest experiment, the book arrived yesterday.
It was everything I was after.
The first problem I have is that I have tiny writing, there's no other way to describe it, so most of the time, with regular lining on notebooks (between 5mm and 7mm), I end up losing a lot of the page to blank space because my writing literally fits between the lines. Not so here...
3mm lines, top to bottom, no excessive margins...
Then there's the quality of the paper, it's no good to me if it bleeds through, no matter the type of ink I use or the saturation of it.
Zero bleed through, not even the hint of the opposite side. It's technically 120gsm, but it has a silk finish, so doesn't feel as thick as it actually is.
Then there's the binding of the notebooks, I do a lot of work in smaller spaces, so I appreciate it when the notebook clean over without any resistance, and the rings used for binding here are very similar in nature to the Atoma notebooks I've used before, only in shiny aluminium.
Given the nature of the binding, it means that all pages are detachable and moveable within the notebook itself, giving me the ability to change things around or re-order my notes as I need to. This may not seem like a big thing, till you realise that I have more than twenty notebooks between A7 and A4, all full of notes, all of them making a reference to pages in other books where I've had similar ideas. With this one, I just take the page out and move it next to the similar ideas as I have them, no more need to keep a multiple index, just change the book to suit.
Is there a price on perfection?
Of course there is...
£15.95 for the aluminium book I have here, £10.95 for the same book with plastic binding. This isn't cheap, for the same money you could get a medium Leuchtturm or Moleskine, and while both of those books are good things to have, they don't possess the ridiculous utility of this one. I'd get more pages in either of the other two books, but the 60 pages of invulnerable, hyper narrow ruled, re-organisable notebook here easily outweighs the use of either of them. It may well be the most useful notebook I've ever owned, and certainly the one that I'll be carrying most places to make notes with, which given the number of notebooks I have, is quite a thing...
The thing to consider here is that this was made for me on request, the 3mm wasn't available till I asked for it, and I've seen the other templates available for this, as well as Rob's willingness to consider anything at all, because he understands that if you are particular about what you write with and on, it's important, and he treats it as that.
These will be available soon from http://www.personalised-stationery.co.uk/
Second review of Personalised Stationery, one to keep an eye on here folks...
