The 365 Notebook

If you go shopping at Plain Stationery, Homeware & Café (Plain.tw) you will find many wonderful things including the 365 Notebooks.

I ordered my 365 Notebook from them and a it was with me in less than a week which is not bad for a trip half way around the world, incidentally, since my order this range has started to become available ‘locally’ via Amazon and other online retailers.

Now, as you can see from the variety of notebooks I’ve looked at my inclination is always towards the conventional and practical and in some respects this notebook meets that criteria and in others it differs. 

The version we are looking at today is the dark grey (Sumi) landscape notebook.

365 Notebooks are made in Japan and as you would expect they are made to exacting standards; the first thing I noticed about this notebook was the rigid plastic sleeve, which is unusual for any notebook, that slides over the notebook and the guide card to protect it while it is travelling with you.

To run through the basics. This is a 380 sheet notebook that is tape bound with a dark grey card cover and a more rigid cream coloured rear cover, and when you look at the images you would be forgiven for expecting to see a notebook with that many pages that would rival a house brick not a notebook under 20mm thick.

This is where the key difference is; the 365 Notebook uses onion skin paper (Wikipedia) which for anyone not familiar with it is a type of paper that is extremely thin but also very strong and was used, by some publishers, as insert pages to protect illustrations, produce lightweight version of books et cetera.

In this notebook it has been taken in a different direction; the paper has two textures; one side of the sheet has been finished and is very smooth and the other side has more of an ordinary paper texture.

I tested both sides of the paper using Diamine Oxford Blue and whilst there was complete show through regardless of which side was being tested; interestingly it did not bleed through. I then did an ad hoc test with a ball pen and gel pen and the results were a lot better; and better still when I used a pencil.

Another thing I liked about this notebook is the guide card (5mmm grid) which slips easily under the page you are working on.

Finally, it’s hard to recommend a notebook I will never use and not because it is a bad notebook but just because it doesn’t suit what I do. What I would say is this; if you are looking for a notebook that offers an abundance of pages in a relatively small package, has excellent build quality and materials and is something different then this might be the one for you.

However, if you are looking for a more conventional lightweight notebook then GLP’s The Author might be a better choice.

Disclaimer: This notebook was purchased with my own funds at retail price. The opinions expressed in this review are my own; and I am not connected with either the retailers or manufacturers in any way.