New Stalogy Notebooks + Notepads: Editor's Series

It's always exciting when we get a new line in the shop, but this one I was especially looking forward to: last week we got in a shipment of new notebooks from Japan, the Stalogy line. Stalogy isn't quite as well known in Canada as other Japanese stationery companies, but I think with their quality of paper, they're going to be become more and more popular. Stalogy has other notebooks as well, but we're specifically carrying the Editor's Series, these black-covered with yellow half-slips, because of how well it does with fountain pen ink. We have the A4 notepads in portrait and landscape, which will be nice for designers and thinkers who like a wider space. We also have the notebooks in A6 + A5, and the much harder to find B6 + B5. I can say with experience that the B sizes are harder to find because I personally prefer the B sizes and I'm always on the lookout for them. Here's the A5 on top compared to the B5 below. I like both the B6 for notes and an everyday carry notebook, and the B5 for my writing and journaling. I find the larger space just does it for me a bit better. Stalogy's 365 Days Notebook is designed to have a page per day, except that it's a free diary style, so you can highlight or circle the day, date + month that you're on. The rest of the page is a light grid, with a very discreet 24 hour timestamp along the left side. If you are faithful to a page a day, you'll have used up a notebook in a year, but if you do miss a day or two, you don't have to worry as much about "wasting" the page. I know some customers who are going to try the page a day with a Stalogy rather than a Hobonichi because they know that they don't want to commit to every single day. The notebooks have a thin, black cardboard soft cover, and the notebook itself has a nice heft in the hand. The main reason why diehard Stalogy fans are diehard Stalogy fans, though, is the paper: it's sort of like Tomoe River paper, and it's in a really high quality binding. The signatures are super tight and you can flex and open the notebook flat easily. The paper is thin, and because there's so much of it, it's a bit heavier and the pages weigh themselves down. Another important note to keep in mind is that because the paper is thin, you get a lot more pages out of it without the notebook being any thicker than other standard notebooks - 368 pages. I have to clarify that the paper is not quite the same as Tomoe River paper, but it's really pretty good. It's almost as thin, and also handles fountain pen ink very well - I've used all of my currently inked up pens for journaling with the paper with no problem. Here are some writing samples. Noodler's Blue Upon the Plains of Abraham in a TWSBI Broad, and underneath is Sailor Tokiwa-Matsu in my Lamy 2000 Medium   Top to bottom: Tokiwa-Matsu in a Lamy 2000 Medium, Waterman Mysterious Blue in a Pilot Custom 92 Medium, Rohrer + Klingner Blau Permanent in an Edison Pearlette Medium The only pen + ink combo that had some problems was the Noodler's Kiowa Pecan in my Noodler's Konrad. I think it wasn't so much the extra ink on the page so much as it was the stiffness of the nib, meaning when I flexed it out, the tines were pressing pretty hard into the page; the carving up of the paper fibres meant the ink feathered into the page. When I used a softer flex nib, like a vintage flex nib, it did just fine. Like Tomoe River paper, though, it will also have significant show through, especially with wetter or heavier inks, but you can still see fine or medium nib writing through the back. The only pen that had feathering or bleed through was flexing the Konrad. I'm currently using the Stalogy notebook as my personal journal, which was good timing as I switch-over from my Life Noble Note, because I wanted to try out the paper. I One week in, and it's safe to say I'm sold - I think I like the heft of the notebook without the additional bulk of a hardcover (this notebook slides easily into my backpack or bag), but I especially love seeing the pages starting to get a bit crinkly from my writing.

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Behind the scenes, we're chugging along. Last week Caleb broke my camera, and Jon had to order me a new camera body. Caleb had sort of broken it months ago, and it was one of those things where it was held together with (washi) tape, and I sometimes had to turn it on and off a few times before it worked. The battery cover had also broken off, and because of the crash, I think the body had kind of bent in a weird way which meant that the battery sometimes fell right out. It was kind of ridiculous looking back on it, since I sort of blog and handle social media as part of my job, which requires taking pictures, but I think I couldn't bear the idea of getting a new one until we really had to. The plus side was that it was a nice week + a bit to really try out how I liked the notebook before doing the blog post. The new camera body came in today! What a wonderful Friday surprise, since it means we have the long weekend to catch up on photos and taking pictures of the Caleb and the furry ones. It also meant I rushed in a few snaps of the Stalogy notebooks to get this blog post up. I love the look of the body, but I'm definitely no real camera nut. One of these days I'm going take a course to learn how to use a camera properly. In high school I took a photography course, but it was back (not so long ago!) when high school art programs had dark rooms for students to learn to develop film and their pictures, and it was a bit more manual. I remember my photography teacher used to just dip his hands into the chemicals and shuffle the photographs around the fixer, while telling us to always use the tongs. Those were the days.