(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)
I will always have a use for a minimalist A5 notebook that's full of Tomoe River paper. There can never be too many, or enough, in this format. So, while this particular model isn't unique, it's a wonderfully useful notebook.
I had never used a Karatis notebook before. These come from Turkey, and I haven't seen them for sale on many sites. I saw this one on Goldspot Pens and decided to give it a try.
It's a soft-cover notebook, but the cardstock cover is quite firm. It has rounded corners and a lovely fibrous textured feel to it, like handmade paper. The binding is stitched thread and glue with a linen tape reinforcement, and it lies flat with very little training.
Inside, there are 96 sheets of blank, cream-colored, 52gsm Tomoe River paper. It's ideal for fountain pens, and is the same paper used in the coveted Hobonichi planners. It holds up well to a variety of inks and artists' media, even handling paint and markers well. It does show some ghosting, so not everyone likes to use both sides of the page, but 96 sheets is still a very decent size for a notebook. And if you don't mind using both sides with some shadows, you get 192 pages.
The sheets inside are blank, but the notebook comes with dotted, lined in two widths, and grid guide sheets. The bold lines on the guides show through the fine paper clearly, so you can place it behind the sheet you're writing on and have the layout of your choice. It's the best of all worlds.
There's not much else to this notebook. It's just a sturdy cover, with good binding, and a nice stack of excellent paper. What more do you need? You do get some color choices, too. It's also available in golden yellow, blue, and purple colors. The price for the Karatis notebook at Goldspot is $17, which is a fantastic deal. These would make excellent sketchbooks for artists, or commonplace books, short story books, journals of any kind. With the guide sheets, you could even make a fantastic custom bullet journal. For my personal use, it's the perfect length for a novella--a short novel or a very long story. It's a fun length of story to write, but it ends up being too long for a slim notebook and too short for a thick notebook. This one's just right.
(Goldspot provided this product at a discount to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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