(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Twitter. And check out her latest book, Out of Water, now available where books are sold!)
272 pages of lay-flat-bound, original, 68 gsm Tomoe River paper in a vegan leather, hardbound, space-themed cover. That's it; that's the review.
Okay, a bit more detail, just for fun.
Odyssey Notebooks caught my attention entirely based on their looks. They're gorgeous notebooks with elegant, understated designs that are fun and interesting. This Saturn cover has the ringed planet lightly debossed in silver foil on a cream-colored vegan leather. The hard cover is thick and sturdy with rounded edges. There is an elastic band to hold the book closed.
Inside, the endpapers are grey-brown with light grey constellations. There's an accordion pocket inside the back cover, and the spine has two satin ribbon bookmarks--one gold and one a champagne color. There's a title page with room for personal information, followed by all those good Tomoe pages. Each page is numbered, with a dot grid in light grey. It's enough guide to use it as lined or grid, but faint enough to disappear if you want to treat the page as blank. The B5 size is perhaps my favorite size for writing. It's big enough to let your ideas spread out, to keep a lot of information visible at once, or to let a mind map of ideas run wild, but it's still small enough to fit in a purse or mini backpack.
The paper may not need a review, especially as it's becoming harder and harder to find, but it's wonderful. Light, crisp, and impervious to anything you throw at it. Not even the Sharpie dotted through, though darker inks do show some ghosting. It really is the perfect paper, and as much as I'm enjoying the quest to find one I like just as much (which involves using lots and lots of notebooks), I still haven't found anything that's its equal.
Odyssey has a number of notebooks in various sizes, colors, page counts, and designs, some with this wonderful paper, others with paper for artists. There are even softcover varieties. Designs range from space themes to mythological figures. This particular notebook sells for $38, which I would consider to be on the pricier side for a notebook, but I can certainly see how the quality of this item has resulted in a higher cost. It's a reasonable asking price for what you get. But I wouldn't wait, if you want the same paper experience. No doubt the notebooks will still be excellent with whatever paper replaces the TR when it runs out--every feature of this notebook is lovely, paper aside--but this incarnation is too good to miss.
(Brad purchased this notebook at full retail from Lemur Ink at the 2022 Atlanta Pen Show.)
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