(Jeff Abbott is a regular contributor at The Pen Addict. You can find more from Jeff online at Draft Evolution and Twitter.)
If there's one thing I can never have enough of, it's A5 notebooks. Lucky for me, that particular size is easy to find in just about any paper quality, cover style, and binding style I could ever want. The A5 size just feels right in most situations, and I think it's great to always have one nearby.
The Bindewerk Linen Flex-Cover Notebook is the latest A5 notebook I've tried, and I'm really impressed with the quality that this hand-bound notebook packs inside.
Bindewerk is a small German company that produces stationery goods. This particular notebook features a soft linen cover that flexes easily like a poly cover on a spiral notebook. The linen is soft to the touch but still has a really great texture that makes it easy to handle. The notebook has rounded corners and zero branding on the exterior. The only branding is at the bottom of the inside back cover, which features a simple Bindewerk logo and "Handmade in Germany" in gray ink.
The notebook is perfect bound, and the stitching/binding feels tight and well-done. It can take some time to break in the binding so that the notebook lays flat without something to weigh it down, but once you've written a few pages of notes, it feels like an old worn notebook that goes with you everywhere. Unlike a lot of other A5 notebooks, this one does not have an elastic closure band or any bookmark tassels. It's minimal, and I love it.
The notebook I have features the grey linen fabric, but there are over a dozen other color options available. Regardless of the color you choose, you get the same linen fabric that I've really come to appreciate in this notebook.
The interior of the notebook is as simple and sparse as the exterior. There are no extra pages for titles and content lists — just 192 pages (96 sheets) of premium paper for you to work with. The pages aren't numbered, and there isn't any additional legends outside of the lines or grids (as in, there aren't any special date or title fields at the top). In my case, I have lined paper in this notebook, but you can also find this with blank or dot grid pages.
The paper is a light cream color and is 90gsm. I've had a lot of notebooks that claimed to be 90gsm that couldn't compete with 80gsm paper, so I've learned to take that number with a grain of salt. In the case of this Bindewerk notebook, the paper is absolutely fantastic. Bindewerk imports the paper from Italy to make their notebooks, and their paper choice is stellar. This paper is smooth, supple, and has a nice amount of feedback when writing. It handles fountain pen inks with aplomb and has almost zero show through on the back side of the page — even with dark, wet inks! I was really impressed by how well this paper behaved.
I've really enjoyed having this notebook on my desk over the past weeks. You can never judge a notebook by its unassuming A5 cover, but in the case of this Bindewerk Linen Flex notebook, it's something I highly recommend trying. At about $25, it's a good price. It's a few bucks more than some of the other large brands, but the price tag is worth the exceptional quality in my mind.
(Orange Art, the US distributor for Bindewerk, provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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