(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'm going to throw caution to the wind and admit upfront that this is one of my favorite notebooks on the market right now. That's because it's one of the closest things I've found as a replacement for my true favorite notebook, the beloved and discontinued Nanami Paper Seven Seas Writer. It's far from identical, but it meets my needs in a similar way. It's also a great substitute for a Hobonichi Cousin if you want something similar to that, but with less structure. It's perfect as a commonplace book or daily pages journal, but also works well just as a regular notebook. With lots and lots of pages. Which we know I like.
The Stalogy Editor's Series comes in A5, A6, and B6 sizes (much like the Hobonichi--and these fit nicely into Hobonichi Cousin or Techo cases and covers) in a few colors: black, red, yellow, and this lovely shade of blue. There is also a B6 Landscape edition. The cover is a thin, lightly textured cardstock that is flexible. It wears well with use, looking loved without becoming too shabby. The design is minimal, with only a few metallic brand logos in the upper left corner.
Inside, there are 184 sheets (368 pages) of 52 gsm white paper with faint grey graph lines (lined and dot grid paper versions are available if you prefer). The line spacing is a narrow 4mm. Each page is also numbered with the month, dates, and days of the week printed at the top, so you can circle the date for each page. This is perfect for folks who don't need or want to planner every day, but hate skipping precious notebook pages. Or, if you happen to need multiple pages for a day. The left margin also has hour markers from 0 to 24, if you need to track an hourly schedule. All these markings are very faint, however, so if you just want to use the notebook as a regular notebook, these guides do not get in the way at all. The binding is thread and glue, and the notebook lays open on its own. I have not had any pages come loose even after extended use and hauling around.
The paper is excellent quality. It's indistinguishable from Tomoe River paper, with the same thin crispness and ink handling capabilities. You will see ghosting, as you would with any thin coated paper, but even if that bothers you and you can only use one side of the paper, you still have a lot of pages to work with in this notebook. It handles liquid ink well and is great for fountain pen users.
I've used mine as a standard notebook, ignoring the calendar functions and hourly schedules--though sometimes dating my work is handy, too. The A5 is perfect for fiction writing, and the A6 is perfect for when I need to write while traveling. The thin covers fit beautifully into just about any case I want to use, or it holds up well without a cover at all. I do think it would make a good planner for those who don't need the rigid structure of a standard planner (I need the structure, personally).
The A5 size costs $26 (though the lined limited editions are more). That's a very similar cost to the Hobonichi graph notebooks, though those have 144 sheets (288 pages). These do, however, cost $6 more than the JetPens Kanso Noto Tomoe River notebooks, which have 160 sheets (320 pages). These are also fantastic notebooks. They're all great, and in pretty close range of one another, and we're spoiled for choice. The correct answer, of course, is to go for all three.
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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