New Product Alert: Staples TRU RED Notebooks

May 15, 2019

Staples surprised me a couple of weeks ago by reaching out and asking whether they could send me some products to review from their “TRU RED” lineup, which ended up including two spiral-bound notebooks and an assortment of gel pens, permanent markers, and highlighters. Knowing that Staples has, in the past, been capable of sourcing inexpensive, relatively fountain pen-friendly paper, the notebooks interested me the most. On the whole, I wasn’t disappointed, and one notebook was excellent, though I predict there will be inconsistency in paper performance for those who want to exclusively use fountain pens or wet rollerballs in these notebooks.

The inside of each TRU RED notebook features a “catch-all” folder, which I find useful for work.

The TRU RED notebooks come in both softcover and hardcover variants, in medium and large sizes. Both notebooks sent to me by Staples were mediums (6.5” x 9.5"), which roughly equate to an A5 size. These spiral-bound notebooks look and feel premium-quality and durable - the hardcover notebooks feature a heavy chipboard cover, while the “softcover” versions sport a flexible plastic cover similar to what you would find on a Miquelrius notebook. The double spiral bindings feel like they will hold up in a bag, and haven’t bent despite some rough treatment.

The covers are thick and durable, and the double spiral binding should hold up well.

The paper is a mixed bag, and the packaging on these notebooks doesn’t provide much specific information other than that they are made in Taiwan. (The only information regarding weight, etc. is the designation as “Premium Heavyweight Paper,” which the Staples website indicates is 27-32 lbs.) Staples offers several different ruling options, including narrow (college) ruled, blank, “meeting”, and “project”. I’d personally love to see dot grid, but I’ll happily use a ruled notebook as long as the ruling is narrow enough. The best part? Perforated pages. For the notebooks I use at my day job, I need to be able to shred/scan/file notes, and the ability to easily remove pages is essential.

The first notebook I tested (the softcover) performed exceptionally well with fountain pens.

Not a hint of bleedthrough - or even show-through - on the reverse, despite the fact that I was using a very wet medium gold nib with an ebonite feed!

So what about paper quality? Well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The first notebook I opened (the softcover) had me really excited, because the paper was excellent, showing zero bleedthrough or feathering even with very wet fountain pen nibs. That initial thrill was tempered a bit when I tested out the hardcover notebook, because the paper - while OK - wasn’t nearly as good as the paper in the softcover notebook, despite the softcover notebook costing less money and nothing on the label to indicate that the two notebooks contained different paper. To me, the discrepancy in performance suggests batch variability, meaning that Staples is purchasing the paper for these notebooks from multiple sources, which makes perfect sense given the numbers. If you’re producing tens of thousands of these things, it’s unlikely that a single paper supplier will be able to meet demand.

On the hardcover notebook, the paper bled through, especially with a stub nib fountain pen, though it remained well within my “zone of usability” for everyday work purposes.

Good thing I don’t write with a stub nib at my day job.

Takeaways and Where to Buy

It’s hard for me to offer a single verdict on the “TRU RED” notebooks given the inconsistency in how the paper behaves, but on the whole I will say they are good for the price point. I’ll probably run by Staples this weekend and pick up one or two more of the black softcover notebooks, and if the paper is consistently good in that version, stock up because it’s some of the best inexpensive fountain pen-friendly paper I’ve used recently. Regardless, I’d wouldn’t hesitate to pick up more of these notebooks for work purposes, especially given the durability, professional look, and the attractive $9.99 price point for the medium softcover.

You can purchase these notebooks at Staples, either in their brick and mortar stores or online. Though it looks like the promotion ends today, Staples is currently offering a coupon code for 15% off purchases of $75 or more from their “Business Essentials” line. I have a few more of these products queued up for review, so stay tuned!

Disclaimer: Staples provided me with the notebooks featured in this review free of charge, for review purposes. I was not otherwise compensated for this review.

Journal Review: Trigg Life Mapper

December 15, 2018

I’m going to go ahead and call this a “journal review” to dispel any illusion about what I feel is a common misconception about this product: that it’s a “daily planner” intended to be carried around as a calendar replacement. No, the Trigg “Life Mapper” is what the company describes as a “productivity and mindfulness diary that transforms your goals into success,” by bringing “planning, habits, and mindfulness to a full journal format.” In other words, it’s a journal designed to guide your periodic (yearly, monthly, weekly, daily) reflection on your personal and professional goals, not to track your schedule. The Life Mapper has generally been favorably received, winning awards including “Best Diary” at the 2018 UK Calendar awards (which may have contributed towards some misconceptions about the product), and “Best New Product” at the 2017 London Stationery Show.

Sure, there’s an annual calendar at the front, but as you can see it’s for big-picture stuff only (unless you write really small).

So Who Is The Targeted Audience for the Trigg and How Does This Thing Work?

The Life Mapper has been around for a few years, and was originally a Kickstarter project designed, and since tweaked, with input from the internet productivity community. If you follow productivity blogs and podcasts (which I’ll admit to dabbling in), you will recognize many of the goal-setting and “life mapping” concepts from books like Getting Things Done, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The One Thing, and others. (By the way, another excellent online resource organized around of many of these same ideas is Shawn Blanc’s “The Focus Course,” especially if you’re looking for a more open-ended tool than the fairly rigid, condensed Life Mapper.)

The front section of the Life Mapper has a section to set annual, big-picture goals in each of four broad categories: self, work, passion, and relationships.

The Life Mapper uses the following process, summarized at a very high level:

Annual Forecast. At the beginning of each year, you do an “annual forecast” or planning session and set “big picture” goals for what you want to accomplish.
Goal-Setting and Progress-Tracking. Using the Life Mapper, you put these goals into four categories, which Trigg labels “Self,” “Work,” “Passion,” and “Relationships.” You set annual and weekly sub-goals, using the weekly and daily planning pages to make progress towards the “big picture.”
Regular Reviews. Periodically take stock of your progress. The Life Mapper includes sections for six-month and year-end self-assessments, though you can do this as often as you want.

The daily layout in the Trigg Life Mapper, which includes an inspirational quote or productivity tip, a space to organize tasks and goals in order of urgency, a section for “appointments,” and a blank space for open-ended writing/reflection/notes.

I’ve obviously not had time to work my way through the “process” set out in the 2019 Life Mapper, but I’ve used similar productivity techniques in the past and found that they do tend to work for me. The year that this blog really took off was actually the year that I was pretty strict in terms of setting goals and benchmarks for my writing and regularly tracking my progress. If you juggle multiple side hustles, or work in a job where you have to track multiple projects and/or develop new business and manage relationships with multiple long-term clients, you might find the techniques reflected here helpful. Even if you don’t adhere to the somewhat rigid structure set out in the Trigg, any sort of process that forces you to distill and refocus on those tasks and goals that are truly important (as opposed to a lot of the busywork that fills our days) can be quite useful, and even powerful.

In the middle and at the end of each year, the Trigg Life Mapper contains a section where you can assess your progress in the various categories.

So enough about productivity. How does the Trigg Life Mapper work as a stationery product? For starters, the 90 gsm paper is great. I tested a few fountain pens in the blank pages at the back, including one very wet stub nib, and while the paper is absorbent there was no bleed-through or feathering. The binding also appears durable, and I can see this sturdy book easily lasting a year, even if you lug it around with you day-to-day.

A few additional observations, both pros and cons:

Each daily page features a productivity tip or motivational quote, something I really enjoyed from my time with the Hobonichi Planner.
While I like the embossed design on the front, I do wish there were additional color schemes other than the turquoise/yellow.
While you can interpret the four categories however you want, based on your own personal goals and objective, I would have liked a couple of open categories to add a bit more flexibility, though this is likely impractical given that it would add bulk to an already thick journal.
The “Appointments” section on the daily page seems a bit incongruous. The Life Mapper clearly isn’t a calendar, and if an appointment is important enough to write down here, I would think that it would fall within the urgent/non-urgent task boxes. The extra space could have been used for more open “journaling” space (though of course you can just ignore the “appointments” section and do this anyway).

The Trigg Life Mapper is one thick notebook: check it out compared against a Baron Fig Confidant in leather cover!

Takeaways and Where to Buy

I’m the target audience for the Trigg Life Mapper, so I like the product. I may even use it this year, since it dovetails with the type of planning and goal-setting I do already. That said, it’s not for everyone, and if you’re considering making a purchase you should be aware that it’s a very structured product, unlike something like the Hobonichi Techo.

You can purchase the 2019 Trigg Life Mapper directly from Trigg. They have an Etsy Store as well, and The Gentleman Stationer is an Etsy affiliate, so if you’d like to help support the blog one easy way to do it is to purchase via my affiliate links, with no added cost to you. Either way, the price looks to be around $40 US shipped. I would get your order in soon to ensure delivery by January 1, especially if you are outside the UK, where Trigg is located.

Disclaimer: Trigg provided me with the journal featured here for review purposes, free of charge. This post contains affiliate links.

As you can see, these particular notebooks got some good use. Penwell Traveler in the background!

Notebook Review: Kunisawa Find Notebooks

October 24, 2018

A representative of the Kunisawa Stationery Company reached out to me a couple months ago and offered to send me some of their recently released notebooks to review - I didn’t realize that it would basically be a crate! I have three of each of their various products, and as I work my way through the different sizes and rulings, I’ll post my thoughts on the notebooks and pads. First up are the “Find Note Hard” and “Find Note Smart” - the first is a fairly standard A5 notebook, and the second is a tall and slim hardback pocket notebook, which is easily my favorite of the two. But first some information on the company itself.

One thing Kunisawa nailed was the logo and the texture of the covers. The Smart Note (top) feels like an old-school pocket ledger, and the A5 Hard notebook features a sheeny vinyl that also feels nice in the hand.

Background on the Kunisawa Stationery Company

Prior to receiving these notebooks, I’d never heard of Kunisawa Stationery. Per their website, it’s a new venture launched in 2017 by Kawachiya, an older, established Japanese paper manufacturer. Kunisawa is to be marketed as a “prestigious stationery brand for business performers,” and they’ve clearly focused on making a clean, fairly minimal notebook that doesn’t look out of place in an office or a boardroom. For their logo, Kunisawa has chosen a three-legged crow, based on a mythical Japanese figure “Yaragatsu.”

The “i do not seek, i find” quote appears on the inside of both notebooks.

“Due to using a golden luminance to guide Emperor Jimmu on his journey through the dark roads of Kumano, Yatagarasu is celebrated as ‘the God of Guidance.’ The three legs represent ‘heaven,’ ‘earth,’ and ‘humanity,’ indicating that all three are brothers born of the same sun. We use Yatagarasu as a symbol of business people that are casting a bright light on the future and inspiring the world.”

— Kunisawa Website

With the heavy focus on business users in the marketing copy, one could be forgiven for thinking this is a “Japanese Moleskine,” but it’s not. The paper and overall quality are much better, and serious effort clearly went into designing an attractive notebook, from the covers to the binding to the copper gilt edging on the paper.

So What About the Paper?

After having used both of these Kunisawa notebooks at work for the better part of a month, here’s my verdict: the paper on the larger A5 notebook is ok, and the paper in the “Find Note Smart” pocket notebook is exceptional. Others reviewing the same Kunisawa notebooks have not had any success at all with fountain pens, so I suspect there may be batch variations in the paper, much like what happened with the recently released “Elements” Notebooks. (See Susan’s review of the A5 and Jeff’s review of the Smart Note over at the Pen Addict.) Their disappointment is not unreasonable - the company expressly advertises the A5 Find Note Hard as “an ideas notebook specifically designed for fountain pens and carefully considered writing.” While the paper in my A5 isn’t terrible at all - I actually found it similar to the paper in Leuchtturm notebooks and the Studio Neat Panobook - it’s still not ideal for fountain pens. There is feathering and bleed through with wetter fountain pens and rollerballs, though I found that the paper performs much better with finer nibs and a light hand. The paper is far superior to Moleskine for fountain pen use, and I suspect most, if not all, typical business users wouldn’t notice any issues and would love the paper in this notebook.

Both Iroshizuku Yama-Budo and Asa-Gao feathered slightly on the “Foolscap” paper in the A5, and had pinpoint bleedthrough on the reverse. While these are both wet inks, they’re not regarded as high-maintenance.

Kunisawa describes the paper used in the “Find” notebooks as “Foolscap,” which they characterize as “created specifically for writing,” and “extraordinarily high quality.” While it’s good paper, I had always understood “foolscap” - at least the way it’s used in literature - to be a size, not a type of paper (which was confirmed by my Oxford English Dictionary), generally used by students, clerks, and attorneys for drafting. Perhaps something got lost in translation….

A sample of Yama-Budo and a very wet mix of Waterman blue/purple (“Blurple”) on the Find Smart pocket notebook. You can tell from the texture that this is likely different paper.

On the other hand, the paper in the Find Smart Note held up to any fountain pen I could throw at it without any hint of feathering or bleedthrough. I also love the format: 40 double-sided pages with gild edging, hardbound in a slim format that’s easy to carry in a coat pocket and use while standing up. The dimensions are slightly shorter and wider than the new Field Notes “End Papers” notebooks. I wish notebooks like this were easily available, and I can see myself using these up fairly quickly, provided the paper quality is consistent.

No bleedthrough whatsoever on my Find Smart Note.

Takeaways and Where to Buy

Kunisawa notebooks are not yet widely available here in the U.S., so the easiest way to purchase is probably to buy directly from the company itself via their webstore. (Overseas orders must be placed by e-mail, with contact details on the site.) The A5 Find Note Hard retails for approximately $26, and the Find Smart Note for just under $9, subject to exchange rate fluctuations. These notebooks are not inexpensive, but they’re also within what I’d consider to be the “range of reasonableness,” to borrow some lawyer-speak.

If you’re a pocket notebook aficionado, and the idea of a hardback pocket notebook you can slip into a jacket or suit pocket appeals to you, definitely check out the Find Smart Note. I was less enamored of the Find Note hardback A5 - I expected more from the paper, given the description - but if you like the look it’s certainly not a bad notebook. I look forward to testing out the rest of the notebooks and pads sent to me to see if there are additional variations in paper quality among the Kunisawa line. Stay tuned for more testing!

Disclaimer: Kunisawa sent me the notebooks featured in this review free of charge, for review purposes. Many thanks to Kunisawa for making this review possible!

Notebook Review: Stifflexible Notebooks

August 1, 2018

At this year's Atlanta Pen Show (way back in April, yes I know) I had the opportunity to check out Italian brand Stifflexible's updated line of notebooks. The primary selling point of Stifflexible Notebooks is the cover: it's a hardcover notebook that "flexes," making it easier to cram into an overstuffed briefcase or backpack without permanently damaging the cover. Not a major selling point for everybody, but I can see where it could come in handy for certain people. Stifflexible notebooks are made by the same company as Giuliano Mazzuoli pens, and are distributed by Luxury Brands USA, who regularly attend pen shows with a full display of these notebooks in tow.

Stifflexible Notebooks contain 192 pages of 80g ivory paper, which handles fountain pen ink quite well. 144 of those pages are lined, 32 are blank, and 16 are perforated graph. If you don't like lined paper, you're out of luck: I've not seen any all-blank or all-graph versions, but I can only assume that may be in the works at some point down the line. I'd personally love to see a notebook full of perforated graph paper. If you've tried Stifflexible notebooks in the past and did not have a great experience with fountain pens, the paper has recently been upgraded in response to customer feedback. The paper in my notebook handled pretty much any nib and ink combo I was able to throw at it, including a very wet medium loaded with Colorverse. (I don't typically write with anything much broader on a daily basis.)

Takeaways and Where to Buy

These are very nice notebooks with good paper; my one quibble being the lack of all-graph or all-blank options. The flexible cover isn't something that I necessarily need, but I can see how it would come in handy for students or road warriors who have to lug around an overstuffed bag. The cover art on these books is extremely well done, and I love the gold Paris Metro Map cover that I chose. A wide range of other designs are also available, as you can see from the Luxury Brands pen show display below. I may very well pick up a couple more this coming weekend in D.C.!

Distributor Luxury Brands brings a wide array of Stifflexible notebooks to pen shows.

Anderson Pens carries the full line of Stifflexible notebooks in a range of sizes from extra large all the way to small/pocket. (The notebook pictured here is the "medium" size, which is A5-ish and measures 5" x 8 1/4".) Pricing is $29 for the extra large, $18 for the large, $16.50 for the medium, and $11.50 for the small, all of which is a fairly standard price point for notebooks of this quality.

Disclaimer: I received the notebook featured in this review from Luxury Brands USA, the Stifflexible Distributor, free of charge for review purposes. I was not otherwise compensated for this review.

Notebook Review: Dingbats* Earth Collection A5 Notebook

June 23, 2018

I reviewed the initial Dingbats* notebook back in 2016, right after they first came onto the market. I was generally pretty impressed with the overall make of these notebooks, including the paper. Since then, Dingbats* has introduced new cover styles and seems to have grown their business nicely.

Apparently, Dingbats* had received some feedback about the paper in the initial notebooks, which was somewhat absorbent and could result in some bleedthrough and feathering with especially wet fountain pen nibs and ink. In response, they released the new "Earth Collection," which includes 100gsm coated cream paper that is more fountain pen friendly. Personally, I found the original Dingbats* paper to work more than adequately with the pens and inks that I tend to use day-to-day, but it's always good to see companies respond to what the market demands.

The new 100gsm coated cream paper is super nice, and Dingbats* has included marked tabs on the edges of the page to allow you to code/organize different sections of your notebook.

And the new Dingbats* paper is, indeed, great with fountain pens. It's coated to better handle fountain pen ink, and feels like Rhodia or Clairefontaine. The Earth notebooks retain most of the useful features of the other versions (a pen loop, dual ribbon bookmarks, lay-flat design, rear pocket, etc.) BUT the pages are no longer perforated - a touch disappointing but perhaps necessary due to the thicker paper?

A writing sample on Dingbats* new coated paper, in cream with dot grid. No noticeable feathering or bleed whatsoever.

Takeaways and Where to Buy

I'm almost finished with the Midori MD A5 that I've been using as my "work notebook"/hybrid bullet journal, and I have this Earth notebook lined up as the replacement. Note that the Dingbats* notebooks are ever-so-slightly larger than standard A5 notebooks, so if you are purchasing to fit a specific notebook cover, be aware that it may not work. For the record, I managed to fit the Earth notebook into my Nock Co. A5 Seed cover, but it was a tight squeeze.

Many thanks to Dingbats* for sending me this notebook for review! Dingbats* notebooks may be purchased directly from the Company's online store, and the Earth series starts at $22.95 with free shipping on orders over $35.

Disclaimer: Dingbats* provided me with this notebook free of charge for review purposes. This post contains affiliate links.