The Vanguard Softcover is a series of notebooks from Baron Fig. They are reasonably priced, high quality cahier-style notebooks that sell for about $5 each. The Vanguard is sold in packet of three.
Baron Fig Vanguard Softcover Notebook
Quo Vadis Habana Notebook
The Quo Vadis Habana is a fountain pen-friendly hardcover notebook with exceptionally smooth paper.
Kokuyo Soft Ring Notebook
The Kokuyo Soft Ring is a small, light notebook that uses plastic, flexible rings for its binding, instead of a wire. This might sound like a weird idea, but it’s both ingenious and quite practical.
Moleskine Classic Notebook
The Moleskine Classic is, as the name suggests, the standard Moleskine. The Classic is a notebook with 240 pages. It is one of the most common and easy to find of all premium notebooks. It’s designed to be the perfect everyday notebook and journal.
Maruman Mnemosyne Word Cards
Maruman Mnemosyne Word Cards are essentially a set of flash cards that are bound together with a single snap-lock metal ring. They gained popularity with fountain pen users when they started to be used for testing and cataloging fountain pen ink.
Muji Word Cards
Many people lament the early death of the Maruman Mnemosyne Word Book and have since adopted the Col-o-ring ink testing notebook. While this is a fine option, Muji has a much more affordable product for sale that you might be able to buy locally.
Col-o-ring Ink Testing Book
The Col-o-ring Ink Testing Book is a ring of high-end paper that helps fountain pen lovers keep track of their ink catalog. It’s something you could do on your own, with all sorts of different paper, but Col-o-ring has done such a nice job with this book that it’s become quite a popular product.
Baron Fig Nomad Sticky Notes
The Baron Fig Nomad Sticky Note are a 3″ x 3″ sticky note with a grid pattern printed on them. They are a direct competitor to yellow sticky notes, which are most popularly sold as the 3M Post-It notes.
Lamy Booklets
In August 2019 Lamy announced that the company would start to sell paper. This was the first such release in the company’s history. One of the offerings is a 3-pack of softcover notebooks that Lamy calls their Booklets.
Field Notes Memo Books
Field Notes, are simple, super popular memo books. They are generally sold in 3.5″ x 5.5″ sized notebooks and 48 pages in graph, ruled, and plain paper decorations. The brand is well known for its limited edition runs and many cover options.
The most standard, most true to the original form, Field Notes notebook is the “Original Kraft.” It’s still sold today in 3-packs for about $10.
Hobonichi Techo Avec
The Hobonichi Techo is one of the best-selling Japanese planners every year, including 2019. It’s a main competitor to the Traveler’s notebook, with some distinctive advantages and disadvantages when the two are compared, including the use of Tomoe River Paper, which will make or break the Techo for some people. The Avec is the half-year model, so it’s sold in January-June and July-December for each year.
The Avec is sold in the A6 size, with the Avec A6 being one of the most affordable Hobonich Techo planner, at a retail price of 1100 JPY.
MIO Paper
This is the paper used in the Kokuyo Campus High Grade Notebook. MIO is said to the the best (or at least the most expensive) paper sold in any Campus notebook, but nothing else is explained about it.
Hobonichi Techo Cousin
The Hobonichi Techo is one of the top-selling Japanese planners each year, including 2019 (and soon 2020!). It’s also a main competitor to the Traveler’s notebook, with some distinctive advantages and disadvantages when the two are compared.
The Hobonichi Cousin is the A5 size of the planner, which is the largest size that is sold. While this is a Japanese planner, it is available in the United States and other countries, though normally at a premium price.
Silvine Originals Project Notebook
The Silvine Originals Project notebook is a large, high quality notebook. The notebook is hand-finished in the United Kingdom with a calico cloth binding. The notebook has heavyweight 90 gram per square meter paper with a slight texture to it. This a lie-flat notebook with heavyweight 300 gram per square meter covers.
Studio Neat Panobook
The Panobook is a landscape-oriented, extra-wide notebook, hence the name Panobook (as in panorama). It was original a launched on Kickstarter in June of 2017 and by the campaign’s close in October of that year it received 3,623 buyers whose total purchases amounted to $187,149.
The Panobook is a 100 page, wirebound notebook that measures 29 cm by 16 cm (11.3 inches by 6.3 inches). The extra width is useful for some some people when notetaking or placing the notebook on a shelf, but ultimately its not took different from getting a standard grid notebook and using it sideways. Or you could use it vertically and have what looks like an oversized report’s notebook.
What is cool about the Panobook is its attention to detail. The creators at Studio Neat offer lots of cool information about the notebook, such as how it uses a cover made out of Neenah LaCrema 617 Charcoal paper on 50 pt black chipboard or that the paper is Finch Fine Soft White Ultra Smooth paper in 70 lb Text. Or did you know that the text on the notebook is Verlag from Hoefler & Co.?
The Panobook has a stiff board cover that gives it some extra rigidity and a sturdy feeling. It’s a nice change of pace from your standard Rhodia or other floppy softcover.
The uncoated paper has a nice weight but it doesn’t play as nicely with fountain pen ink. It can feather and even bleed through with wetter pens, like a broad fountain pen. It’s still nice paper and a good option for most pens, but it’s more of a general use paper than a fountain pen lovers specialty paper (which is often the use-case for expensive notebooks).
Panobooks sell direct from Studio Neat for $20 each.
Image courtesy of Panobook