‘Tis the season to buy a new planner and you know we here at the Desk LOVE planners. Well ok, we love trying and reviewing new planners, but we’re always talking about which ones do and don’t work for us.
If I’m being truly honest with you all (you won’t tell anyone will you?) very few planners work for me. It’s not that I have such refined tastes or particular needs, it’s rather that I don’t. And I can go for weeks without looking at a calendar. (Thanks 2020 – no more of that please!)
The only thing I’ve found that I use consistently is a desk calendar that stays ON MY DESK. It’s basically my weekly bible and my ritual on Friday afternoons is to fill out the following week so I can empty my head of things to do before I wrap up for the weekend.
At this point the introduction is long and you’re probably wishing this were like a recipe online where you could skip the story and get straight to the point. It’s coming up, I promise.
So when I was browsing Jet Pens a few weeks ago, I was intrigued by the Stalogy 365 Days Notebook Editor’s Series A5 ($25). There are enough pages for every single day to have it’s own page, and yet they’re not numbered so who cares if you skip a day or twelve?
Let’s start with the basics. The 018 Editor’s Series A5 measures approximately 5 7/8″ x 8 1/4″ (148 mm x 210 mm) and is a slim volume coming in at 1/2″ (12 mm) thick. The cover is a softcover cardstock, with a slight texturing. It is available in a variety of colors, but I selected Blue.
The book is stitched and contains 184 pages of 52 gsm white paper featuring a 5mm dot grid or gridline. The volume weighs in at 12oz or approximately 343g. The paper is advertised as bleed-resistant and fountain pen friendly.
Basically this is a blank book with enough pages for a year. I realize that seems kind of silly to bill it as a 365-day planner or journal, but my mind sort of took off. I could order date stickers or sweet-talk my favorite rubber stamp creator into creating a set of fun number stamps to mark my days! I could jot down funny stories that happened, big events, notes to myself. This book could be anything!
So let’s check out the paper. It turns out that the paper is, as advertised, free from bleeding and it takes all my fountain pen inks, gel pens, ball points and roller balls quite nicely. However, I’m fairly heavy handed and I’m less thrilled that the super thin paper not only shows the writing through the other side as well as some indentation marks. Which means now my book doesn’t work as well for 365 pages, but rather half those. BUT that is me and my writing. If you love super thin paper like the Tomoe River in Hobinichi planners, then this might work really well for you.
Overall, I’d say this is a pretty nice notebook and I’m still charmed by the idea of having it for a year and then purchasing a new volume. While the price is not inexpensive, when I compare it to other notebooks like the Rhodia Webnotebook ($20) or the Leuchtturm1917 Hardcover Notebook in A5 (19.95) sizes it’s only slightly more, and you get more pages that either the Rhodia or Leucchtturm, still in a slim-line notebook that fits easily into a bag or portfolio.
DISCLAIMER: Some of the items in this post were sent to us for free for the purposes of review. Please see the About page for more details.
Is the fact that its pages are undated what makes it an Editor’s Series notebook? I have a Stalogy notebook, but haven’t opened it yet, and I’ve no idea if it’s from the Editor’s Series.
I have used a couple of them. On the challenge of writing showing through the Japanese have invented the shitajiki. Some of them come in rather dark colors – green or brown for example. Hobonichi sells brown ones. Put them under the page that has been written on the other side and you will notice that the amount of show through is considerably lower. Almost magical!
Oooo that sounds amazing! I’ll have to check that out!
If you want to observe the effect, a sheet of coloured paper will do the trick. Or just fold out the cover of a different notebook and put that halfway under your test page. Maybe even the blue wrapper of the Stalogy notebook would work.
Absolutely try a shitajiki (writing board) with your Stalogy 365. It makes a LOT of difference. I wouldn’t be able to use my B6 Editor as a planner without it. Another tip, if you go the washi tape or sticker route for adding days or dates, it will make the notebook bulge. The tape/stickers essentially double the page thickness. I used stickers in mine last year. They were adorable and added flair to my daily pages, but they made the notebook noticeably thicker and near the end of the year some locations in the book became hard to write upon. This happened even with my staggering the locations of the stickers so they weren’t all in the same place making a thick stack.
Oooo thanks for all the tips. I’m off to go sticker shopping. 🙂