Midori has a line of A6 diary notebooks with a flexible bookcloth cover and an adhesive ribbon bookmark with an embroidered animal icon at the bottom. There are four design options: The Owl, The Whale Shark, The Cat and The Bird ($32 each).
The covers are flexible but not floppy. It is a happy medium of durable but bendy enough to open flat. The book is stitched so its durable enough to “crack the spine” if you wanted to fold it back while writing. IT’s a sturdy, pocketable design.
The embroidered bookmark is adhesive at the top so that you can attach it to the top edge of the spine of the diary on the outside or tucked inside if you prefer.
I attached my bookmark on the outside as the stitch work is the same color as the book cloth and won’t cause a bulge in the cover if I stuck it on the inside.
Each book includes 192 pre-printed pages with designs around the edges that compliment the color on the cover and bookmark. There are four different page spread designs with each style.
Above are the four page layout designs in the Owl Diary. The designs are casual illustrations printed in ochre yellow and deep blue. I like the illustration style. Its like a “pre-decorated” page. It would make it perfect for daily journaling while traveling — fun art without having to bring stickers or washi or anything else to jazz up the pages.
The dot grid is in the deep blue color. The paper is definitely Midori-quality in the soft ivory color that Midori paper frequently uses.
I think the Owl Diary is prefect for the colder months of the year and may be the book I use for the months of November, December and such.
In the writing samples, the paper performed like I expected. Perfectly fabulous Midori paper with fountain pens, gel, felt or brush pens.
From the back of the page, the only show through was the leaky rubber stamp ink. All the regular written text is invisible on the back.
My only complaint is that I wished that they had used the gold color for the dots instead of the dark blue to make them a little less vivid and distracting. They would still have been visible but it would make it easier to use a variety of lighter inks without the dots impeding on legibility.
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were provided free of charge by Vanness Pen Shop for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
