This little gem has been sitting in my to-be-reviewed pile for 3 years now! Alwych is a Scottish brand with a long history. I’d read about them online and was lucky enough to come across one for sale in a fun store in Brooklyn called Dry Goods, which unfortunately closed just a couple months ago. So now, as far as I know, the only way to buy an Alwych book is to check Amazon and hope you get lucky (as of this writing, they do stock a larger version), European Paper (they also only have larger versions), or order direct from the company in the UK.

 

Now that we’re all feeling glum about the difficulty of obtaining this notebook, let’s talk about how cute it is!

The cover has a faux-leather texture, with the brand name stamped on the front in gold– it’s a bit loud, and I’d prefer a plain black cover, but there’s something endearingly retro about it nonetheless.
The other retro detail I love is the blue stained edges. Colored page edges always make a notebook feel special to me.

I love the size. In the days before Moleskines came along and I got used to the 3.5 x 5.5″ size that now seems standard, this slightly smaller size was what I considered perfect. At 3.25 x 5.25″, it feels good in the hand, it can slip into most pockets, and still offers plenty of room for jotting lots of notes, especially because the notebook opens flat, and the cover can even be folded back completely.

The cover feels very sturdy for a softcover notebook– much more solid than the softcover Moleskines I’ve used. I tried to pick at the corners a little to see if I could peel the layers of the cover material apart– I was able to do it, but not without really working at it with a fingernail. The signatures are sewn and then attached to the cover with a layer of glue– sometimes this binding method results in a lot of stiffness, but the Alwych manages to be flexible without being flimsy.

 

Inside, there is some info about the company’s products, but the rest is totally plain. The pages have blue lines, with a wider space at the top.

The paper feels thicker than average, certainly thicker than Moleskine paper, so I was surprised to see how much bleed-through there was with many of my pens. This is not a very fountain-pen friendly notebook, but finer point gel ink pens and pencils work very nicely and don’t show through any more than average.

I haven’t used this notebook day to day, but it does seem like it would hold up pretty well to being tossed in a bag and knocked around a bit. Here’s a testimonial from the blog of Keith Peter Burnett, who has more experience:

“The notebooks above cover around 7 years of random notes, including one that got drenched in a North Sea storm and another that got dropped in a river. The paper is thick enough not to ‘show through’ with the heaviest of gel pens although in White Van Driver tradition, I use a Bic biro with mine. These are working notebooks, not for literary folk.”

There is just something very charming about this little notebook– I really want to use it for something but I’m not sure what! I generally don’t use lined notebooks, and wish they made a squared or plain version. A slightly thicker version would also be really cool.

I’m really glad I was able to add an Alwych notebook to my collection, and hope there may be some other independent stores somewhere in the US that are stocking this brand. Let us know if you’ve spotted an Alwych!