As I’ve mentioned several times on this site, the Bindewerk Linen Notebook (officially known as the Bindewerk Linen Flexible Cover Travel Notebook) is one of my most exciting finds for alternatives to Moleskine notebooks in the 9×14 cm hardcover format. I have bought 10 of these so far because I love them so much. I’ve used one so far as a daily notebook, and I’ll be starting another one any day now. But now that I’ve seen quite a few examples of these Bindewerk notebooks, I do have some frustrations with them.
The first Bindewerk Linen notebook I bought was from the museum shop at the Frick in NYC. They had a few on the shelf, and I examined them all closely and selected one that was pretty close to perfect in terms of symmetry and a nice spine. The others in the shop were ok, but not quite as good as the one I bought. My next few purchases came from online sellers (OrangeArt in the US, and Papersmiths in the UK) and , so I was a bit disappointed when I saw that some of them had uneven spines and cover overhang that was larger on one side or the other.
The other day I was in Paper Presentation on 18th St in NYC– always one of my favorite places to shop for notebooks. They now have quite a good selection of these Bindewerk notebooks in lined, dot grid and plain pages, in all their pretty colors. I picked through the ones with plain and dotted pages and quite a few of them had the crooked/loose spine and uneven overhang issue. I ended up finding one pretty good one, and bought it, but I found the consistency of the problems to be quite disturbing. And even the “good one” I bought seemed to have some extra glue on one side of the spine. There are also a couple of pages inside where the glue between signatures extends a bit too far in and the pages don’t open as flat as they should. Otherwise the notebook opens flat and functions just fine, but these minor defects do bother me.
These notebooks are expensive– at Paper Presentation, they are $18.95, which is the lowest price I’ve seen. My first one from the Frick cost $20. Either way, it is very high for a 9x14cm notebook. (In this size, Moleskine’s list price is $14.95, as is a Rhodia Webnotebook and a basic pocket Leuchtturm. A pocket size Baron Fig notebook is only $12. HandBook Artist Journals are now usually around $13-14. Bindewerk has some advantages over each of these, and to me, the combination of perfect size, beautiful cloth covers and the fantastic paper inside make them worth a little more, but it is also worth noting that they lack a ribbon marker, elastic closure, or back pocket, which are standard on most of the competition. The packaging says they are “handmade in Germany,” so I would expect to get a high level of quality vs. products that are more cheaply produced in China. I can’t expect any notebook maker to be 100% perfect all the time, but with so many binding issues, I’m not sure Bindewerk notebooks are really delivering the consistent level of quality this price point demands.
I can still see myself buying more Bindewerk notebooks if I can inspect them in person and avoid crooked bindings, but I definitely won’t be ordering them online. I hope they can work on their quality control and make sure all their notebooks live up to their potential.