Yoseka Stationery is a wonderful little independent stationery shop in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens, NYC. I visited the shop about a year ago and had a great chat with the owners, Daisy and Neil. I bought my Kokuyo Sketch Book there, as well as some ink. (I felt like I’d showed admirable restraint, given all the goodies that caught my eye on their shelves!) More recently, Daisy and Neil offered me a sample of their own Yoseka Notebook to review. YES PLEASE, I said!

The Yoseka Notebook will immediately appeal to anyone with an eye for minimalist design. They’ve used lovely materials and the branding is subtle and elegant. Once you’ve removed the shrinkwrap, the outside is an uncovered heavy grey cardboard, with an exposed spine and square corners. A vellum band has a silver foil stamped Yoseka logo on the front, and the name on the spine. The company info is on the back of the paper band, and the back cover is debossed with the Yoseka logo. The size is a pretty true A5, with actual measurements of 5.75 x 8.25″. (About 5/8″ wider than a large Moleskine.) Everything seems very precise and squared-off and well-made.

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Inside, the Yoseka Notebook has pale yellow endpapers in a slightly textured paper. They picked a shade of yellow that perfectly complements the grey cover– the overall palette is very soothing, somehow. (But also very difficult to focus a camera on unless you have some contrast in the photo!) The 224 pages of bright white paper, which they have sourced from Taiwan, are unlined and super smooth, and open perfectly flat so you can use the pages all the way across the gutter.

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The paper almost reminds me of the stone paper notebooks I’ve tried in that it gives a little feedback with pens and pencils produce a darker than usual line. The paper weight is not stated on the packaging, but Yoseka’s website lists it as 85 GSM. It feels quite light but substantial, with show-through perhaps a bit less than average. Where it really shines is in the bleed-through performance. No pens bled through, even the Super Sharpie, except in a couple of tiny specks when I was using a lot of pressure to flex a nib and get a wetter, wider line. There was no feathering whatsoever. Every pen laid down a tight, vibrant line, with lighter colored inks really glowing on the page and showing off their shading. The only drawback with smooth, tight papers like this is that drying times can be a bit long (though I have not compared this to see if drying is longer or shorter than other smooth papers like Rhodia’s.). I really love using this paper– as you can see, I started doodling a bit more than usual and attempted to draw Totoro. I even tried a few splashes of watercolor paint– this is by no means a proper watercolor paper and big wet washes would not be a good idea, but you can get away with light use of watercolors if you just want to add a few pops of color to a page.

The Yoseka Notebook is $20, which I think is quite reasonable for a beautiful, high-quality, fountain pen friendly A5 notebook. Some users might miss having a ribbon marker, back pocket and elastic closure, but you could use the notebook with a cover if you need those things. A cover would also protect the square corners, which could get a little bent over time, and the light-colored cardboard, which is likely to get stained. To me, this notebook is great as it is– I’m just rooting for them to make a pocket size 9x14cm version too!

If you love simple, minimal design and vibrant, clean fountain pen lines, you will love the Yoseka Notebook! Definitely visit their shop if you can, but you can also purchase online via the Yoseka website.

As noted above, I received a free sample of this notebook to review, but all opinions expressed here are my own.