The creator of the Tuk Book is another self-professed notebook addict. Zach Rome has always carried a pocket notebook, but despite trying many brands, he could never find that anything truly held up to every day back-pocket carrying. So he set out to design a truly indestructible notebook that he believes is the perfect everyday carry. Let’s take a look at the sample he sent me!
The Tuk Book is made entirely out of Tyvek, which is best known as being that waterproof fabric that is wrapped around houses as a protective barrier underneath siding. When I say “entirely,” I really mean it– it’s not just the pages and the cover that are made out of Tyvek. The “ring” binding is too! This patent-pending FlexiSpine binding is quite clever. Thin strips of the back cover material pass through holes in the pages and are then glued down under the front cover. The result is a totally flexible spine that can be bent in any direction without tearing or breaking.
Like most notebooks, the Tuk Book comes with a bellyband on which is printed branding information. Once that is removed, the notebook is totally plain except for a small woodpecker logo on the inside front cover, symbolizing the company name, Woodpecker Laboratories. (At this time, they do not seem to have any other commercially available products beyond the Tuk Book.)
The version I received has a blue cover. Green, and a red patterned cover are also available. The size is about 3.75 x 5.5″. There is an elastic closure and an expanding pocket in the inside back cover.
Inside, you get 140 pages (70 sheets) of lined paper. The lines are a bit darker than you see in most notebooks, and are spaced at 5mm. The “rings” are not round– being made of paper, they fold up when the notebook is closed. This can lead to the pages sticking out in uneven clumps when the notebook is closed if you don’t straighten them out first. But the binding is loose enough that the pages turn pretty easily.
The Tyvek paper has a strange texture– kind of plastic-y, kind of fabric-y, a bit slippery. Writing on it can be tricky– not all pens are suited to this material, and the packaging warns that it is not intended to be used with pencils. I found that Sharpies worked the best. Some gel ink pens were ok, but ballpoints could be skippy (I don’t have many ballpoint pens to test with). Many pens show feathering, and there were spots of bleed-through. I tried a couple of pencils out of curiosity and found that a hard lead is useless, but a softer 6B pencil actually wrote pretty well.
All that said, the aesthetics of fine handwriting and fountain pen performance aren’t really the point of the Tuk Book. It’s meant to be a utilitarian, indestructible notebook that can take a beating. So I gave it a beating! I tried to rip the paper and couldn’t. I tried to tear the binding and couldn’t. I bent the notebook every which way and all that happened was that the cover got some wrinkles in it. I even ran water on it, and although a couple of inks washed off, the notebook was otherwise fine. I was trying to think what else I could throw at it– in doing some research on Tyvek, it even seems to resist acid, alkaline and saline solutions to some extent, so I thought it might be an opportunity to take my reviews to the next level and start dipping notebooks in corrosive chemicals just to see what happens. Alas, I don’t have the facilities… I had also considered trying to burn the Tuk Book, but it turns out that fire is one thing Tyvek is NOT resistant to.
The competition for this notebook would be waterproof notebooks like Rite in the Rain, or the Field Notes Expedition Edition, though neither of these makes the claim to be an indestructible notebook. In writing this review, I realized that I don’t seem to have ever done a proper review of a Rite in the Rain notebook, though I do own one. I remember the RitR paper being weird with a lot of pens. The Field Notes Expedition paper is also recommended to be used with only ballpoint pens or pencils, but I found that it worked really well with quite a few pens, other than having a long drying time. That paper is also very durable, but not as strong as the Tyvek in the Tuk Book. And neither RitR or Field Notes offers as durable and flexible a binding as the Tuk Book– the Field Notes survives bending quite well, but the pages can be torn out of the staple binding quite easily. To me, the best of all worlds might be a notebook that uses the Tuk Book FlexiSpine Tyvek binding with the Field Notes Expedition paper.
If you prefer to use certain writing instruments and really care about paper texture, the Tuk Book may not be right for you. But if you like to keep a notebook in your back pocket, the Tuk Book will feel very comfortable there. And if you spend a lot of time outdoors in harsh conditions, the Tuk Book will be a durable companion. It truly is an indestructible notebook.
The Tuk Book can be purchased for $14 at Uncommon Goods.
These look pretty nice. I like the lay-flat part. I will say that the Expedition notebooks are really durable. After dropping a previous notebook into a bucket of water a water-proof notebook seemed like a good idea.
Of course, dot grid or regular grid would be excellent. This is especially true for those of us who use notebooks in “landscape” mode.
Thank you for your review. In addition to this experiment, I would like to know if the pencils could be erased and written upon again.
Since this is tyvek paper, I would stick with a 2B pencil. This notebook was invented by my acquaintance Zach and he is a marine biologist. He wanted to make sure he had a notebook that would survive being dropped into the drink. The only thing that survives that is pencil. Tyvek really does not like most inks, but an old-fashioned ballpoint is pretty good. I wouldn’t use anything else because it could disappear if you get water on it; something like a Sharpie marker is not going to be very good for making notes.