The Reflexions Pocket Journal is the last notebook I bought before the pandemic! Which tells you a little something about the backlog of items I have for reviews…
I bought the Reflexions Pocket Journal at a Jerry’s Artarama store in February of 2020. I had never seen this brand before, and haven’t noticed it anywhere since. The label shows it as being made by Creative Mark Artist Products, manufactured in China. In doing some research now, it looks like Creative Mark is a proprietary brand for Jerry’s.
At first glance, the Reflexions Pocket Journal looks just like a Moleskine Cahier or Field Notes or any other slim pocket notebook, but there are some important differences. The Reflexions notebook is not staple-bound, and it actually has four sewn signatures inside. The construction is more like a hardcover or softcover notebook where the outer cover attaches to endsheets, and the first and last page are glued down near the spine so they don’t open as wide as the rest of the pages.
Once you remove the paper band, there is no branding on the outside or inside of the notebook. The tan cardboard cover seems like a nice strudy weight. The endsheets are a creamy white paper, slightly thicker than the inside pages. The inside back cover has a little corner pocket.
The notebook has 28 sheets/56 pages of “guide dot” paper. The marks are crosses rather than dots, and they are spaced at 8mm, which will appeal to people who find the standard 5mm spacing in other notebooks too small.
The paper is said to be 80 gram, but to me it seemed heavier. The surface is nice and smooth and worked well with most pens. Show-through is about average, but bleed-through is better than average. Some wetter/wider fountain pens feathered and bled, but I was quite impressed by how the TWSBI Eco and Pilot Falcon did, even when applying pressure to flex the soft Falcon nib.
If I had the opportunity to buy more of these notebooks with unlined paper, I happily would. I love have something very slim and portable that still feels substantial enough to use as a sketchbook. But alas, I don’t see these listed on the Jerry’s website! They have some other Reflexions sketchbooks, and I found a review of a similar Reflexions Pocket Journal with a black cover and unlined paper, but the link there is broken and these lovely little notebooks seem to be gone. I haven’t been back to the store where I found mine, but I doubt I’ll have much luck almost 2 years later. The only other online listing I found was at Walmart, which shows Jerry’s as the 3rd party seller, with a $12.99 price. I would guess this is an error.
I don’t have the receipt from when I bought the Reflexions Pocket Journal, but I think it was $4.99. At the time, I thought it would probably just be a cheapo little jotter that might not even be worth that price, I now think the price seems quite reasonable for the quality. Perhaps the recent increases in paper prices made it impossible to keep stocking these, but I hope they’ll be back someday!
Sounds like something I’d use, if they were around these parts. Still, since retirement, I now have plenty of pocket notebooks. “Too many” my wife will say. If you think about it sometime, could you apply a pencil to the paper and let us pencil types know how it does? Besides writing in mine, I will do the occasional drawing of things I find interesting. Thanks for all you do on the blog.