I have to confess that I bought this notebook mainly because I was feeling a little frustrated. I’d made a trip into NYC and was all excited to go to Goods for the Study and browse through lots of fabulous stationery… but then when I got there, I didn’t see anything that I really thought was new and exciting. “Been there, done that, meh,” is not a sensation that I want to experience in a stationery store, but I guess when you’ve been blogging about notebooks for 16 years and collecting them for 50 years, it’s bound to happen sometime! There are only so many ways to make a notebook new and exciting. But I felt like I couldn’t leave empty handed, so I decided to buy something lightweight and (relatively) inexpensive. I chose this Dressco Stitched Notebook.

It’s actually pretty adorable. The packaging is very elegantly designed (and mostly in Japanese). The shape is a bit unusual but it’s slim and pocketable, also quite elegant. And you can tell right away that like so many Japanese notebooks, this is made with a high level of attention to detail and quality.

The outside of the notebook is a rich brown paperboard with a bit of a mottled tone to it. It’s not very thick but feels a little heavier than the usual cover of a Field Notes. The peacock logo that appears on the paper band is also blind stamped on the cover. The dimensions are “A6 slim,” 85 x 145mm, and about 5mm thick.

The cover wraps around a single signature of paper, held together by precise stitching running up the spine. Inside, there is one black sheet of paper at the front and back, and then 88 pages (44 sheets) of creamy white plain paper. I had trouble finding information in English about the paper, but I did see one online retailer describing it as “Ink-friendly MITSUBISHI Bank Paper.”

The paper feels smooth but not glossy-smooth like Tomoe River paper, there’s a little bit of feedback. And it is indeed ink-friendly! Show-through is a bit more than average because the paper is quite fine, but there is no bleed-through. I would love to see how this notebook looks when it’s completely filled with beautiful small handwriting in a variety of fountain pen ink colors– I’m sure the overall layered effect would be gorgeous.

So I ended up loving this notebook despite my jaded attitude when I bought it. Notebooks don’t have to be new and exciting to make me happy– precise construction, quality materials, and simple, elegant design will do the trick! I’d prefer that it was more in line with all my other 90 x 140mm notebooks but I’m willing to be a little flexible sometimes.

At $9.95, this Dressco notebook costs a lot more than a Field Notes or a Moleskine Cahier. But it’s an elevated writing experience, more in line with the Pebble Stationery pocket notebooks I reviewed. Those were $9.95 for a two-pack when I wrote about them in 2019, and are now listed at $10.95, though they are currently out of stock. Lochby’s Tomoe River pocket notebooks are $23.99 for a 4-pack. I can’t think of any other pocket notebooks that are as expensive per page/square inch as the Dressco Stitched Notebook, other than maybe Jet Pens’ A5 size Tomoe River notebooks. But if you want to save a few bucks, the best deal on the Dressco notebooks seems to be a 4-pack of assorted colors in a slipcase. The cover texture looks like it may be different, but they do say they have “bank paper.” And at the current price of $31.27 at Amazon, it’s almost a bargain!