According to this Fox Business article, there has been a big increase in people stealing office supplies from their employer.:
According to data from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiner, office Opens a New Window.stealing of noncash items — ranging from scissors and notebooks, to staplers and paperclips, has ballooned to 21 percent of corporate-theft losses in 2018 from 10.6 percent in 2002….
Hot items include scissors, notebooks, staplers and tape, especially during the gift-wrapping holidays. The uptick has even forced managers to routinely stock up on 20 percent more supplies in order to account for lost items right off the bat.
My first reaction was that the notebooks and pens at any office I ever worked in were not worth stealing, though I probably did hoard a box or two of Uniball Onyx Micro Points years ago when they were my favorites. But I always had trouble finding notebooks in the supply room that I even wanted to use in the office, let alone steal.
At one office where I worked, these National notebooks with pale green paper were the only offering. They were the 8×10 version, which was totally annoying, because you couldn’t tuck in letter size papers without the corners getting all bent.
Another office also offered steno pads, which I tried for list-keeping, but didn’t like. I ended up buying my own notebooks (you can see a few in this post), and after I discovered the Uniball Signo RT 0.38, my own pens. Hopefully I saved the company enough money to make up for the occasional roll of tape I took home!
How about you, notebook addicts? Do any of you work in places where they supply nice notebooks that are tempting?
A recent article in the Guardian talks about things people supposedly only do in the movies:
•Who keeps scrapbooks any more? Only the movie psychopath, who knows that the scrapbook will clear up any ambiguities when it is discovered in a drawer in the final reel. Recent culprits include the hostage thriller Berlin Syndrome. Seven is a special case: along with the killer’s newspaper clippings, there are 2,000 notebooks for the police to thumb through. That goes for photo albums, too, recently used in Hereditary: it wouldn’t have been the same if Toni Collette were scrolling through the cloud.
Morgan Freeman in Seven. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock
I’d say there are a few other people who still keep scrapbooks and notebooks, even if they aren’t movie psychopaths!
I first spotted the Kleid Japan 2face notebook on Instagram, where I had to do some enlarging and squinting and auto-translating to figure out what it was. This brand does not seem to have much of a US presence, but I was actually able to order a Kleid notebook from Amazon, where several color combinations were available. I decided to play it safe with black/red, but the brown/orange, navy/light green, and burgundy/blue versions were also appealing.
Kleid 2face Notebook Exterior
On the outside the Kleid notebook is pretty typical, with a soft, smooth cover material similar to a Rhodia Webbie. The red elastic closure and ribbon contrast nicely with the black. The only branding is the gold stamped logo on the front. I tend not to love logos on the front cover, but in this case it has a nice refined look and doesn’t bother me.
The construction of the notebook seems very solid and well-done, though I did notice that the edge of the back cover sticks out a bit more than the front. The front cover has very little overhang, so it’s a shame the back doesn’t match! The elastic is a slightly looser tension than I prefer, as it doesn’t sit snugly when you tuck it around the back cover, but this is pretty typical.
Kleid 2face Notebook Front Cover
Kleid 2face Notebook Back Cover
Kleid 2face Notebook Logo Detail
Kleid 2face Notebook edge detail
Kleid 2face Notebook Compared to Pocket Moleskine
Kleid 2face Notebook Moleskine Comparison Top Edge View
Kleid 2face Notebook Moleskine Comparison Side View
Kleid 2face Notebook Interior
Inside the notebook, you get beautiful red endpapers, in an unusual textured paper. There is an expanding pocket in the back. The ribbon marker is the skinny type found in Nolty and Daiso notebooks, narrower than most other brands use. There are six stitched signatures of paper and the pages open quite flat throughout. The last signature is perforated.
The pages have an almost yellowish tone with a 2mm light blue grid, which I love. Until I saw it in person, I didn’t really envision quite how small the grid would be. If the lines were any darker, this could be distracting, but the blue color on the off-white paper is actually very subtle and works well with large or small handwriting. I would love it if more notebook brands offered a tiny grid design like this. I like the way it looks on the pages edges too, giving them a slight bluish tone.
Kleid 2face Notebook Endpapers
Kleid 2face Notebook Back Pocket
Kleid 2face Notebook Opened Flat
Kleid 2face Notebook 2mm Squared Paper Compared to Moleskine 5mm Squared Paper
Kleid 2face Notebook Pen Tests
Unfortunately, what I didn’t love about the paper was its performance with wet pens. Quite a few bled through, and many feathered. Some inks also resisted the grid lines– this is normal with squared paper, but the one drawback of having such a small grid is that you notice it more. The paper has a soft feel, not as super-smooth as Moleskine. I will happily use it with my Uniball SIgno RT 0.38 pens, but will keep fountain pens far away.
Kleid 2face Notebook Pen Tests Front of Page
Kleid 2face Notebook Pen Tests Back of Page
Conclusion
I will put this in my “maybe use someday” pile, though I wonder if that back cover overhang would get on my nerves with daily use. And it’s a shame about the fountain pens. This is the first higher-end Japanese notebook I’ve used that hasn’t been fountain pen friendly, I think. (The notebook is made in China, but that is also the case for some other Japanese branded notebooks, such as the Daiso notebook I reviewed recently, which performed better with fountain pens despite costing a lot less than the Kleid!)
On Amazon, these “A6” size Kleid 2face notebooks cost $17-26, including free shipping from a third-party seller in Japan. If you must have this brand and this tiny grid design, I guess you’ll pay it, but otherwise, most people won’t want to pay that much for this combination of features and performance.
But I would be interested to hear from any readers whether they’ve had the same experience with the Kleid 2face notebook. In researching the Kleid brand, they seem to present themselves as having a premium paper in at least some of their notebooks.
They have done a collaboration with the Life notebook brand, which I thought was broadly respected as always having fountain-pen friendly paper– it’s hard to tell with auto-translated info, but it seems the Kleid contributions to the collaboration are just their 2mm grid paper in a section of the notebook and logo on the cover, while other sections of the notebook have Life’s regular paper in two different shades of white. Would Life want to put their name on something if not all the paper was fountain pen friendly?
Also, other Kleid notebooks claim they are fountain pen friendly and made in Japan. I’m left wondering if the 2face notebook is just their lower-end, made-in-China product, or if the brand is hot enough that someone would bother to counterfeit it, and I didn’t get the real thing!
I’d like to give a Kleid notebook another chance someday, and will be keeping an eye out for them in US stores.
A while ago, I wrote about Phil’s Stationery, one of the few remaining independent stores of its kind in NYC, selling new and vintage office supplies. When I stumbled across their midtown Manhattan store, I was in heaven.
Phil’s Stationery NYC, home of vintage office supplies
The sign alone is just so cool, and inside, there was a pleasantly dusty mess of notebooks, pens and assorted stationery supplies. I barely scratched the surface. I haven’t been back, but now I feel like I can get the same feeling from the comfort of my own home: Phil’s has a storefront on Amazon where they sell all sorts of stuff, including many virgin vintage office supplies. Some of these are Made in the USA items that are probably now produced in China. Here’s a few things that intrigued me:
You can click through the images to see more details at Amazon (affiliate links). They have quite a lot of other stuff that looks ancient– old ledgers, coding sheets, staplers, hole punchers. Try searching “vintage” from within their storefront to find more. Maybe you’ll find an old favorite you’d forgotten!
This week’s addict is a designer and illustrator who has filled a nice row of Moleskine journals:
What’s inside is even better: beautiful travel collages!
For the past several years, I’ve keep a sketchbook that I use for everyday notes, ideas, lists, sketches, as well as travel collages. I carry it with me everywhere and, recently, it has been filling up with new Japanese words I’m learning! Whenever I travel, I add collages of each city I visit. You know all those maps, brochures, and ticket stubs you collect while traveling? I have always hated throwing all that information away; I have this irrational desire to hang on to it all because I’ll want to look at it again one day! Of course, I never actually look at it again, so I’ve decided to save some of it in my sketchbooks by cutting it up and making collages.
I’m Riccardo from Italy and I love your blog. I think I have a “problem” with notebooks and paper in general. I want every paper object to be perfect. Today I misspelled my email address in my personal info in my planner and… You can imagine what a rough time I had. Am I the only one? Is there anyone who is as “perfectionist” as me?Â
For many of us, the obsession with notebooks extends into some form of perfectionism. Lots of us search for “the perfect notebook,” that meets a very personal set of criteria. Then there is the attention to detail in the construction and quality of a notebook. It drives me crazy when a notebook is uneven, crooked, not square, sloppily finished. In the notebooks I use daily, if one corner sticks out a little more than the other, I find myself fiddling with it and pushing at it, as if I could whittle away the extra material to achieve perfect symmetry. I didn’t just get into this habit because I review notebooks on this site and have to look for all their flaws– I was this way even as a kid with 25 cent notebooks from the local newsstand. If one notebook wasn’t quite right, I’d try to fix it somehow, or want to buy another one. This obsession with perfection is also why I’ve stockpiled over 100 unused Moleskines from the early 2000s when their construction was slightly different and their quality control was tighter–a difference of a millimeter or two in cover overhang means those old ones are as close as I’ll get to “perfect” so I bought as many as I could.
As for the contents of notebooks, I am not a perfectionist at all. I’ve seen many sketchbooks displayed online that look “perfect,” in terms of having beautifully executed artworks inside, or impeccable calligraphy and precise handwriting. I admire that, and I’d like some of my pages to be more “beautiful,” but I don’t aspire to perfection. I scribble and cross things out and allow myself to make a mess. I’ve even done what Riccardo did, writing my email address wrong. But I just crossed it out and kept going.
I have also seen many people talk about how perfectionism holds them back from using notebooks– the notebook is “too nice,” so they are afraid to make a mistake and mess it up. And on another blog recently (I thought I saved the link but now can’t find it!), someone talked about his “DGAF notebook.” At first I thought DGAF was some cool new brand I hadn’t heard about, but it just stands for “Don’t Give a F**k.” It’s the notebook you allow yourself to use for pen tests, torn-out pages, taking notes in the bathtub, or whatever. A notebook with absolutely no need for perfection, and nothing to hold you back.
How do you feel about notebooks and perfectionism? Do your notebooks have to be perfect? Or are you more of a DGAF person?
I came across these images while searching for “Clipper” sketchbooks, after finding out that Richard Diebenkorn used them. The Clipper Sketchbooks below are from the website of Albert “Abby” Sangiamo, an artist who taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art for 50 years. He unfortunately died a few months ago.
I can’t decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that there is no Daiso store near me. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Daiso is a chain of Japanese dollar stores, with worldwide locations including quite a few in California. There are also US locations in Texas and Washington state. The stores are full of fun stationery, beauty, and houseware items and everything is dirt cheap. It is so cheap that their online store doesn’t even attempt to sell individual items– everything is in 6 packs or 12 packs or 20 packs just to get to the $15-25 price point where it even makes sense to ship things. When I went to their store in Alameda, CA, I was determined not to go nuts buying all sorts of doodads, but I couldn’t escape without a pack of post-it notes, some mechanical pencils, 2 packs of paintbrushes, and the Daiso notebook in this review. My total bill was $10.58, of which this notebook accounted for $1.59, I think? Maybe $1.99? Definitely under $2.
So, what would you expect to find in a hardcover, pocket size, under-$2 Moleskine clone notebook? Let’s take a look!
Daiso Notebook Exterior
The outside of the notebook is very typical of Moleskine clones. The cover material has a texture pretty much identical to Moleskine’s. What looks different is the vertical placement of the paper band with the branding. There is no branding stamped anywhere on the notebook itself.
Daiso notebook front cover
Daiso notebook back cover
Daiso Notebook compared to Moleskine notebook
The Daiso notebook is also noticeably thinner. I’m always saying I like chunky, thicker notebooks, but I actually like the slimness of this. The construction is quite good, though I seem to remember picking through the ones on the shelf to find one that was nicely square and even. The cover overhang is pretty big, though, and the corners are folded in with only a few pleats, which always makes the corners look a little angled and clunky.
Daiso notebook cover corner overhang
Daiso Notebook side view
Corner comparison of Daiso notebook (bottom) vs Moleskine notebook (top). Note that this Moleskine is an early 2000s example with very little cover overhang.
Thickness comparison of Daiso Notebook top, Molesine Notebook bottom
There is an elastic closure and it has just the right tension to sit easily around the whole notebook, or tucked out of the way just around the back cover without flopping loosely. My biggest question about the exterior is why the paper band has the word “flipchart” on it. I could not detect anything flipcharty about this notebook.
Daiso Notebook Interior
Inside, you get plain white endpapers, without any back pocket. There is a ribbon marker which is very skinny, like the ones found on Nolty and Design Y notebooks rather than the wider ribbons found on most other brands.
Daiso notebook inside front cover
Daiso notebook corner inside front cover
Ribbon marker comparison: Daiso Notebook at left, Moleskine on right
The five sewn signatures allow the notebook to open flat. The 80 sheets (or 160 pages) of paper are lined, with wide margins and the sides and space at the top and bottom. The paper is a creamy off-white, similar to Moleskine, but feels noticeably less smooth to the touch.
Daiso notebook opening flat
Daiso notebook inside back cover with elastic closure wrapped around
Daiso Notebook Pen Tests
With pens and pencils, you also notice the slight tooth of the paper. I’m guessing that the paper weight may be 80 GSM because that number appears among some Japanese characters on the cover, and the page count is already specified elsewhere. When I first started writing with fountain pens, I was feeling a little more feedback from the paper than I prefer, and I expected to see a lot of feathering and bleed-through. But the paper actually performed better than I thought it would. There was not much noticeable feathering, and bleed-through was limited to a few of my wettest pens. Show-through is average. I would not consider this a slam dunk for fountain pen users, but depending on your personal preferences for paper feel and pen/ink types, it could work. Let’s call it semi-fountain-pen-friendly.
Daiso notebook pen test front of page
Daiso notebook pen test back of page
Conclusion
This notebook cost less than $2, people! It’s an insanely good value for a notebook of this format. It may not be quite as refined as some of the competition, but the competition usually costs 7-10X more. It is made in China, but so is most of the competition. I can’t think of any other cheap (under $10) Moleskine clone type notebooks I’ve reviewed that are as good a value as the Daiso notebook– there was the Tops notebook that cost around $5 back in 2010, but I pretty much hated it. The Peninsula notebook I got for about $6 or $7 was just so-so. The Superior Maker notebook is probably the best “cheap” Moleskine alternative I’ve reviewed, but it costs about $9 for the pocket size. If you are on a tight budget and go through a lot of notebooks or if you have kids and don’t want to spend a lot of money on fancy journals for them, Daiso is a great option– if you live near a store. Unfortunately these notebooks don’t seem to be listed on their online store,** though they do have some other fun notebooks, stationery and art supplies if you are willing to buy in bulk quantities.
Loyal readers may remember that last year, I did a cross-country road trip, during which I had hoped to stop at various local independent shops to look at notebooks, including those that were mentioned in your responses to my call for suggestions. The journey was fascinating and fun, and in the end I didn’t really have time to do much notebook shopping because there was so much other great stuff to do! But I did keep an eye out for notebooks along the way, and about halfway through the trip, I posted a re-cap of what I had seen so far: Cross Country Road Trip Notes. At that point I had only bought one notebook, the Vinylux notebook below:
This was purchased at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, TN, but I have also seen them sold in NYC at the Bryant Park holiday market. The journal itself is pretty basic and I haven’t tested the paper. The front cover has a real slice of a vintage vinyl 45rpm record glued to it, with a Stax-branded thing-a-ma-jiggie in the middle. (If you’re under the age of 40, you probably wouldn’t know what that thing was if you saw it out of context, at least not before the resurgence of interest in vinyl records in the last few years. People my age know what it’s used for, but don’t know what to call it other than thing-a-ma-jiggie.)
After leaving Memphis, I didn’t buy another notebook until I got to California. At the Daiso store in Alameda, I bought this super-cheap Moleskine-clone. A full review is coming soon.
In Berkeley, I found this lovely fish journal at Pegasus Books. The cover is beautiful, and the endpapers and designed pages make it even more elegant and special.
On my way from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe, I stopped for lunch in the charming town of Placerville, CA. There were some cool antique shops, and in one of them, I just couldn’t resist this little vintage diary. The horizontal format is unusual, something I’ve since seen only in one of the diaries I bought on my European trip last fall. Only a few pages of it were used, and some may have been torn out. The first page has notes about the owner’s experiences in Europe during World War II. Another page listed some fellow military officers, performers from a USO team (not shown here, as there were personal details), and some scoring guidelines for marksmanship. The rest doesn’t seem at all war-related– just a few random notes about things like safe deposit box numbers, correspondence, and a list of apple dishes.
That was it for notebook purchases! That makes about one notebook for every 2,250 miles driven. I think I showed admirable restraint… but the other reason I was disinclined to spend money on notebooks was that I had busted my souvenir budget on an impulse pen purchase. I went into a pen shop just hoping to find a cheap mechanical pencil, but I ended up falling in love with a Pilot Justus fountain pen that cost over $300, by far the most I’ve ever spent on a pen (I know all you true fountain pen addicts are like “hold my beer…”). But it’s actually a great pen and a useful addition to my modest collection– the firmness of the nib can be adjusted between being soft and flexible for (attempted) calligraphy, and very fine and firm for everyday writing. It’s like two pens in one… two $150 pens. (You can find it for a lot less on Amazon.)
So I can’t give you the cross-country stationery shop tour that I’d hoped for, but honestly, if you ever have the chance to do a road trip across the USA, don’t spend too much time shopping! Take the back roads, go to national parks, wander through Route 66 ghost towns, eat the craziest food you can find and enjoy all the beautiful places and friendly people that our country has to offer. Fill the notebooks you already own with lots of memories! I sure did.
Notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, diaries: in search of the perfect page…
