Left Hook Pens

Stalogy is a Japanese paper company that makes very minimalist planners in several sizes and colors. I used their 1/2 year A6 and A5 planners for a time, and consider their paper a faster drying alternative to Hobonichi or Midori notebooks. The paper is thin and can handle most fountain pen inks. If you’re transitioning from other thin papers like Tomoe River, it does take time to appreciate and get used to Stalogy paper.

Stalogy paper was the first paper that I tested when I did my Scale of Paper Absorption tests. The average dry time was 14.2 seconds, and I gave this paper a 3 on the scale. This seems like a harsh score in hindsight, and now I would give Stalogy a 7. Noodlers Golden Brown, a super wet ink that can take actual hours to dry, did not bleed or feather on this paper. When I wrote with a Retro 51 rollerball, the ink didn’t feather but it did bleed to the back of the page enough to render that side unusable. As far as smudging during daily writing, I have not. The only smudging has come from me turning a page with my thumb.

The very light printing on each page is unobtrusive and means that you can use these planners as intended or as a regular notebook. My wife has two Stalogy notebooks: one is a B6 365 that she uses for work, and one is an A5 1/2 year that she uses for training/workouts. The left hand side of each page is numbered so that you can use it as a daily time table. The A6 size is numbered for 12 hours, and the A5 size is numbered for 24 hours. All of the 365 and 1/2 year notebooks are part of Stalogy’s Editors series. I used my A6 for actual editing once, and I enjoyed it. The light gridding makes it easy to read your notes again in the future. The date and time formatting on the top and side margins is so tiny that you could easily write over it if you wanted to.

The Gentleman Stationer recently talked about how he cut his A5 1/2 year to be able to fit into a Travelers notebook, and I am considering doing the same. You could cut down an A6 to fit in a passport sized Travelers notebook, but it would require two cuts instead of one.

The covers on these notebooks are very nice. They’re lightly textured, flexible, and are made of coated fabric on thin cardstock. After using my A5 for a few weeks without a protective case there’s a tiny bit of fraying along the edges, and that is pleasing to me. The binding lays flat so that you can leave your notebook open and the pages won’t flop over.

Really, Stalogy notebooks can be whatever you want them to be. The pages have very light printing, but the grid ruling serves as a guide when you need it. You can draw calendars, graphs, write to-do lists, and take notes. Recently, Stalogy has started offering dot grid and blank notebooks that don’t have the date formatting at the top of each page. These notebooks retail for between $17 and $35 USD at most stationers.