Long story short, I happened across a video review of a notebook that has taken my fancy so much I'm desperate to track down something similar. I say 'something similar', because said notebook appears to be as rare as the proverbial rocking horse shit, and retails on the maker's site for £20 - which I refuse to pay for a notebook. So, I'm looking to other notebook freaks, to see if there's anything similar out there at a more realistic price. The notebook in question is this. The Seven Seas Writer by Nanami Paper. A simple A5 affair, but with many qualities which, at least for me, set it apart from others. The style details which are important to me are: Number of pages (this features far more than standard notebooks of this type). A plain, soft cover trimmed flush with the page edges, stitch-bound (as opposed to glued), and an absence of the elastic closure that's so common in notebooks these days. Not expecting anyone to go out and do the searching for me, but if any notebook lovers have come across something like this, please drop the name/link here. Thanks in advance.
I'd go for a Moleskine and cut off the elastic, if the elastic closure bothers you. I will say, there is no way the notebook in the video is worth what they're asking for it. The cover looks flimsy and will look like hell in about a month (less than that, if it was traveling with me), and the quality of paper looks extremely thin. It looks like fountain pen and gel pen inks would bleed right though, so you wouldn't be able to write on both sides, reducing the number of available pages. I don't know if it's archival or not, but Moleskines are. Some of my notebooks from as little as fifteen years ago that aren't archival are now completely unreadable due to the acid/ink reaction.
The Moleskine was my first thought, but (and here's where my annoying obsessiveness kicks in) the height to width ratio of the a5 Moleskine seems a little off to my eyes, appearing to be too long and thin. They're also very slim compared to the Seven Seas. As for the durability of the Seven Seas, they use something called tomoe (tomoegawa) paper, which while very thin resists bleed-through better than most papers twice its weight - which is probably how they justify the inflated prices. As for the cover, it does look like the edges suffer, but then I quite like the look of a good old battered notebook anyway.
