Stalogy 018 Editor’s Series: The Best Notebook You’ve Never Heard Of
Forget Leuchtturm 1917. There’s a new player in town. And it’s…Japanese?
What Should Have Been, Is. That’s the promise, embossed in gold on the outside of this wonderful little notebook. Tucked into the notebook is a little card with an explanation for that saying (which, of course I’ve long since gotten rid of). The gist of it is that this is some high-falootin’ paper technology: the perfection of a notebook.
In a way, it is. I mean, I really like my Stalogy notebooks. Notebooks, plural, because so far I’ve purchased four. Initially I was looking for something with 365 pages for the purpose of putting together a Calendar of Wisdom a la Tolstoy. (That’s fallen by the wayside, but I plan to do something similar this coming year and perhaps into the future if it works out? I’ll elaborate when I write my Yearly Intentions post. So stay tuned.)
I like big pages, and this seemed to check all the boxes, for the most part. B5 means it’s close to letter-sized, and inside is a very faint grey grid for staying on track with the ability to improvise/sketch. And there are 365 individual pages (meaning, front is page 1, back is page 2, etc.)
I was pleased enough with the thing that, when I finished my last journal, I decided to go with a Stalogy for the next one. I like journals that take months to fill out, and this keeps my writing small. I double-space the grid lines because it would be too cramped otherwise, and a front-and-back spread takes me just under 20 minutes to fill out if I don’t get distracted by my phone or children. So the thing will take me roughly 6 months to finish. I started it on June 9 and still have maybe a month of pages left? (I only write one page on weekend days.)
Another slightly unexpected thing I like is that the black cover is a blank canvas for stickers. I love stickers. I feel like they define the point in my life that I’m at. Right now, it’s a lot of Dutch Bros stickers, plus some Yums stickers and an OmegaMart man.
So now I’ve just purchased two more notebooks. One will be the aforementioned 2022 Calendar of Wisdom(ish), and the other is my coding notebook! That’s right — I plan on using it to transcribe code and things I’ve learned via Codecademy to try and cement the concepts and also be a visual reference of how I’ve applied those concepts in the exercises.
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