Review of my Leuchtturm notepad

I recently decided I would buy myself some Leuchtturm notepads, to try them out and see how much better they are against the usual cheap old notepads that I use, that I generally just find lying about and appropriate for my nefarious journalling needs.

I decided to buy the Hardcover Pocket A6, which has 187 pages and is lined with a dot grid spaced 5mm apart.

It has a few features that I definitely prefer over the notepads I've used in the past. The main two are the contents page, and the numbering of pages at the bottom of the page. I have for certain notepads numbered the pages manually myself, but the presence of the page number down the bottom saves me a bit of work. It is also fairly inconspicuous, printed in a light grey, so allows me to almost ignore it if I wish.

The contents page is helpful, though I haven't used it much yet. I think mainly, it will be good for when I finish it, and I want to refer back to specific portions. As a result of the contents page, I have created subheadings for the topics I write about, so I can easily refer back for myself and say, go to subheading "Directions to British Academy" on page 5, for instance.

The grid spacing is nice. It allows me to write in a ordered way, keeping the lines straight, whilst also not having the line, which is quite an "imposing" part of the page.

The squares are a good size for when I write in English, and allow for a pleasant gap between the lines that makes it easy to read. I wrote a page in Japanese, and find that the grids are oddly a bit too small for kanji, but actually too big for kana. Hence, the kana appear to have a lot of spacing about them, but kanji, especially slightly more complex ones like 練習 (renshuu - practice) or 選択 (sentaku - choice) are not given enough room to show all the strokes clearly within the cell. I am using a TWSBI extra-fine, which granted is not quite as fine as a Japanese EF, but is still pretty fine. I think this cannot be helped though. Lord help me if I ever have to try to write 憂鬱 (yuuutsu - depression) or something like that. I might just write that one in hiragana.

The paper handles my writing with fountain pens well. Both the TWSBI Eco and the Pelikan M200 (using Iroshizuku Yama-budo, and Faber-Castell India Red) write well with no bleeding, and do not have any dry starts, etc. I also don't end up getting bits of the paper on the nib of the pen, as has happened with cheaper paper before. All in all, a good experience.

The size of the notepad is good as well. It is the perfect size to be able to fit into pockets, and so functions very well as an actual pocket notepad. Writing on it when it's held in my hand and I'm upright is a challenge, but probably just because I'm not used to writing in that way.

I think it's definitely worth it!