A little bit of history: Choosing Keeping is a shop found in London that can be reached through the Central Line or the many lines that serve London Liverpool Street. They are open Wednesday through to Sunday (which means they’ll be open on the weekend, if you plan on spending a weekend in Central London!). Choosing Keeping sell fountain pens, rollerballs, ballpoints, mechanical pencils, art & office supplies, desk objects and many more. What we have for you today is from their paper offerings: some very beautiful notebooks in three different sizes.
How it looks & feels: Those within the Inkdom were very impressed by the presentation of these notebooks. There’s a very retro look to them, which is further enhanced by the string keeping them together when they were delivered.
The personal touch and retro look is further enhanced through the envelope that the notebooks are stored in, inside the parcel package.
Hand-made in Italy with leather-looking paper, these seriously look the part! The covers do throw you a bit because you expect them to be leather, but they definitely don’t feel it. You can tear them with a bit of force, but it shouldn’t be a problem for normal carry. The covers come in three flavours, depending on the size you want: green (A5), red (11x15cm) and blue (9×13.5cm).
The pages are lined with red edges, which is a bit different. Another thing that is lined is the off-white pages themselves, though you do have the option for plain layouts too. On the inside page you have space for a weekly planner overview and on the final page is a multiplication table. Could be useful? It’s written in Italian as these are Italian-made notebooks – you can still understand the numbers though!
The paper has a bit of tooth and texture, but nothing overly noticeable or anything that would give a bad writing experience.
Crucially, how does it handle fountain pen ink?: Coming in at around 70gsm, we may have been a bit sceptical as to whether the paper would hold up, but it handled fountain pens very well. They even held up to Nick’s tests!
Pulp! What is it good for?: Coming in different sizes, you can use these for different applications. But you have the options, from a pocket notebook to scribble down quick notes up to an A5 size for those more in-depth thoughts. They complement each other quite well as you have the different sizes which will allow you to transfer and expand on thoughts when moving to the larger sizes; it would be quite interesting to view your own thought processes expand in that respect!
VFM, and what else is there on offer if it isn’t quite your cup of tea?: £18 for three notebooks does sound like quite a lot. Especially when you consider that Rhodia A5 notebooks are around the £2 mark. Overall you get 186 pages when considering all three notebooks, which leaves you paying a fraction under 10p per page. Leuchtturm notebooks, with 249 pages, for reference will be 6p per page. Leuchtturm also come with more options, such as colour, options for planning and numbered pages, though the paper quality is often contested. However, you don’t get the same personal touch or feeling when using other notebooks and that is something you definitely get with these. They are also very easy to slip into a bag and don’t take up too much space due to their covers, but remain very stylish and looking the part.
Our overall recommendation: The personality, the way the pages keep up with fountain pens… It’s difficult to give these a miss.
Where to get hold of one: Direct from Choosing Keeping
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