We’ve seen some rather lovely notebooks over the last week worth mentioning.
Starting with the beautiful, textile inspired V&A notebooks above. Not only do these notebooks have beautiful covers, but the paper is a good quality too. We spoke to the V&A paper buyer Annabelle Dodds, who said the selection of paper for the insides of the V&A notebooks is often done on instinct, going for colours and texture that feel beautiful and appropriate. We like the ivory tone of the writing pages, much nicer than that shiny white some notebooks use.
There are interesting textural detail such as flocked covers, pinking-edge finishes, vellum overlays and ‘surprise pages’ as Annabelle calls them, printed acetate tip-ins (new stationery techie word) which are decorative botanical print interest pages scattered through out the hard back notebook. Our favourite were the Leaf and Seed notebook set above right, which includes two notebooks for £10 (one ruled, one plain) in retro botanical prints inspired from the 20th century textile archives. Also the Pattern Collage hardback journal below, with the acetate tip ins at £20, both would make lovely presents. All are from the autumn collection and go on sale soon on the V&A website
overlaid acetate ‘surprise’ pages in the hardback journal at the V&A
Then we have Letts. I must admit I was a bit sniffy about the look of these on the website, it’s ages since I’ve bought anything from Letts and I had a vague memory of the product being being just so-so, but the company sent me some samples and the notebooks are lovely quality and very good value at £5.99 for thick-ish A5 size.
Letts notebooks, good value and nice quality
I like the strong images used -there are lots to choose from – for the soft covers and inside the lined paper is good quality which takes fountain pen well (no bleeding) and has a date space in the top right hand margin- a nice touch. They are definitely robust enough for being thrown into a handbag so look out for them in stores or you can buy them here
inside the Letts notebooks, I like the date line on the top margin
