Tong Family

OK, this is only for true nerds, but I was listening to April’s Stationary Cafe podcast and saw on her Penguin Creative and then directly to Hobonichi Notebooks. I had no idea that this was a thing, but the idea of a small A6 notebook that has a day for everything is a great idea.

I spent way too much during the pandemic getting into fountain pens and now that I have some great ones I find that I have no excuse for using them. Yes, I can take notes but I find that not only do I not read them, but the latest innovations with Kindle Scribe (which I should but don’t use a lot) and Nebo on iPad Pro take care of those needs.

But the idea of a small daily planner that encourages a daily record is a great idea. Hobonichi was started years ago and is amazingly a huge website. Anyway, wish me luck as I see if an A6 original is going to work for me. I just thoughtfully designed products like this and I do think a set of these notebooks is a nice artifact to scan and keep forever.

The many flavors of Hobonichi

Of course, there are a million different flavors of these notebooks but looking at it is really well designed, so some of the top flavors are:

1. A6 Daily Original. This is the one that started it all. You can get them in Japanese, English, and Chinese (I started with English, but Chinese is a good way for me to say in visual practice). It uses Tomoe River S paper which is super thin so it’s pocket-sized and makes it easy to put anywhere for daily diaries. The original as the name suggests was the first design, there’s a simpler design called Planner
2. A6 Covers. Then you can get a cover for it. I really liked this addition as you can stick a pen and other things on it
3. Cover on Cover. This is a plastic thing that slides over the cover

Anyway, we are $75 poorer, but will report back on whether we write every day :-). You can get all of this at JetPens.com or if you are lucky and are in Japan, you can get them for about half the price there at 1101.com