What makes a good notebook?

A notebook is one of the few objects you carry with you every single day. You carry it in your bag alongside your laptop perhaps, and your wallet, pen, phone, keys. It travels with you around the world, it might sit by your bedside for 3am lightbulb moments. It can be a companion, a trusted friend, a container for your most bright and brilliant ideas. It ends up containing (arguably) your most precious possessions in the entire world — your ideas (or at least the ones you got around to writing down).

Many of us talk about being able to write on paper in a way that simply cannot be imitated on screen. And just like a laptop, this is an essential tool which, if designed right, can not only aid your productivity and workflow, but inspire you and make you feel proud and excited about the work you are doing. 

You show up with it at meetings. So as you compose your look, from clothes to shoes to hair, a stylish bag, a pen, a notebook. When you sit down at your meeting with someone you want to impress, what is the object you are going to place in front of you as you sit down to start a conversation?

The lowest bar it needs to meet is to not be annoying. This sounds obvious but I have been astounded over the years by how many notebooks have features that actively disrupt my workflow, irritate me and stress me out. These are all the opposite of what I want from a tool that should be helping me get things done. 

So as a start, the following bugbears must be overcome:

Low quality paper that feels rough to touch and does not have a nice flow when I write on it with a pen (of course if you’re sketching you may like a little more texture, if you’re using watercolours even more so, and fountain pen users often talk about liking a little bit of ‘tooth')

> At Mark+Fold, we use a 120gsm paper made at a specialist mill in Sweden which specialises in white papers only and we use their most premium smooth paper which is passed through a series of rollers to achieve a beautifully smooth and even surface for writing. 

Paper that allows the ink to bleed through (a common misconception is that paper weight is what’s in question here and that is actually not the case. Opacity is actually all about the density of paper fibres and some high performing ‘size’ (this helps give opacity and different paper mills use a variety of materials, most often chalk)

> Our paper has excellent opacity thanks to many years of refinement to achieve the most refined surface texture  and opacity, making it perfect for fountain pen. It has just enough ’tooth’ to be satisfying to write up, without feathering or bleed-through. Our mill happens to be located close to a marble quarry, so they sometimes use marble dust which is a bi-product of marble cutting and which achieves a beautiful opacity to the paper.

Stiff bindings that won’t open flat (since the dawn of ‘magazine bindings’ in the 20th century which use hot glue for a strong and fast binding, at the expense of the book being able to lay open flat - this has been used by stationery brands looking to cut corners on cost (and quality) for the past few decades and it’s one of the things we set out to resolve when we created our first notebook back in 2015. 

> The binding method we use is similar to traditional hand bookbinding, with thread-sewn sections of strength and a very thin layer of cold glue to make the book extremely strong but beautifully flexible and floppy.

Just as people talk about ‘dressing for the job you want,’ we believe that you should get yourself a notebook that reflects the work you intend to do. If you’re about to start a new business, or begin a big project, and you intend to do some really great work,  then you need to get yourself the notebook that does justice to it. 

Best example of this is Huma Qureshi who treated herself to a Mark+Fold notebook and saw it a  a symbol of her first day as a full time author (having quit her day job as a journalist), and she went on to write her first published book in a Mark+Fold notebook.

People often tell us that the beautiful quality of our paper inspires them to see their work (even the early scribbles) as ‘worthwhile’ and worth holding onto. We’re often inspired when we visit art galleries and see the early sketches created by hugely impressive artists — an essential part of their process and a step they could not possibly have skipped, in order to reach the end goal of a world-famous piece of art. The sketches are so important, those first ideas, rough and ready and not to be judged too harshly, before they are refined and developed into something more resolved and finished. 

Surrounding ourselves with objects that feel good has a huge impact on our mood and our perception of how things are going. Anything you can add to your everyday which makes you feel like you’re having a ‘good hairday’ at work, is worth having. We all have busy lives, with complications and unexpected challenges — from kids, to pets, to travel delays — we rarely arrive at our desks unflustered, well slept and in the perfect headspace to be productive. So we need to surround ourselves with tools, routines and rituals that help us feel ready to work, and help us find our flow.

A good coffee, a comfortable chair, a nice pen that feels good to write with. This extend of course to your notebook — you want one that feels good to touch as you take it out your bag, that lays open effortlessly flat, that has pages you enjoy stroking as you open them to find the place where you left off yesterday, and of course one that feels great to write on as you begin to get your ideas down on the page.

We feel strongly that your notebooks should be a blank canvas waiting for you to make your marks upon it. This means that the notebook itself should not be trying to steal the show. So whilst we sometimes collaborate with like-minded brands to create special editions with bold pattern and colours, ultimately for us a notebook should be something confidently simple. We use such high quality materials that they do all the work. This pared-back approach makes them useful and appealing to as many people as possible — we are proud to count investment bankers and stay-at-home parents among users of the very same products. Designed to be universal, so that they can work for everyone.

There is so much more we could say about all this! If you're as fussy about the details as we are, please do get in touch and share your thoughts. We always love to hear from fellow stationery lovers!