Karatis A5 Soft Cover Notebook Review

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)

I will always have a use for a minimalist A5 notebook that's full of Tomoe River paper. There can never be too many, or enough, in this format. So, while this particular model isn't unique, it's a wonderfully useful notebook.

I had never used a Karatis notebook before. These come from Turkey, and I haven't seen them for sale on many sites. I saw this one on Goldspot Pens and decided to give it a try.

It's a soft-cover notebook, but the cardstock cover is quite firm. It has rounded corners and a lovely fibrous textured feel to it, like handmade paper. The binding is stitched thread and glue with a linen tape reinforcement, and it lies flat with very little training.

Inside, there are 96 sheets of blank, cream-colored, 52gsm Tomoe River paper. It's ideal for fountain pens, and is the same paper used in the coveted Hobonichi planners. It holds up well to a variety of inks and artists' media, even handling paint and markers well. It does show some ghosting, so not everyone likes to use both sides of the page, but 96 sheets is still a very decent size for a notebook. And if you don't mind using both sides with some shadows, you get 192 pages.

The sheets inside are blank, but the notebook comes with dotted, lined in two widths, and grid guide sheets. The bold lines on the guides show through the fine paper clearly, so you can place it behind the sheet you're writing on and have the layout of your choice. It's the best of all worlds.

There's not much else to this notebook. It's just a sturdy cover, with good binding, and a nice stack of excellent paper. What more do you need? You do get some color choices, too. It's also available in golden yellow, blue, and purple colors. The price for the Karatis notebook at Goldspot is $17, which is a fantastic deal. These would make excellent sketchbooks for artists, or commonplace books, short story books, journals of any kind. With the guide sheets, you could even make a fantastic custom bullet journal. For my personal use, it's the perfect length for a novella--a short novel or a very long story. It's a fun length of story to write, but it ends up being too long for a slim notebook and too short for a thick notebook. This one's just right.

(Goldspot provided this product at a discount to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

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Profolio Oasis Notebook Review

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)

The Profolio Oasis Notebooks are fantastic in their most basic form, and this National Parks series elevates them even above that high mark. The combination grid-dot-lined paper is unique to Profolio notebooks, and it works as a lined journal, or a grid notebook, or dotted. Whether you need vertical or horizontal lines, it's got you. But the ink itself is a pale grey, so it isn't too restrictive. It's easy to ignore the lines you don't want. The paper is an 84.3gsm, an improvement over their old paper, which makes it better suited to liquid inks. It has a smooth, coated surface that shows off ink properties nicely.

This notebook has a thin cardstock cover, stitched, lay-flat binding, and 80 sheets (160) pages of paper. Inside the cover are interesting facts and maps of the park that is featured on the front. The artwork for the cover is done by artists from across the USA, this one by Jon Cain, and features six (so far) gorgeous national parks. They are all stunning. There were no Rocky Mountain or Isle Royale (my personal sentimental parks) options, so I chose the Smoky Mountains design. It's a very pretty notebook.

I think these notebooks make excellent commonplace books, and with this A5 size, they'd even be perfect for some class notes or meeting logs. The versatile lines make them perfect for sketch notes, outlines, or even poetry. Lots of folks use them for handwriting practice, as the extra guides can help you know if you're forming your letters consistently.

The Profolio Oasis National Parks Notebook sells for $17.99 at Goldspot Pens, which I think is a very fair price for the quality. Under twenty dollars for a softcover notebook with this many pages, nice paper, and an artist-designed cover is a great deal. They're all so lovely, I'd be tempted by all of them, but I'm really hoping they'll release more park designs in the future. They'd be perfect for a travel journal or adventure log to those very parks. Looks like I need to plan a trip to the Smoky Mountains!

(Goldspot provided this product at a discount to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

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Enjoy reading The Pen Addict? Then consider becoming a member to receive additional weekly content, giveaways, and discounts in The Pen Addict shop. Plus, you support me and the site directly, for which I am very grateful.

Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!

Apica Notebooks - A Quick Review

(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)

I had heard of Apica notebooks before, but hadn’t really given them much thought since we all know I already have way too many notebooks in the paper fort, but I have some friends who really enjoy using Apica so I thought I’d give them a try.

The Apica C.D. line of notebooks comes in sizes ranging from A4 to A7 (and B5 too) and is available in 10 colors. The Premium C.D. comes in A4, A5, B5, and A6 and comes in “A. Silky 865 Premium” and “Cream Woodfree Paper” (the latter is only available in A5). I am using the C.D. Notebook in A6 and the Premium C.D. Notebook with Silky paper in A5.

Apica C.D. Notebook in A6.

Apica Premium C.D. Notebook in A5 has a cellophane cover (handy for slapping stickers on for the non-committal folks like me).

Here’s the notebook without the yellow band and cellophane cover. If you didn’t already know the brand, it’s hard to tell that this notebook is Apica. It is also foil-stamped “Premium”.

The itty bitty logo at the bottom of the notebook tells you if it’s Apica C.D. (top) or Apica Premium (bottom).

Side note: I am using the A6 to keep track of my Italian learning and vocabulary. Most days, I’m just doing Duolingo, but sometimes I listen to podcasts or read Italian books. I’m not using this to memorize vocabulary, per se, but writing it down makes it stick a little more. Also, I’ve been making screenshots/highlights on my phone and then copying the words down later. That way, it’s like doing a review several days/weeks later when I get around to putting them in the notebook.

Writing samples in the A6 Apica C.D. Notebook. The paper is white but not overly bright.

You can see some feathering from Colorverse Chesapeake Bay.

You can see some ghosting and a wee bit of bleedthrough on some of the dots.

Here’s how the page looks with writing on both sides.

It generally handled the flex writing from my Stylosuite X-Wing Harpoon flex nib. I didn’t see any of the subtle chromashading of Sailor Ink Studio 143 though.

Can you see the shimmer up top? Not the paper’s fault but my pen decided to let out a bunch of shimmer - this is what I get for not periodically rotating my nib up/down to redistribute the shimmer. Still, it handled the shimmer just fine.

Look at the entries for 9.12.26 and then look at the same section in the next picture.

Look at the sheen of Diamine Polar Glow! It’s blue in the above picture and almost hot pink from this direction!

A different flex nib from Stylosuite which is much sharper than the other one - hard to tell if the feathering is from the ink (Bungubox Tsuyuhikari) or from the nib making microscratches on the paper.

My dedicated set of standard pens and pencil: Uni-ball Signo DX, 0.38, Pilot G-2 07, Frixion Clicker 07, Parker Jotter Ballpoint, Lamy Tipo Medium, Parker Flighter Gel, Spoke Clickstream, Schmidt EasyFlow 9000 M, Zebra Sarasa Clip 05, Ticonderoga HB Soft, Sakura Pigma Micron 05, Tombow ABT, color 476, Sharpie.

Std pens and pencil on the A6. No problems with any of them on this paper. Side note: I “lost” this clear Penco Clampy on my desk multiple times while taking pictures cuz the dang thing is clear, aka invisible. Keep that in mind if you buy this “color”. 😀

No bleedthrough on anything but, you guessed it, the Sharpie. I don’t know why I bother with the Sharpie but maybe one day I’ll find a fountain pen friendly paper that it won’t bleed through.

One of my pet peeves is when the first/last page of a notebook is glued to the cover so it doesn’t flip properly without being creased.

Overall, the A6 paper was ok. Not great, not awful, never knew what would make it bleed through, though it usually didn’t bleed through too much (Sharpie aside, of course). I kept thinking I must be missing something because this doesn’t seem good enough to be some folks’ favorite paper. That’s when I did a little digging on the Apica website and realized that there were different papers. So now I was really curious to see how the A5 behaved.

In the A5 Premium C.D. notebook, I logged the pens/inks used for the entries starting 8.22.26.

Pens/Inks used: Platinum Curidas, Fine; 3 Oysters Aubergine (picked for the very fine/thin line) Lamy Studio, 14kt gold Fine; Colorverse Chesapeake Bay (shading ink) Pilot Decimo, Fine; Akkerman #16 Oranje Boven (fine nib) Pelikan M800, Fine Cursive Italic; Pelikan Edelstein Apatite (wet pen with a grind and a slightly dry ink) TWSBI Eco, Fine; Robert Oster African Gold (just cuz, lol) Zodiac Pen Co Virgo, Stylosuite EF X-Wing Harpoon; Sailor Ink Studio 143 (flex and subtle chromashader) Visconti Van Gogh, Medium; Wearingeul x Atlas Stationers Twelfth Night (shimmer) Sailor Pro Gear, 21kt gold Medium Fine; Diamine Polar Glow (sheening ink) Esterbrook Estie, Fine Journaler; KWZ Beefeater Red (wet ink) Platinum 3776, Medium; Van Dieman’s Spotted Sun Orchid (cuz it’s pretty) Leonardo Momento Magico, Stylosuite EF X-Wing Harpoon; Bungubox Tsuyuhikari (wet pen, sharp flex)

You can see the shimmer in the Visconti, the sheen from the Sailor, and the feathering of the Leonardo with the sharp flex nib and Bungubox ink.

The bleedthrough is primarily coming from the two flex nibs, but there are occasional spots where there is more ink, especially dots.

As with the C.D. paper, the Apica Premium did just fine with the standard pens/pencil. Side note: I appreciated the blue “stitches” in the middle of the signatures/sections of paper. It made it easy for me to find the middle, so I could remove these sheets down the road when I figure out what I want to use this notebook for. They don’t do this in the regular C.D. notebooks - all of those stitches are white.

Same as the above, no problems on the back, except for the Sharpie. Good thing I put a sheet of scratch paper underneath because it did transfer to the page behind it.

Same pet peeve in the Premium notebook. Not the end of the world, it’s just kind of annoying. FYI, the notebook’s spine is intact - what you see on the bottom is the yellow “belly band” of the notebook.

I liked the Premium paper more than the regular C.D. paper. While the C.D. is fairly smooth (a touch smoother than Leuchtturm or Rhodia), the Premium is even smoother, which I prefer. Both papers portrayed ink colors pretty accurately though some of the more subtle chromashades didn’t show up as much as other papers out there. Both had some bleedthrough with flex nibs, so I’d avoid flex or super wet nibs/inks on both of these papers.

At around $4 for 52 pages in the Apica C.D. A6 notebook, I’m ok with how it behaved, though I wish it came in more options than just lined. The Apica Premium C.D. A5 notebook costs $19 for 96 pages, and it’s also available in blank, lined, grid, and dot grid. As I said, both are fine, and I’ll use the ones I have but I probably won’t be rushing to restock them.

(Disclaimer: All notebooks were purchased by me from Vanness Pens (for the A6) and Flax Pen to Paper (for the A5). All pens/inks are my own.)