Like most of my purchases over the past couple years, I don’t remember where I heard about the Write Notepads Pocket Notebooks. I vaguely remember making the order, but that’s about it.

That said, however it happened, I’m glad I learned about them.

The Pocket Notebooks are 3-3/4” x 5-1/2” and are perfect bound with 100-pound cover stock. Inside are 64 pages of 70-pound paper stock. (I know, I know; you were told there would be no math.) I chose the Variety Pack which came with one lined, one blank and one graph paper notebook. The three notebooks came in a box made from a single piece of folded card stock. They are made in Baltimore, Maryland.

The complete package, including fancy box and the card with the school code.

Note: As an incentive, for each notebook you buy, a notebook is donated to a Baltimore City public school to help an aspiring writer. Inside the package you receive is a code that helps you identify which school received the donation.

I started with the graph paper version and used it as my food and exercise journal as this allows me to use it quickly with a lot of different pens. Although it is perfect bound, I managed to fit it in my Old Church Works Quad cover.

The paper had a bit of tooth to it, but every pen I used on it, including fountain pens, gel inks pens and ballpoint pens, worked with little trouble. There was very little feathering. A couple of my wetter inks showed through and a couple bled through to the back side of the page, but I usually had to try to break the paper to get it to bleed.

One of the few inks that bled through.

Places where ink didn’t bleed through, but you can still see it. This is more normal.

Although I appreciate how good the Pocket Notebooks look, I’m not sure the perfect binding is necessary. The notebook doesn’t lay flat unless you force it to, and it makes it slightly harder to fit into a cover. That said, the perfect binding is what sets it apart and keeps it from being just another Field Notes notebook clone.

Also, although the box is a nice touch, and is well made, I’m not sure it’s necessary. It stores three notebooks well, but it doesn’t seem as if it would be useful for long term storage. With my system it would merely end up as a box in a box.

With or without the box, the Pocket Notebooks are on my list of notebooks to restock once my current supply is gone. (That may take a long time, though.)