When I saw the Ink Bottle Traveler’s Notebook ($40) from Inky Converters at the St. Louis Pen Show I bought it without a second thought. I love Angela’s illustrations and she just so fun.
The Features:
There are some fantastic details beyond the darling ink bottle pattern Angela created for the cover. There is a metal slot detail on the cover with a slot to keep the elastic in place. The cover itself is made from a PU material (vegan-friendly!)
Inside are two plastic card holder sleeves, one is all card slots and the other has a zip pouch to hold miscellaneous ephemera. The cover itself only has one elastic stitched into the cover but it ships with an extra extra-thick elastic to loop around the notebooks and attach to the cover elastic.
The cover comes with two notebook inserts: one graph and one dot grid. The covers of the inserts are warm kraft cardstock with ivory paper. Dots and grid are printed in a blue-grey color and the inserts have 72 pages each.
The Paper Quality:
When I bought the cover, the inclusion of notebooks was a bonus. I had intended to load the cover up with custom inserts but I thought I’d go ahead and test the paper just to see how it performs.
With my flex nib Pilot Custom 912, I did get some feathering and show through with some of my wetter, wider nibs and even some of the rollerball pens. For everyday work notes where I might be jumping back and forth between gel pens, pencil and fountain pen, the paper isn’t terrible. Sadly, it’s just not great.
The Bad News:
The inserts are 190 x 105mm (7.4375″ x 4.25″). This is an unusual size which came as a surprise to me when I started doing my research. This cover is not a standard size like A6, B6 Slim or classic Traveler’s Notebook . The images here show the cover and inserts compared to a standard Traveler’s Notebook insert from Galen Leather which measures 210 x 110 mm. The difference in width is negligible but the height difference is disappointing. A Midori MD B6 Slim is 174 x 106 mm so it’s about the same width but a bit shorter. The B6 Slim size would probably fit better but I could not find my B6 Slim notebooks to show a comparison. If you have A5 notebooks you’d like to use with this cover, they would need to be trimmed to fit.
Final Thoughts:
I really like this cover and would love to find a way to make it work with paper that I genuinely like so I’m going to try some Cosmo Air Light in B6 Slim ad see if it pairs well with the cover. I love the idea of a non-leather cover designed by an artist I truly want to support.
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were purchased with funds from our generous Patreon subscribers for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
Please think about the use of the label “vegan-friendly.” Polyurethane (PU) is plastic, whichever way you slice it, and comes with its own ethical and sustainability issues.
would love more alternatives to leather and yes, I know plastic is not the solution to non-animal products, often its the only option commercially available for people looking for an alternative.
Hi,
Great review! I had one quick question, did you manage to test the B6 Slim notebook in this cover, and if so, how did it go? I’ve got a notebook cover that takes 190x105mm refills and similarly they’re not super FP-friendly.