Stationery review (2025/12)

by Adelaide Song on 2025-12-16.
[stationery]

My daily driver notebook

For all my fuss about pens, there’s an entire other half of the saying “pen and paper.” This was probably the most egregious oversight in my original post; in truth, though, it’s not something I really care that much about. My pens are broadly separated into workhorses and hangar queens, and my workhorses are specifically chosen to write reliably on almost any paper-like object.

A few months ago, however, I committed to (almost) daily journaling, and I can justify being more picky about a book that’s going to see that much use. While I have and love my Traveller’s Notebook, its expensive refills and awkwardly long profile put it firmly in the special occasion category of journaling. Enter the humble A6 MD Paper notebook.

I gravitated to this notebook for a few reasons:

• The size. This is a great compromise between my Traveller’s and a two-dollar A4 spiral book. It’s small enough to fit in many of my smaller, more portable bags—it’s exactly sized for my Billingham camera bag, specifically—while being just big enough to allow me to write comfortably. As a wrong-hander, I have trouble writing on the Traveller’s verso¹ pages without contorting my wrist into oblivion, or wasting a giant chunk of space. Not so with this book.
• The binding. No risk of accidentally consigning your notebook to an ignominious death by spine-crack. Exceptionally useful for lap writing, which is a common use case as someone who’s stuck on public transit for hours at a time.
• Hobonichi cover compatibility. I don’t personally have use for a Hobonichi planner, and I certainly don’t have the income for it at the present day². As cool as I find the idea of personally customizing the MD notebook’s plain white exterior, the reality is that it absorbs stains and damage like nothing else, and it generally wears pretty poorly. Hobonichi’s covers serve as both an aesthetic touch and a sacrificial anode—as well as not costing 80 Australian dollars a pop oh my God.

I’ve flagged that I’m not super fussed about the specific qualities of paper as a rule, but I have no complaints about Midori’s work. My Vanishing Point has never feathered or bled through all the way through to the other, although writing from both my VP and my rollerballs is still faintly visible on the flipside of the page. It even takes heavy inking/crosshatching from a fineliner without ever feeling waterlogged or in danger of tearing.

My new daily driver pen

Back in July I mentioned the Pilot Hi-Tecpoint as my go-to, but that’s ceased to be the case for a while. The ink started fading, then cutting out altogether, and at that point it went into the trash. Right now, I’m currently rocking a Zebra Sarasa Grand body and a Pilot Energel 0.7mm refill.

The body is well-constructed enough to survive so, so, so many stupid drops without suffering obvious dink and dunk marks. It’s weighted correctly for my hand, by which I mean it feels good to twirl, and the spring is so strong it successfully stops me from clicking it with my teeth as a fidget response.

Halfway through the original Sarasa blue-black refill also choked on its own vomit and died. I tried every trick in the book to resuscitate it—blowing, shaking, holding the tip under a lighter—and failed to stop it becoming Code Blue-black instead. It’s a real shame, because the blue-black is one of the prettiest colors I’ve ever had the pleasure of writing with in person, and an incentive to write on its own. I’m convinced that this was a one-off issue or caused by writing on an extremely poor-quality notebook for long periods of time; however, note-taking waits for no woman, and the Energel is about as unkillable as it gets.

It carried me through much of high school, and I’m pleased to say that it’s one of the only consumer products that hasn’t gotten notably worse in the time between then and now. It writes smooth and dark to a fault; that fault is that occasionally it’ll smudge when I’m writing at full speed, but that’s a rare event for me these days, and even mediocre-quality paper is absorbent enough to prevent it. If for some reason you’ve never bought or shoplifted³ a two-buck Energel, the only thing that should stop you is the fear of ruining ballpoints forever. Seriously, no Parker will ever be as dark as the cheapest gel refill ever—a statement that is the closest I will ever get to espousing biological determinism on this blog.