This is the season when we celebrate the harvest. My friends in the US just celebrated Thanksgiving – a holiday which is also celebrated in Canada, though in October. Of course, many countries and regions have their own versions of harvest festivals.

A fond childhood memory for me was the annual fall trip to Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, an event I’ve continued to attend as an adult. They just wrapped up their 88th season.

A particular treat of such an event is seeing less common varieties and breeds of livestock. The preservation of these animals is championed by organizations such as Rare Breeds Canada and their international counterparts.

When Ivy Press contacted me, I was delighted to learn about about the theme of their notecards and other products – less common and endangered breeds of farm animals. They kindly sent me samples of their Beautiful Pigs and Beautiful Sheep notecards.

There is no exaggeration – the products are beautiful. Each item is a boxed set of twenty notecards and twenty envelopes. Each box has four different portraits – five cards each. The pigs were photographed by Andrew Perris, and the sheep by Paul Farnham. The boxes themselves are very sturdy and attractive, and I can’t imagine throwing them out when the cards are gone.

The boxes:

The cards:

Among the sheep, I especially like the Suffolk yearling:

Less familiar but incredibly captivating is the image of the Blonde Mangalitza boar, a native of Hungary:

To me, the theme and photos are very appealing. Though they don’t (as far as I know) sell at retail in Canada, the list price of £8.99 for 20 cards plus envelopes is very good value based on the quality and originality of the product.

Photos of a couple of other sets:

The first and last two photos are official photos from the Ivy Press, and copyrighted by them.

The notebooks strongly resemble the current offerings, and have held up very well over time. Good job, Clairefontaine!

An unexpected local find, the Düller Memo Pad.

An elongated notepad, the paper features a dotted grid. The cover is a very nice forest green.

Shown here with a Düller Dietrich Lubs fountain pen:

The globe is shrinking – recently found locally (Ontario, Canada) – Midori notebooks.

Plain and simple, yet high quality. Nicely finished. No visible cutting or processing artifacts or residue.

Relatively expensive, but their reputation preceded them.

The Midori paper loves graphite, and graphite loves this paper!

I recall seeing engineering notebooks from decades ago that had isometric patterns, often facing a ruled or blank page. The tasks that require isometric graph paper (along with polar graph paper) long ago transitioned to computer software.

So, let me state that it was an immense surprise to see pads of a new isometric graph paper for sale at a brick and mortar stationer.

Alvin, who might be considered a traditional drafting and engineering supplier, claim isometric graph paper is “Ideal for mechanical drawing or design needs, especially machine design, architecture, and patent office drafting.”

Whitelines, the Swedish stationer known for using white ruling on grey backgrounds, are the creator of this new product, and state that “isometric graph paper helps you visualize ideas and draw in 3D for design, mathematical illustration and just sheer play.” It sounds like a slightly different market segment.

Shown with two of the most technical drawing leadholders I could find: a Caran d’Ache Fixpencil 22 with roughened grip (purchased at Phidon Pens) and a Rotring compass pencil.

I’d like to also see the Alvin paper – it is about the same price per sheet as the Whitelines paper.

The “sheer play” purpose seems just right!

Who enjoys using a large piece of paper?

On the forefront of the photo is a Miquelrius “Grid-It!” series notepad in “The Guardian” design. Each sheet of paper shows a 1988 newspaper layout design by David Hillman. It is the layout for a sheet of newspaper.

At 375mm x 600mm, each sheet is 0.225 square metres, or 2.42 square feet.

The significance is appreciated – I have been a previous subscriber to the Guardian’s international edition, and can still purchase the Saturday edition in walking distance from my house. It seems to be a strong international representative of the UK.

In the background is the Rhodia No. 38 “dotPad” – a black covered, dotted grid version of the famous Rhodia notepad.

The dotPad is advertised as 420mm x 318mm, but that includes an unusable section bound with staples. The usable (and detachable, via perforation) area is the standard A3 sized 420mm x 297mm. I measured the notepad with my Danish Folle ruler, and am not just accepting the manufacturer’s statements.

A3 paper is 420mm x 297mm = 0.125 square metres or 1.35 square feet, so it is about half the size of the Miquelrius pad.

These types of paper are great for design work and drawing graphs of several types, which I do.

For paper of this weight and dimension, mail order tends to be impractical, and I was fortunate to find these items locally.

The Guardian notepad was purchased at Phidon Pens in Cambridge, Ontario.

The Rhodia dotPad was purchased at Write Impressions in Waterloo, Ontario.

Also, the official page for The Guardian Miquelrius notepad.

Much of the monitor screen real estate is unfortunately blank as I was trying to view the currently offline Pencils and Music website.

Does anyone else like large format paper?

The weekend before last, I spent a very enjoyable afternoon at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Visits to this art gallery are always great, but experiencing the refurbished building by architect Frank Gehry seemed to take everything to a new level. Even walking through a hallway was an amazing thrill.

At the end of my afternoon I took a look at the gift shop, and saw sets of woodless pencils and some custom edition Moleskine cahiers with Gehry sketches on the covers. I know this type of item can be hard to find and is appreciated by a lot of people. I bought a set to give away on the blog. I hope I’m correct that it may be of interest.

This is another commenter reward draw – only those who have previously left comments are eligible, and the WordPress blog software is set to only allow comments by those who have previously left a comment here.

So to win a set of three Art Gallery of Ontario woodless graphite pencils, three pocket Frank Gehry Moleskine cahiers, and three large Frank Gehry Moleskine cahiers, just leave a comment here before Friday, September 24, 20:00 EDT.

[Update, September 24, 2010]

Thank you to all those who entered. It was great to see some long time commenters enter.

Using the python random number generator on my Mac, we have:
$ python
Python 2.6.2 (r262:71600, Apr 16 2009, 09:17:39)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5250)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import random
>>> random.seed()
>>> random.randint(1,34)
19

I wish everyone could win, but this time it is the 19th commenter, awin. Congratulations, awin!

A recent post on composition books received a relatively large amount of attention. I thought it might be interesting for some to see the “Hilroy exercise book”, which has always been widely used in Canadian schools.

The map on the cover is a little different that the one I grew up, as it now incorporates Nunavut Territory:

Nothing fancy, but I’m sure they bring back memories for many.

See also:

Flickr photo of an old Hilroy office

Official Hilroy website (Slow to load, but contains a nice company timeline.)

Quo Vadis Canada has kindly sent pencil talk a few back to school themed items. Let’s take a look at them over the rest of the week.

First, we have the Rhodia Leatherette Holder. In an attractive orange that matches the famous stapled notepads, the refillable cover protects the No. 11 pads.

The cover itself has Rhodia’s famous logo embossed, and is a nice way to protect and house a pad.

The cover was quickly appropriated by a family member who is making daily use of it!

One more thing. QVC also sent a large black version for the No. 13 pad, which will be given away via random draw. (The photo below shows the sealed item.) To enter the draw, just leave a comment on this post before Thursday, August 26, 20:00EDT. Thank you Quo Vadis Canada!

The Draw

Following the same method as used in the previous draw, we have …
>>> random.randint(1,41)
12

The 12th commenter, k, is the winner! k, I will contact you by email. The package will be sent by Canada Post. Thank you very much to Quo Vadis Canada for supplying this great item!

These books are single signatures of 50 pieces of paper, sewn and folded in half, creating 100 sheets. The cover is cardboard and fabric. The standard dimensions are 190mm/7.5″ width, 247mm/9.75″ height.

The Mead Composition seems to be the classic. Also shown here are a few others that I found at a university bookstore. They are:

Mead Composition, MeadWestvaco Corporation, made in Vietnam
Environotes Recycled Comp Book, Roaring Springs Paper Products, made in USA
100% Recycled Composition Book, Top Flight, made in Taiwan
New Leaf Composition, New Leaf products, made in Brazil

All except the Mead proclaim the use of partial or majority recycled materials. The Environotes stands out slightly with the muted colour scheme, square corners, and 80 (rather than 100) sheets. The New Leaf book easily had the brightest paper.

All have tables for class schedules on the front inside covers. The back inside covers have “useful information”, mainly weight and distance measurement conversions. The Mead is alone in having a grammar section.

I have to note something about the price: each is $C4.29. The same bookstore sells a large Moleskine notebook for $C21.00. (Right now, one Canadian dollar is $US0.96 or €0.78.) They are not the same products at all – but the almost fivefold price difference surprised me.

The Mead composition book may in fact be magnitudes more successful than fancier fare. It doesn’t have an active PR department or online marketing team; it does seem to have wide distribution, being available in big box office supply stores, the stationery corners of department stores, and even the small university bookstore I visited.

Some online reviews suggest these books are not great with fountain pens or fibre tipped pens. I won’t dispute that. But trying a nice pencil, there is no problem at all. That is a typical pencil advantage – many paper types accept graphite quite easily.

I like the fancy brands, but the composition book still seems appealing for many purposes.

What do you think?

Letts of London have origins dating back to 1796. Today a part of the Letts Filofax Group Ltd. (notably the owner of Yard-O-Led), such an established brand is amazing to contemplate. How many of today’s new brands will be around in two hundred years?

The name is among the most known in the stationery field. I’m not sure of their worldwide market, but the association with diaries and datebooks (at least in Canada) is historically very strong. Do you know Letts?

A past post mentioned a trip to Laywine’s. One of the items I found was a general purpose squared black notebook, the noteletts L5:squares.

Not a standard size, the hardcover notebook offers 192 pages of cream colour 172mm x 232mm paper with 5mm squared ruling. Though less common as a notebook size, it is almost exactly the same size as many hardcover books, and is fine with me.

The notebook was wrapped in plastic and very reasonably priced at $12.95 – much less than many products from competitors.

There was a big surprise, and I didn’t discern this before removing the plastic – it has a linen fabric cover. I would never have bought the notebook had I known this, as linen books strike me as being hard to maintain. I imagine dust and day to day activities overwhelming this type of cover. Maybe I am wrong. Are you a user of linen covered notebooks?

The individual pages feature a nice place to write the date.

They also have that dreaded branding.

The endpapers are grey, and the back has a pocket. Long term lime storage not recommended.

Not perfect for me, but definitely a nice product that was reasonably priced.

A previous post mentioned a successful stationery shopping trip. One of the brands I picked up was “doane paper”. I had definitely heard of these fine folks via The Pen Addict. The Addict uses doane paper in all his reviews. It may be an addiction. The paper’s grid combines traditional lined ruling with squared (graph paper) ruling.

While the doane paper website offers online ordering, the economics of their flat rate shipping to Canada aren’t too appealing to potential customers who just want to try a pad of paper. It may make sense for large orders.

So count me lucky in that I stumbled across one of their few brick and mortar retailers – Laywine’s in Toronto. I picked up packages of the 8.25″x11.75″ and 5″x8″ paper pads and the 3.5″x5.5″ stapled notebook. (1″ = 25.4mm, and I’ll continue to use Imperial measurements here because they turn out to be integral to the product format.)

The paper immediately struck me as appealing in design, as well as offering a nice heft. What I wasn’t so pleased with were the thin cardboard backing and the bright shiny blue top section. The thin back means the pad can only be used on a desk or other solid surface, and the super glossy blue section struck me as being a distraction.

While the paper and layout are very nice, there are a lot of elements that are so “just right” that I have to presume they are the results of careful and thoughtful design.

The paper pattern in based on 1/8^th inch squares rendered in fine blue ink. The small pad is 36 squares wide and 54 squares long.

Let’s note two paper design items here:

First, the smaller squares are almost unique. 5mm squares are a stationery norm, from high end Clairefontaine and Rhodia to generic office supply store paper, and the 1/8^th inch (about 3.2mm) squares, with fine line rendering, have much more of a precision engineering look and feel.

Second, the squares are contained, and don’t bleed to the edges (see the top two photos). This addresses another problem – quadrille/square/graph paper almost always has the issue of randomness of the application of the ruling pattern. Even Exacompta Record Cards have this issue. (Japanese manufacturers such as Correct seem to have solved the problem, and can consistently apply the square pattern across a given paper format.)

What this means is that is that the grid layout looks more centered and even more precise than almost any other paper most of us typically handle. The doane paper pad appears so precise and exact because it uses smaller squares, and because the squares don’t bleed to the edge.

Next, every third horizontal line is thicker – these are the normal horizontal rules of most paper. The number of vertical squares (54) is of course is divisible by three, so that there are 18 normal ruled sections created by the 17 thick rules.

The pièce de résistance is the thick red vertical margin rule. Something in me says it should be six squares in to balance the three squares of the thick horizontal rule section in a 2:1 ratio. But of course it shouldn’t be! It is five squares in – for a 5:3 ratio, approximating the golden mean.

The 5×8 pad in particular, which has 50 perforated sheets, with a detached sheet being 5×7.25, really is a compelling offering.

The large pad, which I also like, is 62 squares wide and 84 squares long. The margin line is seven squares in.

The above stated, I’m neither a designer nor a design critic. I was taken with the paper and wanted to try and learn what elements made it so interesting and special. I hope some or much of the analysis is correct.

The ‘utility notebook’ was less interesting to me. The cover is very thin, making it unideal as a travel companion. As well, the graph bleeds to the edge and there are no red margin lines – all the elements which seemed most interesting in the pads are absent in the notebook.

There are other formats as well, but I didn’t see them at Laywine’s.

Now the paper itself seems to handle graphite really well. The sturdy bright white paper and blue lines combine very well with graphite – either ceramic or polymer. A super high quality pencil like the Tombow Mono Mark Sheet just pops on the paper.

I recently used the small pad to help prepare for a presentation, and I found the format to promote conscious, organized note taking. Speaking to an audience, where content and time management are parallel tasks, was a challenge ably addressed by this format. I said to myself, “Content goes on the lines, timing and technical notes on the grid”. I really didn’t have to think about it – it just worked.

For many readers of this blog, I think doane paper is well worth examining. Have you seen it?