Stalogy A4 graph pad
To be perfectly honest, this notepad has me a little stumped.
Don't get me wrong; the pad is delightful - glass-smooth paper; 5 mm grid lines in a light grey; some numbers across the top and down the side (marking off cm). Writing on it is a wonderful experience.
I just have no idea what it's meant to be used for. The label says "A4 size sheet pad (for chart and project) 5 mm grid. Simple and clean design for all pages. The numbers on the sides show the length of lines you draw."
Okaaayyyy...
It's the numbers that I find confusing. Across the top they start at "9" (one square/5 mm in) and count down to "0", then back up to "9" (with another 5 mm square after the 9), so "0" is the centre line.
Down the left, the numbering starts two squares (1 cm) down with "1", and continues to "27", which is level with the last line of the graph paper.
Any more clues on the packaging?
On the inside of the label are 4 more points about the notepad. 1 & 2 repeat pretty much what is on the front. Point 3 is that the pad will open completely flat (the cover does indeed bend back 100%). Point 4 says, "Ideal when planning schedules and organising thoughts."
Right.
I suspect there are lots of people out there who are currently shouting at the screen, saying "It's for X, you dummy!" but my brain is somewhat stumped as to how to use the numbering on the lines. I'm a physiologist by training, and if I needed to draw a graph, the vast majority of the time I had an origin starting at (0,0). Occasionally, I plotted things increasing and decreasing, but not always +/- 9.5. Currently, my main job is as a fiction-writer and although I do plan a lot on paper, I still can't quite work out when I would need +/- 9.5 in a plan. So far, I have used it to re-draw a chart for a knitting pattern and ignored the numbers. I suspect I'll simply continue to ignore the numbers and use it for planning timelines in my books, and possibly even gridding out a map of The Realm that features in my books (or at least of the city in The Realm).
The landscape version apparently has small triangles to indicate where the halfway point of each line is (I have not seen it in the flesh, so to speak) and that seems a little more flexible than the numbering, to my mind. That said, nothing is done without thought, so I assume there is some reasoning behind the +/- 9.5 that is currently evading me.
It's amazingly good paper (as all Stalogy paper is) and as I said, glass-smooth. A very soft pencil might smudge on it, but I tried from HB to 2B and they were just fine. Fountain pen bleeds through to the reverse side (unusually for Stalogy paper, though this is incredibly thin paper and quite different to the paper in the B5 notebooks, and indeed from the 365 series), as did a few other pens (though the pages underneath were unaffected). The biro and Zebra rollerball I tested on the paper didn't even ghost through to the other side.
The actual writing experience, whether pen, biro, pencil, rollerball etc was exquisitely smooth and a total pleasure. I'm just not sure about the numbering.
