Taking the point

So, you've spent all year dropping big, heavy, detail-laden hints about the vintage OMAS 14k flex nib with piston-filler, and you wait in wild anticipation on Christmas morning. What's in that promising-looking stationery-sized parcel under the tree?

Now, let's be realistic. It's probably not the rare, costly fountain pen. But it might just be a nice pencil - in which case you'll need something pencil-friendly to write on with it, of course. 

As we've covered elsewhere on this blog, the choice of writing utensil has a direct bearing on the ideal of choice of paper, and with pencils you want a bit of texture on the surface so that the graphite rubs off evenly without too much effort, although not so much texture that it feels like attempting mindfulness on sandpaper. Well, the stationery wizard responsible for this particular notebook got scribbling obsessives from all over the world (OK, OK, it was me) to test a whole range of paper samples to find the one which worked best with pencils, and this one won. So far, so groovy. 

From this brief story it's probably no big surprise to discover that these are all hand-made, with a nicely old-fashioned attention to detail. Admittedly, the same can be said of pencil-friendly pocket notebooks from the likes of Field Notes and Moleskine, but those are completely unforgiving if you switch up to a fountain pen for even a line or two. This notebook, however, can handle that too; there's a tiny bit of feathering, but nothing much to worry about. So if you are still optimistic that the Yule pencil will be followed-up with some birthday nibbage at some point in the future, this covers both bases. One can hardly complain about such universal competence, now, can one?