Ryman Soft cover notebook

Ryman B5 Soft Cover Notebook review and my NaNoWriMo challenge.

~ rupertarzeian ~ 2 Comments

In September, a reader’s comment alerted me to a new Ryman notebook with 100gsm paper which was supposedly, fountain pen friendly. I was already familiar with their 70 gsm notebooks and have several of them in A5 in various colours in my stash. However I was keen to visit my local Rymans to check out their 100gsm version.

On 1st October, I paid a visit and found a shelf of these new notebooks in various sizes. The available colours were limited to “pink, mint or stone”. I opted for a B5 size in the stone, which is a very light grey. The book contained 240 pages of cream, 100gsm paper, ruled at 8mm row height (my favourite) and with 27 rows to a page. The cover has a smooth pleasant feel and offers some protection to the pages, but is a flexible, bendy cover, (not a hard-back like the versions with 70gsm paper). Crucially, the pages are stitched for open-flat use and the line spacing and the smooth soft feel of the paper are just as I like.

Ryman B5 Soft Cover Notebook. Pagination and margins added by me.

Other features of the notebook are rounded page corners, an expandable pocket inside the back cover and a single, white ribbon page marker. There are no page numbers (I added my own), no elastic closure and nothing to distinguish the front of the book from the back, unless you have a bit of the ribbon marker showing at the bottom.

The B5 size was £7.99, which I calculated gives a cost of just 3.33 pence for each of the 240 pages. I do not usually go for the B5 size, which falls between A5 and A4 (ideal for people who cannot decide which of those two sizes they prefer).

At home I tested the paper for fountain pens by writing with a Faber Castell Ondoro, medium nib inked with Graf von Faber-Castell Cobalt Blue. My note reads “Feels smooth but with some pleasant feedback. Lovely.” There was no bleed-through or feathering. I was delighted with the notebook and started using a few pages, starting from the back, to write various lists, including one list of some writing prompts that I had created and saved alphabetically in the app ColorNote.

Example of some writing prompts. The pen is an Aurora Style.

In October, after the London Pen Show my pen cups were full with inked pens. It was obvious even to me that I did not need any more pens, inks or notebooks for a while! What I needed was a writing project. I hadn’t undertaken a writing project as such, for a few years since I finished transcribing Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

And then, just at the right time at the end of October, I read in a blog about the NaNoWriMo challenge. I had never taken part in this before. The objective is to write 50,000 words, the first draft of a novel, in November. I understood that participants could register, and once signed up, receive some tips and support as part of the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) community. However, I planned to tag along quietly on my own without signing up. This was just as well as I then learned that NaNoWriMo was no longer running, having closed down in April 2025.

Nevertheless, I really liked the idea of the challenge. The point of it, I think, is to get people writing regularly and to establish a writing habit. The emphasis is on completing 50,000 words, that is, on quantity rather than the quality. It is only a first draft.

I did not have an idea for a novel in mind and had never written any fiction. Instead, I decided to utilise the biographical writing prompts that I had already entered in my new B5 notebook and to use that notebook for the challenge. I would write every day with a fountain pen.

A few back-of-an-envelope calculations soon told me that 50,000 words in 30 days = 1,666 words a day. I had already written on the last 20 of my 240 pages, and allowing the first 2 pages as a frontispiece, I would have 218 pages available for the challenge and so need to average 230 words per page. The daily word count of 1666 words, at 230 words per page would mean writing for an average of 7.25 pages a day.

As of today, I have kept up. I have passed the one third point. I am really enjoying the writing exercise and like to start first thing in the morning, and so my NaNoWriMo is also a bit like doing Morning Pages. I pick a topic each day from my writing prompts list, and also pick a fountain pen. The idea then is to have a topic on which I can write continuously, rather than if I were copying from a book and needing to pause to look up and down all the time.

This challenge, apart from being satisfying day by day, has multiple other benefits. Just sitting to write with a nice pen and ink is a joy in itself. It is a way to practice and improve one’s handwriting. It is a way to test a fountain pen over an extended chunk of time (typically about two hours per day) and to check that the pen keeps up with the ink demand and is drawing ink down from the reservoir. You can spend time with a pen to remind yourself of why you like (or dislike) it. You write a pen dry in a few days and can then clean the pen with a clear conscience or else re-ink it if desired. It is a good mental discipline, the brain generating thoughts and words and the hand and eye keeping up with the flow of ideas. And I am getting to tell my little stories.

I am also enjoying the Ryman B5 notebook for this purpose. It is just the right length for the NaNoWriMo challenge. I have been using my lefty-underwriter (upright) style of handwriting whereby the book is level (not rotated) and so I do not have the problem of having to reach too far away from my body to use the right hand page: this might be a problem if I were to use my lefty over-writer style when I rotate the paper to the left: the left-hand page can then become smudged or creased. I found this to be a problem with A4 notebooks, whereas A5 notebooks are small enough to rotate without causing such an issue.

In conclusion I can recommend Rymans’ 100gsm paper notebooks. For my part, I am enjoying at least the spirit of the NaNoWriMo November writing challenge, in my own way.

Ryman notebook and Aurora Style fountain pen.

Early thoughts on the Ryman soft cover notebook.

~ rupertarzeian ~ 7 Comments

Let me begin by saying that I am a big fan of Leuchtturm A5 journals. I like the format, the paper, the quality and the wide range of colours. They are readily available from my local branch of Ryman stationers. Over the last three years, I have filled about ten of them.

The one issue that I have with them, is that the line spacing is a bit too narrow for me. They have versions with dot grids, but these are at 5mm intervals and so would give you either a 5mm row height, which I find too narrow or 10mm if using two rows, which is a bit too wide. About 8mm would be just right. I prefer to buy the Leuchtturm with plain pages and then use a guide sheet or rule my own pencil lines, when and where I want them.

Yesterday, on a visit to Rymans I decided to try one of their own brand journals. Whereas the Leuchtturm journal costs typically around £16.99, the Ryman alternative is just £7.99. Ryman also make a larger one, which is approximately A4 size.

Ryman small, soft cover notebook.

As it is sealed in plastic shrink-wrap, you cannot inspect it fully. The labelling tells you that it has 192 pages of lined, cream, 70gsm paper.

Features.

  • 192 pages;
  • cream paper;
  • 70 gsm paper;
  • ruled lines (7mm row height)
  • one ribbon page marker;
  • expandable pocket in rear cover;
  • hardback;
  • soft-touch finish;
  • a selection of colours;
  • stitched binding, (book can be opened flat);
  • elastic pen loop.

When they say “soft cover”, this means soft-to-the-touch, not soft as in floppy like a paperback. It is a soft touch hard cover. It has the look and feel of leather.

The pages are not paginated. I did not mind and quite enjoyed paginating the book myself in pencil, especially when reaching the end and finding that I also arrived at 192, rather than, as sometimes happens, having to go back and look for where I had made a mistake.

Each page gives you 26 rows at 7mm spacing. The page numbers are my own.

The colours for the Ryman book included a pastel pink, and a pastel turquoise which did not particularly appeal to me and which I thought would get grubby in time. I chose the grey which seemed the most inoccuous.

The size.

The book is not A5 size and does not claim to be. An A5 page would be 148.5mm wide, by 210mm. This book’s pages are considerably narrower, at around 126mm and so your rows are around 22.5mm (almost one inch) shorter than A5. The page height is 207mm, which is only slightly less than 210mm A5 size. It is about the same as the Moleskine format.

When I compared the Ryman notebook with one that I had bought from the same shop about 7 years ago, I was surprised to see that the old one had much wider pages. I preferred the old one. I cannot see any advantage to the consumer in making the book narrower, except perhaps that it would be easier to fit in a coat pocket. It seems that, like many familiar chocolate bars, products are now being sold in smaller sizes.

Ryman notebook 2021 version, with an old version below for size comparison.

The paper quality.

The cream paper, with grey lines, is pleasant enough to write on with a fountain pen. The weight of 70gsm means it is a little on the thin side, and so you can expect some show-through. However it is bleed-through that renders a paper unsuitable for double-sided writing with a fountain pen. I tested a selection of pens and inks from my currently inked pen cups, to see which could be used and which could not.

Some bleed-through with certain inks. You need to choose your inks with care.

Those (from my initial test batch so far) that did not exhibit any bleed-through were Aurora blue, Graf von Faber-Castell Cobalt blue, Waterman Serenity blue, Noodler’s black and Platinum black cartridge.

On the other hand, those inks that the paper did not cope with so well, were Waterman Harmonious green, Conway Stewart Tavy by Diamine, Pilot Iroshizuku Yama-budo, and Onoto Meditteranean blue.

I realise that it is not just the ink that determines whether it will bleed through papers, but how wet it is applied, which depends upon the individual pen.

I quite enjoyed sampling a few different pens and inks on the back pages of the notebook to see which I could use without bleed-through. This was no hardship and I anticipate that most fountain pen enthusiasts can find several combinations that work well from their own selections. It may be disappointing if you have a particular ink that you want to use in the notebook and then find that you cannot, or at least that you cannot use both sides of the page. It is necessary to test out the ink first.

Ticks for pen and ink combinations that do not bleed through. Crosses for those that do.

Conclusions.

Compared to the Leuchtturm, the pages are smaller, there are less of them, and the paper is less resistant to bleed-through from certain inks. Whilst it might look superficially to be an alternative to the Leuchtturm, (with its elastic closure and expandable pocket), it loses out to the Leuchtturm in size, paper quality and the number of pages.

Still, if you have lots of fountain pens and enjoy writing, then you need notebooks to write in. I shall enjoy using this one. It is not perfect for me. I would prefer that the line spaces were 8mm rather than 7mm and that the page width not been cropped since the last version I bought.

I have in mind to use it to write up some memories, little fragments of life remembered. Sitting down with one pen and one notebook, and one hour of quiet time, is something I find relaxing. Perhaps it is my equivalent of going to the pub for a pint.

The not-quite A5 journal with a Sailor Procolor 500 fountain pen.