Midori – MD Notebook Journal A5

I bought a Midori A6 grid-rules size version with the same paper weight/color/finish as this notebook elsewhere a few months ago, and it’s made a fantastic “currently inked” log for my FPs.

The covers on these are blank smooth heavy cream cardstock with a clear thread-reinforced glued or thermal (pad-bound) wrap that covers the spine and about 1/2″ of the front and back cover.

It comes with a small sheet of black printed on matte white paper stickers — some for the spine and a “From the Library Of” (+ “Start” “Finish” “Volume” with blank spaces) to put on the title page or cover, if you want.

The paper is an ivory-tone cream color, feels like about 70-80gsm, rulings (I have the 5mm grid & bought 5mm dot grid here on pen realm) printed in an indigo-tone blue that appears slightly more on the teal side because of the paper color. The printing is clear, but not glaring – it’s not low-visibility, but it’s probably not dark enough to show up on photocopies.

The grid-rule version is unique – it’s not an actual graph printing – the boxes of each row aren’t completely connected to the rows above – there’s a blank 1-1.5mm space under each row, making the grid actually formed out of multiple rows of upward facing open squared u-shapes. I really love that – I usually prefer dot grids, because they make pages look more open and graph ruling appears very boxed-in to me – the way Midori’s design department has altered their grid rule printing is a small tweak that pleases the graphic design geek in me.

The paper is thin but still crisp, perfect balance midway between floppy and stiff.

The finish is balanced between smooth and toothy, ink dries moderately fast but no feathering even with moderately wet inks in moderately wet 1.5-2.0 mm italic calligraphy pen nibs. It’s not perfectly smooth, there’s a mild dry tooth, probably a light cockle finish.

Minimal ghosting on the reverse of pages – even with a 1.5mm pilot parallel pen nib using rather wet ink. Unless I put a super bright white pencil board behind a page with writing on the other side (or hold a page up to light) the minimal ghosting isn’t strong enough to make it readible, so I write on both sides – ghosting is often irritating to me, I stopped using moleskine because of the ghosting issue (I almost always only use 0.2mm UEF-0.3mm EF dry-leaning nibs and lower gray-value darkness inks – medium blue, medium brown, copper, etc). Leuchtturm1917 120gsm works, but the paper thickness makes them not compact enough for EDC. Midori paper is perfect for me.

Midori journals have a single 1.5-2.0mm nylon or polyester bookmark ribbon securely attached in the binding. The end frays out a bit with use – not rapidly, but enough that you might want to singe melt or fray-chek glue the end of it if you don’t want it to basically develop a 1/2″-1″ tassel of unraveled threads at the end of the ribbon by the time you’re halfway through writing on pages.

I have tried many papers over the decades. In the last couple years, I’ve regularly used Kokuyo (sarasara smooth for ballpoint/micro & shikkari firm for pencil/rollerball/marker/calligraphy), Lihit Lab, Tomoe River (sanzen, 52 gsm & 68 gsm), Maruman Mnemosyne, Sakae Iroful (also Sanzen – 75gsm), Muji/Mujirushi, Filofax (specifically FP friendly), Borden & Riley rag tracing vellum & rag layout bond, Clearprint 100% rag design vellum 1000H, and many many other specialty writing papers ordered directly from paper mills. I also have made my own paper by hand and hand bound my own blank journal books on & off for almost 30 years.

Not counting papers that were discontinued years ago and can’t be found anywhere anymore – my top 6 (so far) thin general-purpose-but-pleasing papers for journaling, letter writing, and edged pen calligraphy practice are Muji, Midori, Iroful, Kokuyo Campus Shikkari (except for their annoyingly incompatible nonstandard 3:1hole punch spacing and difficult-to-get-in-USA dot grid or graph rule printed versions), and Tomoe River Sanzen 68gsm.