I finally caved. I bought a B6 Stalogy!

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B6 is probably the only planner size I haven’t tried before. Which is basically how I justified this purchase!

As well as a nice selection of notebooks, Stalogy also have a range of accessories including sticky notes and stickers. Along with my B6 I picked up some full page sticky notes*. 

The sticky notes are a really good idea. They’re a full page and allow you to plan out your month. This is perfect if you’re planning to bullet journal in this but don’t want the hassle of drawing out a monthly spread.

These are super handy. The size is basically that of the grid part of the notebook so it doesn’t take up all of the page.

As they’re sticky you can reposition them to get them exactly where you need them to be. However, once they’ve been in place for a while I wouldn’t say they’re repositionable. I tried pulling one up after it had been down for a couple of weeks and it just bent the note and left a great diagonal fold on it.

B6 is a really nice size.

I can see why so many people use it. You get a decent page size that you feel like you can really use in something that feels so much more portable than the A5.

If an A6 is too small for you, and an A5 too large, I highly recommend picking up a B6.

The design of these notebooks simple and elegant. The outer cover has a textured faux leather kind of effect with just some simple gold embossing in the top left hand corner.

The inside and back covers of these have grey paper stock. There are no pockets or anything extra with this, in keeping with the simplicity of it. There are no contents pages or any extra fluff and you simply open into the first blank page.

The pages themselves are thin and cream, reminiscent of Tomoe River paper. It’s not Tomoe River paper but it stands up to fountain pens just as well (more on that later).

Just like in the Hobonichi, the markings on these pages are very subtle so you can use this really quite flexibly.

At the top there are the months of the year, days of the week and 1-31 written. You highlight or circle whatever you like or just ignore it and write a title to the let of the text as there’s plenty of space.

Down the left hand side of the page there are the times from 7am to 11pm if you wanted to use this as a daily planner. The grid size is 0.5cm which I like. I don’t find myself being forced to write small, like I do with my Hobonichi.

There is a substantial margin around each page – 0.6cm which I don’t mind. The pages aren’t numbered so if you like to have an index you’ll need to go through and number them yourself.

I’m really impressed with how well this paper handles ink.

When doing my pen test the only fountain pen that had any bleed was my Pilot Kakuno with the black Pilot ink cartridges inside. In terms of everything else, it was just the Stabilo Fineliner that bled a little.

When it comes to looking at the page on the reverse to see what bled through, it was just again the Pilot and the two highlighters.

What I liked the most when doing the pen test though was how quickly the ink seemed to dry in comparison to the Tomoe River paper in my Hobonichi. In fact, since using this I haven’t smudged ink once (famous last words, I know). I think I actually prefer this paper, just because I smudge the ink my Hobonichi so much.

There’s only really one thing in this notebook I don’t like.

It doesn’t lay flat. As you can see in the pictures above I had to hold the pages down to get a good enough picture of them.

Despite being thinner than the Hobonichi the binding must be different because it doesn’t lay flat at all. I’m hoping with a bit of training it’ll get better but this is one of the two reasons I won’t be switching from Hobonichi to Stalogy for regular planning (the other reason being I need a weekly layout). Laying flat has always been a dealbreaker for me and the reason I never really got into Travellers Notebooks properly.

This is still a great notebook and I’ve enjoyed setting this up (set up post is coming soon once I’ve decided on a cover). For £17* this is a great value notebook and I’ll happily add more to my collection soon.