When Oliver and I were passing through Sackville, NB en route to Halifax in March, we stopped in at Tidewater Books on Bridge Street, and I picked up a couple of lined notebooks from the Circulo line of Vancouver’s Paper-Oh, notebooks that look like this:

I bought an A6 in red on black, and an A5 in orange-on-grey, both with lined paper; if I’d had my druthers, I would have bought the unlined variant, but this was before I started sketching, so they were intended for note-taking, not for drawing.

But I’ve been using them for sketching, for almost two months, and I love them:

• They’re built like tanks, and even after two months of wear and tear they’ve both kept their shape. The covers are unusually thick, and wrap around completely, which really helps in this regard.
• They have an ingenious almost-invisible magnetic latch. It seemed silly in the beginning, but the “click” of the latch, and the fact that it keeps the notebooks well-closed, is very satisfying.
• The paper is very pleasant to draw on.
• The lay-flat binding means that pages open right up, and the well-sewn binding means there’s no danger of pages falling out.

I’m well on my way through both notebooks, and so I went looking for a local source yesterday, but came up dry. Fortunately it looks like The Bookmark will be able to order some, so stay tuned if you want to get some for yourself.