Quality notebooks are worth it

About 10 years ago I wanted to journal more again and decided to purchase some notebooks in advance. Being oblivious to things like paper quality I bought a couple of cheap notebooks at a local drug store. I have no idea what I was thinking about them back then but today I stumbled upon an unused book where I could write down some notes for various certifications. After seconds I realised how much I love Leuchtturm 1917 or even Moleskine products compared to that.

View onto a spread of that notebook

Just to list a couple of my gripes:

  1. The pages have no margin whatsoever and the squares do not have the same margin to right/left ends of the paper on every page.
  2. The pages are not numbered nor is there an index or something similar.
  3. The paper quality is mediocre at best.

Basically, the only positive aspect I could find about that notebook was the price. IIRC they were around €8 back then but, to be honest, I wouldn’t buy any of them ever again. It’s just not a joy to write in them. In fact, right now I’m contemplating if I should just ditch it (or use it only for throw-away notes) and copy all that I’ve written in it today over to another notebook. Actually, I’m pretty sure I’d do that if I had one lying around that I didn’t already want to use for my normal journaling 😣

To summarise: cheap notebooks don’t get better with age and getting a good-quality notebook is always worth it.