Pen and notebook recommendations?

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Current state of my art

It’s an all Japanese line up.

  • Maruman Mnemosyne A5, 5mm dot or square pads, side or top bound
  • Sakura Sigma Micron 0.1 pens

I’m curious if there are people that have tried these and have something they prefer.

The pads

I just switched pad brands a few days ago. I used to use Rhodia A5 5mm dotpads with top perforation (it’s a French brand that’s part of Claire Fontaine). I found the pencil didn’t show up well enough on the dark lines, but then Andrew turned me onto the Dotpads about 10 years ago. The Mnemosyne pads have off-white instead of white pages (maybe a bit greenish like old graph paper) and the rules (or dots) are perfectly light. But it’s the smoothness of the paper that’s really incredible. I’ve never felt paper like it and now I’m hooked.

The pens

Matt Hoffman turned me onto the pens when we started working on Stan (though he’s now using Muji pens). They are great at writing fine lines, which is perfect for math. I ran out of pens on a trip to Berlin and found that Staedtler Pigment Liner 0.1 pens are a reasonable substitute (not quite as dark, but the nib’s a bit tougher). Andrew uses some kind of erasable pen—I’ve never cottoned to those.

I have used Pentel Quicker-Clicker pencils since high school (circa 1980). I still use them sometimes, though with B lead as I find the HB too light. I thought I’d dislike doing math in pen, but now I prefer it because pen is more fun to write with and the end result is much easier to read.

39 thoughts on “Pen and notebook recommendations?”

  2. Bob:

    I use the Frixion erasable pens. They’re great, a million times better than those erasable pens that came out when we were in high school. I agree, though, that it you want to write with real precision, there’s a limit to what the erasable pens can give you.

    For a notebook, I use the Leuchtturm with a dot grid. But, yeah, I’ve heard that the Japanese versions or all these things are the best.

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  3. The pens are “Sakura Pigma Micron” (not Sigma). I like them, too, but for an additional reason, as well: the ink is alcohol-proof, and Pigma Micron pens have become the de facto standard in natural history museums for labels on specimens stored in ethanol. (Such specimens are known as “alcoholics”.)

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  4. Not a notebook per se, but Edward Tufte’s graph paper pads are my permanent go-to. Very light lines, very nice quality of paper, 8.5×11 and 11×17 sizes available!

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  6. I’m finding it much easier to keep everything organized and ready for travel with my reMarkable tablet than with pen and paper. There are other such paperlike tablets (that even give you a proper pencil scratching feel) such as Onyx Book Pro.

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  7. I use a fair number of gel pens, the Pilot G2 series are pretty good. The Pigma Micron is a better pen for artwork or math, but the tiny felt tip would wear out more quickly for taking notes.

    When I was in grad school and had to take notes in a notebook for hours at a time, I used fountain pens with Noodlers ink and a converter/refillable cartridge. I like the Lamy Safari and the Pilot MR/Metropolitan for inexpensive fountain pens. I’m too frugal to go with higher end fountain pens.

    I kinda want to be a pen and paper buff, but honestly I don’t have much reason to need them much these days.

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  9. The light green not white. Better to see with as less eye strain due to less contrast than on white. And your eyes now have changed a great deal since high school with your meaty inference engine – visual cortex – so well trained it covers for the contrast / stroke weights / fuzz of felt and paper texture so well … I’d probably advise to get your eyes checked!

    Trivia. The Evelyn Wood Speed Reading Course used to print texts on v light green.

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  10. I used Rhodia pads for years. Last few years I started using Leuchtturm1917 A5 dotted notebooks. They are a German company, possibly not easy to get them on the other side of the Atlantic? Very durable, pricey, but I am much happier with them.

    I do math with pencil usually, but I use soft dark pencils. My favorite is the Palomino Blackwing 602. Dark like ink, soft like butter.

    Speaking of writing implements, too many people suffer with bad chalk. I got myself some of that fancy Hagoromo Fulltouch chalk a few years ago, and it’s totally worth it.

    Of course you may use whiteboards, in which case there is no helping you. You have chosen the wheel of pain.

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    • White boards are chosen for us, and we all must suffer in many ways. Perhaps most because I always try to erase something I just wrote with the side of my hand so I can quickly continue writing, and of course marker just smears. I have two rooms that were updated recently enough that their chalkboards should survive for 20 years before someone decides they need to be replaced.

      I particularly like the Leuchtturm1917 A5 books because they have numbered pages, which makes relocating important notes/ideas figures/discussions much faster than flipping through, but still allows me to keep one notebook going at all times, rather than switching between several for different purposes. I feel like the extra money is worth it just for being able to immediately locate the page I wrote a paper idea on (for example).

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      • When I worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory I insisted on a chalkboard instead of the whiteboards everyone else had. Sometimes someone would express pity or wonderment, as if the whiteboard were in some way superior rather than vastly inferior. I would point out some of the reasons I prefer chalk — turn the chalk on its side and you can make the line whatever thickness you want (up to the length of the chalk); use different amounts of pressure to get different darkness; you can do shading, which is pretty much impossible with a whiteboard; no smell; erase with your hand, or turn a line into a dashed line with a few strokes of your finger, without ending up with ink all over the place. It still kind of baffles me that none of my colleagues followed me lead.

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  11. I also use the Mnemosyne A5 in dot grid, but I’ve used the Leuchtturms that others have mentioned and they’re quite nice as well.

    My favorite pen is easily the Zebra Sarasa Dry gel pen, which I adopted after years of using Pilot G2s. The build quality is just a little bit nicer than the G2s, with touches like a clip that is mounted on an actual spring-loaded hinge — so the clip does not inevitably break off from plastic fatigue. But the real highlight is the gel ink. It writes smoothly and evenly, and is dry almost instantly after writing, making it nearly impossible to smudge.

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  12. For dotpads I currently like the Fabriano Ecoqua Plus A4 glued/flat-lying notebooks, but for talks I need something with lines and really like the Notem UMA Notebook in large (though it is terrifically expensive for paper). I used the Rhodia dotpads for a long time, but always spiral-bound (the staples at the top makes the back-side unusable for me).

    I find that the finer a pen-nib is the smaller and less legible my notes become, so I like medium/broad-nib Lamy for figuring out what’s going on in a paper. I used to use Blackwing pencils like Richard, but I was annoyed at how much of it ended up in the sharpener. So I switched to the rOtring 600 in the 0.7mm size.

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    • Good question. At 15 comments and counting, there is interest. Unlike zombies, which are really boring and never make comments.

      Seems like there should be a “Workflow” tag would be appropriate.

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  15. I have created my own pen while being unsatisfied with what i could buy. It can use Pilot BLS or BXS inserts, which are great and cheap. You can check it out here: https://www.matejmiklavec.com/product/pisalo/ It is made of aluminium and anodised in a gray color for durability. Shown is a sanded surface model, but i recently made a polished version. I am trying out different things, but it seems that different people like different things, so its not so clear if one is better than the other. The sanded version is different and has great grip :-) I like both, but i am biased since i made them for my own liking :-)

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  16. For notebooks, I highly recommend the following Leuchtturm1917. It’s got a dot grid with the right amount of spacing. The page numbering lets one later create an index. (So, be sure to keep the first couple pages blank). A second fabric bookmark is sometimes helpful. I use the pocket at the end to hold a smart tag. And the A4 paper size is ideal. That’s slightly larger than a standard American-sized page (8.5 x 11 inches). I sometimes need to add (paste or tape) an American-sized page within the the notebook and the A4 size means the inserted pages don’t stick out.
    -Leuchtturm1917 Hardcover Dotted Master Slim Notebook

    Others have mentioned Zebra brand pens, but their mechanical pencil with an unbreakable lead feature is a game changer. It’s no a joke. I’ve used these pencils for 6 months now and can’t recall the lead ever snapping off. With other brands it seemed I lost half the lead through breakage.
    – Zebra Pen DelGuard Mechanical Pencil with Lead Refill, Fine Point, 0.5mm

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    • > The page numbering lets one later create an index

      This is like another level of organized.

      I slowly fill up my notebooks and then feel bad about throwing them away but I don’t regularly go back in them.

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  17. Pentel GraphGear 1000 0.5mm, with one of the medium-hard Ain Stein leads (B, but I am not picky so HB is fine).

    I write on whatever random scratch paper I have around. Mostly A4 printed on one side, that’s large enough, I find the A5 and smaller notebook format constraining. Anything over an A4 page worth saving ends up typed up into LaTeX anyway (Emacs + AUCTeX + preview-latex), which gives me an opportunity to check the algebra.

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    • > Anything over an A4 page worth saving ends up typed up into LaTeX anyway

      Oh this is something I think is missing here — I knew a couple people in grad school who preferred to do Math in LaTeX cause the equations were pretty and copy-pasting is fast.

      The raw LaTeX kinda confuses me enough that I don’t mind that writing out another line of text takes a while even when I’m only changing a small thing.

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      • For derivations with a lot of complicated but eventually meaningless algebra (think: variable transformations and their Jacobians), I prefer to use symbolic tools, mostly Maxima. It allows me to experiment with various versions of doing something rather quickly. And I can export directly to LaTeX when done.

        I keep using pencil & paper for more conceptual stuff, eg visualizing algorithms.

        The problem I had with working in a notebook is keeping it organized when I am working on multiple projects during a longer timeframe. I always ended up with a mess, with pieces for a single project scattered all over. Working in LaTeX I can just keep everything in a separate file and pull it up when I get a new idea. But maybe I am just not tidy enough.

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  18. I love Leuchtturm1917. I am working my way through a pile of Moleskine notebooks that I got for free long a go and Leuchtturm > Moleskine. I don’t know about Japanese brands.

    Writing:
    for lists, math, etc. I would stick to fine liners of decent quality and stay away from the gel pens.
    for writing a diary/prose, I am happy with any affordable fountain pen. I have expensive pens but I don’t find a difference from the Lamy sold for schoolchildren. I recently bought the fine tip model of the entry level Waterman pen (17 Euros or so) and it works well and remains quite thin on the page.

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  20. My notebook advice will be useless for Bob as I live in Berlin, but as for pens, for me nothing can beat a Pilot pen with an 18 carat gold nib, especially when writing math. I have one that’s lacquered with an image of Mount Fuji, and another which is all black. The ink has to be good quality too of course. I can’t buy Japanese ink here in Germany so I use German-made high-end ink.

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  22. If you want to go full pen-nerd: Rotring isograph (or rapidograph if you prefer cartridge refills ) is the GOAT technical drawing pen. These guys have metal nibs, rather than the felt on your Sakura fineliners. So they’ll have a different feel, a scratchier feel. But it’s good scratchy. Not toenails on hot cement, more like a finger across fresh stubble. And they’ll last forever (or until it rolls off your desk). Anyhow, just an fun alternative to fineliners.

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