MD Annual Journal A5

You decide when the year begins. Because the annual journal from Japanese manufacturer Midori is completely timeless, with no dates, days of the week or months printed on it. The 368-page book leaves you as much space as possible for every day of the year. Fill the pages with notes or entire stories, sketches or colored drawings, stick in business cards, tickets, photos, invoices or newspaper articles. The annual journal preserves your memories and becomes a story in itself.

Thanks to the codex binding with an open, thread-sewn spine, the diary can be opened wide and flat from start to finish so that you can write and draw comfortably on every page without the spine edge in the middle interfering with writing. The chamois-colored paper - in the usual excellent quality of Japanese stationery with a fine, smooth surface - accepts fountain pen and ballpoint pen ink with the same contours as the fine lead pens commonly used in Japan. However, it is also suitable for colored and ink pens. In addition to the unusually good handling, the binding also ensures long durability. A set of stickers with titles and tabs to mark the months and the perforated corners provide an overview and make it easy to find the last page entry. Let the new year begin!

The outstanding characteristics and undisputed extraordinarily high quality of Japanese stationery have partly to do with the fact that Japanese writing is difficult to mechanise on a typewriter. The first typewriters were introduced at the beginning of the last century. In addition to Japanese syllable writing the Chinese characters called “Kanji” are common in Japan. The Kanji prove to be exceptionally difficult to reproduce. Until the introduction of the personal computer in the office, it was customary therefore to write business correspondence by hand, and one used the best stationery available to leave a good impression. The passion for extraordinary stationery has survived in Japan even if it is not used for official correspondence anymore. For daily notes, a paper like the lined note paper offered here is put to use. It‘s thread-sewn and features a spine reinforced with black and gold embossed spine tape. An obscure, if amusing side remark: By printing “containing best-ruled foolscap” the Japanese manufacturer came a cropper. Because none of these notebooks is in foolscap, the traditional Anglo-Saxon paper format somewhat larger than DIN A4.