Midori MD Grid Notebook in A5 - Review and Pictures

This is a review of the Midori MD grid notebook in A5. It is my current absolute favorite fountain pen ink-friendly notebook. I’ve included a couple of pictures and my own thoughts about it.

Buy the Midori MD Grid Notebook > (Note: This is an affiliate link).

I first found this notebook and bought it from Rum för Papper, a stationery store here in Gothenburg. At first, I didn’t recognize the products as Midori, because the branding isn’t vulgar about the brand name. And I wasn’t gonna buy it because I didn’t think it could handle fountain pen ink. But I kept reaching for it to observe the light-blue graph lines inside the pages, and finally saw that it was indeed Midori! After that, I knew I just had to have it. It’s a hobby of mine to try out and collect different notebooks, so this was perfect.

About the Midori MD Grid Notebook

The Midori brand

Midori is a quite famous Japanese stationery brand. It’s classified by most fountain pen & notebook enthusiasts as one of the best high-quality stationery brands out there along with Leuchtturm1917 and Rhodia. Their products are especially well-known for the paper quality that can handle fountain pen ink well.

In addition, their products are sold for a reasonable price (which is always great!).

Cover Design & Style

The cover design of the Midori MD grid notebook is very minimalistic and beautiful, similar to other Japanese stationery brands such as Muji.

The cover of the notebook is like thin cardboard, but soft and bendable at the same time. It comes covered with a rice-paper sheet (love that). Rice paper is super-thin, half translucent paper. It feels and looks very delicate, faint, and soft. It’s beautiful. And on top of that rice-paper sheet, there’s another cover in bright blue thick paper. This cover is decorated with very pretty and authentic handwriting in both Japanese and English, as well as hand-drawn sketches. I’m not gonna lie, the hand-drawn sketches and handwriting were one of the reasons I wanted to buy it.

The sketches and handwriting is printed both on the outside of the cover, as well as on the inner pages. See the image below for sketches and handwriting inside of the Midori MD grid notebook.

Midori MD grid notebook in A5 - Cover — Midori MD grid notebook in A5

inside of Midori notebook — Cute handmade sketches & instructions inside the Midori notebook

Buy the Midori MD Grid Notebook >

Note that the cover is soft, which often means that the durability isn’t as good as with hard-cover notebooks. However, Midori also sells different covers for the notebook. I bought an opaque plastic one, that I have re-used on multiple notebooks. So, I’d recommend you to do that as well if you’re planning on carrying it with you often on-the-go.

Functionality

You can see that they’ve put thought and effort into functionality and utility.

The graph lines are in a faint blue colour, which helps make your writing stand out from the guidelines
The notebook comes with a bookmark thread/tassel, so that you’ll easily know where you left of
It comes with multiple stickers that can be used for keeping in place both the bookmark tassel, as well as to mark the cover of the book after you’ve finished it (for structured storage).
The binding of the book is also of high quality and the notebook can be opened flat, which is super important for me
The spacing between the graph lines is perfect for my small handwriting, and as guidelines for print-writing

Paper Quality

The Midori notebooks are very well known for their superb paper quality. Both for the right amount of scratchiness when writing, as well as for how it handles fountain pen ink.

How does it handle fountain pen ink?

I can personally attest to that the paper quality is great with fountain pen ink. In the photos below you can see the other side of a page where I’ve written with Diamine ink. You can see that there is some slight ghosting on the other side, but nothing too bad. I personally enjoy ghosting though, so that’s not a problem for me at all. I think ghosting on a page gives the book a “soul”/charm, in the same way as used old books have a certain charm to them.

Midori MD grid notebook in A5 — Picture of Midori notebook grid

What is the paper color?

Apart from how the paper handles ink, I really love the creme-colored pages. It isn’t whitened 100%. And I love that because it creates a beautiful harmony with the light blue graph lines. It also makes it shine beautifully in the sunlight, which is important for all of us who love writing in the sun.

How is the texture like?

The paper offers some texture, which gives the right amount of scratchiness when using a fountain pen. It gives the right amount of control, and it also feels comfortable on the fingertips.

What about the graph lines?

I love the graph lines. Especially the beautiful shade of light blue, but also the spacing between the boxes, and that they’ve put whitespace around the graph lines. In the picture below, you can also see that there are small guidelines all around the width of the page (dots and slashes) which has served me many times when writing lists or sketching things. I think this graph paper would work really well with a bullet journal as well.

They offer the notebook with lines, dotted, and plain as well. But after trying all, except the dotted, I still return to the graph paper. It’s unusual for me though, since I never use graph paper otherwise, but that just goes to show how good this graph design is.

Here’s an example of how a page of the notebook looks like with handwriting on it. The graph lines help a lot with guiding my handwriting and making it more readable. (The pen I used is one of my newest and most favorite Muji pens!)