New notebook day! I’m excited about this new Midori MD grid notebook in A5 that I bought. Here are a few pictures and a review.
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Buy the Midori MD Grid Notebook >
About the Midori MD Grid Notebook
The 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.
Especially in regards to how it handles fountain pen inks. Their products are also sold at a reasonable price (which is always great!).
Design & Style
The design and the style of the Midori MD grid notebook is very minimalistic, beautiful and highly functional. It reminds me a lot about the Muji brand (which is another one of my favorit Japanese stationery brands).
The outside of the notebook comes covered with a rice-paper sheet (love that). Rice-paper is a 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.
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.
Buy the Midori MD Grid Notebook >
Functionality
You can see that they’ve put thought and effort into functionality. The notebook 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. The binding of the book is also of high-quality and the notebook can be opened flat, which is super important for me.
Paper Quality
The Midori notebooks are very well known for their superb paper quality. Both for the scratchiness when writing, as well as for how it handles fountain pen ink.
I can personally attest to that the paper quality is great. I’ve added some photos below. You can see that there is some slight ghosting, but nothing too bad. I personally enjoy ghosting though, so that’s not a problem at 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.
Picture of Midori notebook grid 
Midori MD grid notebook in A5
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Here’s an example of how a page of the notebook looks like with handwriting on it. (The pen I used is one of my newest and most favorite Muji pens!)
Thanks for reading!
