Hardbound Notebook, Section Sewn

Details

An A5 case-bound notebook, thread sewn in signatures of sixteen pages, cased onto 2.5 mm greyboard with a cloth spine, a ribbon marker and an expanding paper pocket at the back. The named cheat in this category is arithmetic. A hardbound notebook sold as 192 pages routinely carries 180, because a signature was trimmed out to hold a price and the cover was not reprinted, and nobody counts. The word page does the rest of the work: on some books it means a side, on some it means a leaf, and the ambiguity is deliberate because it lets one number mean two things depending on who is asking. On this store a page is one side, a leaf is one sheet, and both figures are printed. The second cheat is the word hardbound itself, used for a board cover glued onto a milled, perfect-bound block. That is a hard cover on a soft book. It will not open flat and it will shed.

• 96 pages is 48 leaves in 6 signatures. 192 pages is 96 leaves in 12 signatures. 240 pages is 120 leaves in 15 signatures. Every one of those divides by 16 exactly, which is why those are the three sizes
• Counted on a sample from every lot against the printed figure. A short book is a rejected lot, not a discount
• Thread sewn through each fold, rounded and backed, cased onto 2.5 mm greyboard. It opens flat at any page and stays there without a hand on it
• Text paper measures 100 GSM to ISO 536, taken from a disc cut out of the bound book, tolerance plus or minus 3 percent
• Opacity 94 percent, ISO 2471, ISO brightness 88 percent to ISO 2470-1
• Fountain pen friendly, described honestly. Extra fine to medium steel nibs: no feathering, no bleed-through, light ghosting on the reverse. A broad or a wet italic will bleed through in places and we say so instead of printing the words fountain pen friendly and stopping there
• Acid free to ISO 9706. Elemental chlorine free with AOX under 0.2 kg per tonne of pulp, which is not chlorine free, and this store refuses that rounding on every paper item it sells
• Virgin fibre. No recycled content and no leaf on the cover implying any
• Spine measures about 7 mm at 96 pages, 12 mm at 192 and 14.5 mm at 240, from a 0.11 mm caliper at 1.1 bulk
• Ruled at 7 mm. Ribbon marker, elastic closure, and a gusseted back pocket that takes about eight folded A4 sheets