Write on this journal with a heavier pen and you’ll see a faint ghost of the words on the other side of the leaf. I know. I chose the paper anyway, with that trade in front of me, because the alternative would have cost the thing that actually matters.
Most paper decisions are made on a spec sheet. Opacity, weight, brightness, a column of numbers you can compare. I made this one with my hands.
What I was actually testing for
I went through dozens of stocks before landing on Knight Smooth 120gsm, and the two things I was testing for don’t appear on any datasheet: how it looks, and how it feels.
The colour had to be exactly right. Not a pure, snow-bright white, which reads as cold and clinical, like something printed rather than written in. Not a warm cream either, which tips into keepsake territory, cosy and soft in a way this object isn’t. I wanted the white in between. White enough to feel considered and deliberate, without any of the yellow that would make it feel like a comfort item. A restrained white, for a tool meant to be used with intent.
Then the feel. Not thin, not heavy. It had to sit between the fingers like a considered object, not like the paper in an office printer, and not rough or newspaper-adjacent either. That’s where the smoothness came in. I wanted it to feel different the moment you touched it.
Here’s the part that made the testing real rather than theoretical: on every single sample, even the ones I disliked on sight, I wrote at least a full page. You cannot judge paper by looking at it. You judge it under the pen. Writing on every stock taught me what each structure actually did, which let me give Richard precise feedback instead of vague preferences. I kept written notes on each one too, because the samples came weeks apart and memory isn’t a reliable instrument.
The one that felt right
Several stocks ticked every box on paper and still felt wrong in the hand. That’s the whole reason I tested by writing rather than by comparing specs. A sheet can be more opaque, more even, technically superior in every measurable way, and simply feel dead to write on.
The one I chose didn’t win on the checklist. Somebody looking only at numbers would point at the show-through and say it fails a box. But it felt right immediately, the first line I wrote on it. I didn’t trust that first impression on its own. I held the decision for days, went back and wrote on it again on different mornings, in different moods, before committing. It kept feeling right. So I committed.
Why I own the show-through
I could have chased zero show-through. It was available. It would have meant a brighter, harder, more coated sheet, and that sheet would have lost everything I’d just spent weeks selecting for. The colour would have gone cold. The hand would have gone flat. I’d have traded the entire character of the paper for a number that looks better in a product description.
So I made the opposite trade. Good uncoated paper with real feel under the pen will let a heavy nib ghost a little. That’s not a defect in the paper. It’s the nature of the material, and it’s the cost of choosing feel over opacity. I’d rather own that cost plainly than hide behind a stock that writes like plastic.
There’s also the matter of what this journal is for. It’s for reflection, one page at a time, thinking worked out slowly. It isn’t a reference book where you read both faces of a leaf at once and need each side pristine and isolated. A faint trace of yesterday underneath today isn’t interference in that kind of writing. If anything it’s honest about the fact that a real object was used.
For a long time the show-through was just something I asserted. I have since tested it properly, the same page written out across three notebooks side by side, rather than leaving it as a claim.
Feel over the spec sheet
You can optimise paper for the spec sheet or for the hand. You can’t always do both, and when they pull apart, I know which one I trust. The hand doesn’t lie. A person writing on the page can feel in a second what a column of numbers takes a paragraph to describe, and usually gets wrong anyway.
I chose this paper with my eyes open, and I’d choose it again.
You can feel it in every journal we make. View the journal.
The writing, occasionally. Subscribe.