I’ve always been a fan of spiral notebooks for GMing notes, particularly spiral notebooks with perforated pages and durable covers. But there’s always one problem with them: When you stick them in a bag of gaming books, the spines have a tendency to get smooshed.
Enter the Five Star Advanced spiral notebook. Not only does it have a pen loop (something every notebook should come with), it has a nylon sleeve sewn into its cover that protects the coil from getting crushed.
I bought one of the smaller ones (the 6″ x 9 1/2″ version) for work, and it travels like a champ. I couldn’t find one of the larger ones (linked above) when I needed a notebook for my current campaign, and I’m regretting that already.
Simply put, this is the best spiral notebook I’ve ever seen. If you like using notebooks for your old-school GMing note-taking needs, I highly recommend them.
I squee’d with joy when I read “Ultimate Spiral Notebook.” Does this make me a nerd?
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll have to pick one of these up for my lab work.
Being left-handed spirals always pose an issue for me, as my hand sits on the spirals as I write. I like a bound notebook, but just not spirals.
But nice to see that someone can improve upon the old spiral notebook.
I’ve loved Mead’s Five Star notebooks for years, but when they came out with the nylon sleeve/pen-holder version I bought about six in one trip. My friends looked at me as if I was totally daft and I just couldn’t explain to them that these were the best notebooks ever and what if I could never find them again? Still, it made me incredibly, irrationally happy.
Does someone make left-handed spiral notebooks? Or ones with margins on both sides, so you can just flip them upside down to write lefty?
And geeking out about office supplies on a blog about RPGs? Not nerdy at all. Nope. Not a bit. 😉
Oddly enough, I have a Five-Star spiral notebook (without all the kewl powerz ;)) in front of me.
There is enough “bleed through” on the margins to use them in reverse for lefties.
I’m a lefty too, but I’m so used to the spiral that it doesn’t bother me.
Walt C
As a tech gamer (a laptop is all I need), this doesn’t seem up my alley, but a counselor I know (psych, not legal) says that when we write by hand, we do a better job of discerning what we’re feeling, so it looks like a trip to Office Depot for me.
I’ve been using one of these notebooks for quite a while now, and I love it! I keep my initiative cards and some spares in the index card pocket and any artwork for show in the sleeve pockets. A mechanical pencil sits in the front. Anytime I travel or while I’m sitting in bed or on the couch, I jot down notes, ideas, sketches, outlines, etc. for my game. During sessions, I keep a task list of things to follow-up on between sessions. If I’m having a few days of inspiration and brainstorming, I make sure I have it with me at all times.
When I don’t have it with me, but I’m in front of a computer, I’ll use Google Notebook for quick thoughts and lists or Google Docs for more thorough documents.
For the record, I use the smaller notebook as it’s much more portable.
Telas: Yes! My work here as an Office Depot affiliate is done. 😉 (Kidding!)
Cedric: I just picked up my first Moleskine for NaNo (my goers-everywhere notebook), and it’s pretty nice. I haven’t written in it yet, but it looks like it’ll hold up well with daily travel and frequent use.
The only thing that bugs me about them — and nearly every small notebook I’ve ever seen — is the lack of a pen loop. What am I supposed to do with my pen? Tucking under the elastic is all I could come up with, but it’s not ideal.
Amaril: Oooh, I’d forgotten all about the index card pocket! They even come with a couple pages worth of perforated index cards, which is a nice touch.
On the other hand …
I just picked up three 100-page count spiral notebooks from Dollar General for 8 cents ea. Those work just fine for me.
Dollar General for gaming supplies is awesome. I think I spent $5 for a box of 50 70 page spiral notebooks. Very handy to have near the table! Everyone gets their own notebook for next to nothing in terms of cost to me.
Ugh, I used one of those last semester as my school notebook. I hated it.
I prefer to fold a spiral notebook in half, not lay it out like a book. That’s impossible with this monstrosity.
The smaller ones fold back just fine.
Mead DOES make spirals for lefties. They’re hard to find, though. And expensive. (I think I can get a 100 pg. spiral for $1 and the same for lefties will be $3-$5) And it’s hard to use ’em once you’ve spent years using the ones for right-handed folks. I’ve tried… I would always start from the back of the lefthanded ones.. which were the front of the right.
Spirals still bother the heck out of me. I’m still in college, and I have a hard time taking notes, since I know my hand will be one gigantic hunk of pain and meat by the end of the day. It’s easier if I’m not using spirals, but it’s hard to find cheap composition books with the same size and number of pages as a standard spiral notebook.
I would imagine you could find a notebook with A4 paper that is used in countries with right-to-left writing like say Japan. But, I couldn’t even find A4 paper here in the states at Office Depot.
Still looking around for some. Sometimes I hate the US for being different on everything. i.e., metric anyone?