I reviewed the standard Story Supply Company (SSC) pocket notebook and pencils over here. Plus I’ve picked up and reviewed their collab with CW Pencil Enterprise called “the Pencil Pusher” over here. They began as a Kickstarter and have evolved into a small but growing company that makes their own notebooks in a small shop in York, Pennsylvania. I love this little company.

There is a lot to love about this company. First, their LE game is on point, their summer 2018 edition “SMR” is a gorgeous series of orange and yellow shades across the cover of a notebook. It perfectly evoked the hot August sun.  

The Fall 2018 LE, “Morning” is muted and gorgeous. I don’t know how many of you have needed to get up super early in the morning in the fall and happened to look out across a field or lake. Watching the fog lift and the changes in temperature occur is really gorgeous, and the Story Supply team captured that feeling in this cover. It’s a grey to black gradient but done a little differently to get that fog like feel. I love it. Inside is a lighter grey version of the gradient plus some printing.

The cover stock is thick and beefy, it’s some of the thickest cover stock available in the pocket notebook game and it is the one to beat. The thick cover stock makes this a great notebook to use for notes on the go-  the sturdiness of the covers means you can actually write in hand without a great deal of bending.

Inside the covers are 48-pages of thick creamy paper. It’s smooth but toothy enough that all my pencils respond well on its surface. Fountain pens do pretty well on this paper as well. It’s thick so there isn’t a great deal of show through. I had no feathering or bleed through, but the largest nib I used was a medium and most of my inks are well behaved. Rubber stamps do well on this smooth but toothy paper.

Overall, the SSC notebooks are top notch and are just amazing to use. At $11.99 their pricing is standard for materials that are anything but. The combination of quality and durability can’t be beaten. You could buy another brand but why? If you want to test them out without buying an LE their regular notebooks are $10, but they also have sales on older editions for $10 as well.

SSC donates notebook and pencil sets to schools in need. You buy a pack of notebooks and a kid gets a notebook and pencil set of their own.

The Pilot Precise V5 has been around since the dawn of my stationery awakening and is a favorite of mine. I like it for just about every task- writing, notes, sketching and doodles. It is a great pen.

Until I saw these on the shelf I’ve always bought the capped version. I don’t know if I simply wasn’t aware of the retractable version or if it wasn’t available. Regardless, I have them now and I’m never going back.

The design of the pen is simple and parts of it hearken back to the capped version- the grooves in the nose and swirly silver on the color, and translucent colored plastic. The similarities end there. The rubberized grip has DX-like divots. THe knock reminds me of the Signo 207. It has a long drive down to extend the tip and click into place. It does have a satisfying click noise. The clip is a futuristic wrap around that clips tightly to the placket of my shirt or a notebook. It wiggles from side to side and feels loose when it’s not clipped to anything. It’s not, it has a sloppy feel.

Overall the Precise V5 RT is a great update to the capped version of the pen. You won’t lose a cap and the ink is fabulous. It does respond and feels more like gel ink than liquid ink. I’m okay with that. Anyway, you can get these on Amazon for around $2/pen. There are entire tubs of 48 of these pens- black and multi colors for around $55! They are also available in just about any store from Target to Walmart to Staples to the local grocery chain.

Pen+Gear might be Walmart’s house brand but it has contained some surprising quality. I snagged the Pen+Gear Gel Stick Pens (GSP) n a whim from the clearance section post Back-to-School season. Cost in clearance was around 50 cents. Regular price is a few dollars. They are made in China.

In the package are eight 0.7mm pens. Each pen has a grippy rubber grip with circular divots to improve the grip. The tip at the working end is metal. The tip unscrews to reveal a pretty standard stick pen gel refill. Each refill has a different amount of ink. You can see the differences in the images of the package. The refill doesn’t last very long. It took less than a half week for me to blow through one at my day job.

The ink itself is nicely dark, doesn’t grey out in the middle, and has really nice flow. Some of my pens were perfectly wonderfully smooth, others were scratchy and felt gross on all paper. The ink seems moderately waterproof. I do not know if it is lightfast. I have not tested it.

The cap snaps closed securely and with a nice click. It posts in the same manner. All of it is nicely secure.

You might recognize the design from several sources- the design is a direct rip off of the Uniball Signo DX stick gel pen. It also looks like the Staples Stick Gel pens, which I suspect are made by Uniball. Frankly the Pen+Gear GSP looks as though Walmart passed a Signo DX and said, “Scan this, but change everything just enough so we don’t get sued.”

Honestly, while the Pen+Gear pencils and notebooks are a steal these aren’t. You have to find the pens that work smoothly and contend with scratchy tips to do so. Even if you need a cheap waterproof sketcher you can usually walk into any store (here in the US) and pick up a 2 or 3-pack of Uniball Signo in black for not much more and have almost guaranteed smoothness and success. The Pen+Gear GSP is a pass from me.

The Grand is a refillable pen body made for Zebra’s Sarasa gel ink refills. It will hold almost any gel ink refill- from Pentel to Pilot to Uniball.

The Grand is available in 5 colors, black, navy silver, copper, and gold. The clip on all colors is chrome. The lower half of the pen is metal cased in a thick layer of glossy metallic lacquer. The top half holds the clip and a translucent window. It could be argued that the window is to view the ink level but it is far too high to tell you when the ink is low, and thus useless, but looks nice.

Overall, I find the Grand quite comfortable. It’s narrower than the Pentel Alloy and heavier. The weight is toward the working end and as a result the balance feels good to me. The glossy lacquer is going to be slippery for folks with sweaty hands, but works great for me. The clip is sturdy and grabs onto my lapel and holds on. The Grand has made it as a DayJob go to pen because the clip is fabulous.

I picked up mine in the clearance section of my local Walgreens for… 75 cents. They only had the copper (aka Rose Gold?) color which is really a dull metallic orange-pink. At 75 cents it was cheaper than a regular Sarasa. Regular price is about $11 almost everywhere. IF you don’t like the Sarasa refills you can get the Sarasa Clip refills via Jetpens, ranging from about 75 cents each to $2 a refill. You can also buy boxes of Pentel or Uniball refills on Amazon. Essentially, you have options of refilling this pen body.