Five pocket sketchbooks, tested for four weeks each
A pocket book is a different animal from an A5. It gets carried in a jacket, drawn in standing up, and closed on wet ink. These five were each carried for four weeks through the same route — Yongkang Street in the mornings — and scored on what broke.
Place card — Yongkang Street, Taipei
| Kind | Field kit |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 25.0335, 121.5290 |
| Country | Taiwan |
| Medium | Ink |
| minutes on site | 30 min |
| Tools in the bag | Muji 0.5 mechanical pencil · Sakura Pigma Micron 05 |
| First published | 7 Sep 2026 |
The four things that decide it
Format, paper weight and price are on every product page. What decides whether a pocket book survives a month is none of those:
- Does it lie flat? A pocket book drawn standing up gets one hand. If the book will not hold itself open, you will lose the bottom half of every page to a shadow and a wobble.
- How does it take a 0.5 nib? Pocket books often use thinner paper than their A5 siblings. Below about 100 gsm a 0.5 nib starts to show through on the reverse.
- What does a thumb do to it? You will rest a thumb on the page while drawing. On soft paper that thumb burnishes a grey patch that no eraser will lift.
- Weight per page. Not total weight — weight divided by the number of usable pages, because a light book with 30 pages costs you more per drawing than a heavy one with 96.
The five, scored
| Book | Pages | Paper | Weight | Lies flat | 0.5 nib | Thumb | €/drawing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muji A6 plain, 5-pack | 30 × 5 | 80 gsm | 62 g | No, needs a clip | Bleeds after 2 passes | Marks badly | 0.18 |
| Moleskine Pocket Sketchbook | 48 | 111 gsm | 145 g | Yes, after a break-in | Good | Slight burnish | 0.42 |
| Hahnemühle Travel Booklet | 40 | 140 gsm | 118 g | Yes, immediately | Very good | No mark | 0.35 |
| Stillman & Birn Alpha A6 | 62 | 150 gsm | 176 g | Yes, immediately | Excellent | No mark | 0.44 |
| Fabriano Pocket, glue-bound | 32 | 120 gsm | 96 g | No, and it resists | Good | Light mark | 0.31 |
The Hahnemühle is the surprise: it is not the best paper here, but it opens flat from the first page, which over a month of standing-up drawing is worth more than the 10 gsm it gives up to the Alpha.
Where each one actually failed
Muji 5-pack. The honest verdict is that this is a note pad, not a sketchbook. The 80 gsm paper takes a pencil fine and a 0.5 nib for about two passes; after that the reverse of the page carries a ghost of the drawing and, worse, the paper cockles under the thumb. At €0.18 a drawing it is still the cheapest way to spend a month drawing badly without guilt, which is a real use.
Moleskine Pocket. The 111 gsm paper is better than its reputation. The failure is the binding: it needs about a week of being forced flat before it stops closing itself, and during that week every drawing has a curved bottom edge. After the break-in it is genuinely pleasant, and 48 pages means it finishes inside a month of daily use.
Fabriano Pocket. Best paper-to-weight ratio of the five, and the only one whose binding actively fought back. Glue-bound pocket books are designed for notes; forcing one flat cracks the spine at about page 20. Mine lost its last six pages on day 24.
Stillman & Birn Alpha A6. Wins every technical category and loses on one practical point: 176 g in a jacket pocket is noticeable. If your jacket has a proper inside pocket, this is the answer. If it does not, the weight means the book stays home, and a book at home draws nothing.
What I ended up carrying
Two books, which sounds like a compromise and is not. The Alpha A6 lives in the bag for planned sessions; the Muji 5-pack sits in a jacket pocket for the ten minutes waiting for a bus. Keeping the cheap book for throwaway drawings removed the small hesitation that used to stop me starting a page in a good book — and that hesitation, rather than paper quality, was costing me the most drawings.
On prices: the per-drawing figure uses Taipei prices in New Taiwan dollars converted at the time of writing. Muji and Moleskine are widely available and stable; the Hahnemühle and Fabriano prices move with import duty.