This Pentalic Traveler Pocket Journal (buy via Amazon) is pretty small, measuring 3″x4″ but its also pretty thick with 160 pages. The journal is a pocket journal and is really marketed as a sketch notebook so to be honest I’m not sure why I bought it. Most likely I was just liking the bright orange color and the fact that its so small.
The cover on the Pentalic Traveler Pocket Journal is somewhat leather-like but has a very smooth and soft to the touch finish to it. The material is pressed onto some slightly heavy card stock so its pretty flexible and besides this orange version that I picked up, there are plenty of other colors to pick from.
The back of the journal is bare except for the bottom center where the Pentalic name and logo is stamped into the cover. Usually I’m a fan of more minimalist branding but because of the size of this notebook, the logo is fairly large in comparison. I found it interesting that while most of the times brands or names are stamped on journals its a pretty light press, but this logo is pressed in pretty deep.
As I said previously the Pentalic Traveler Pocket Journal has 160 pages so its quite thick. This side view gets in close and shows the binding and the page finder ribbon that is color coordinated with the cover. You can also see the thickness of the cover material as compared to the cardstock its pressed onto as well as the folded up back pocket folder on the bottom.
Besides being a great picture of my finger, this picture was just to show that the back cover does in fact have a pocket. It isn’t huge so you can’t fit a lot in here, but if you wanted to use it for a debit card, and ID, a business card and a few bills you could probably manage to fit those in there.
The Pentalic Traveler Pocket Journal has 120gsm paper and it handled these Sharpie Art Pens as well as some fountain pen ink very nicely. There was no feathering and no show through at all on the back of the page. These were pretty much marketed as sketching journals, and my artistic abilities are non-existent so I can’t really speak to that. I did however have an issue even just writing on the pages here because of the small surface area in relation to the thickness of the 160 pages. I think the fact that I had a hard time even just writing without fatigue would make sketching in these even more challenging. Again I can’t speak to the sketching aspect, so that is just an educated guess. Overall though the paper quality is great, the cover looks and feels great, so if you think something this size might work for you, you can check them out on Amazon where they also have 6″x 4″ and 8″ x 6″ sizes in about 10 different colors.
©2017, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.
