As promised in my last blog post about a test with Midori MD Paper, here is now my test with the lovely paper of William Hannah.
William Hannah Discbound Covers
William Hannah Limited, which was founded by David Round in about 2015, is a small family business from the UK which creates lovely leather bound covers which include discs within the cover.
David has started his small company at his kitchen table in 2015, because he wanted to have a special cover with removable and repositionable pages. I don`t know how long it took from the first protoype to really manufacturing these covers but I admire David for the route he took: no outsourcing to China, this might have been cheaper at the beginning, but staying within his own country, working with local businesses to create such lovely covers.
What I like the most with these covers: the discs are within the cover, the leather surrounds the stainless steel discs! So no more noise when you put down the cover, the discs cannot make a click-clack noise on the table because they are covered!
In the beginning only A5 covers were available, but now the same superb covers are available in A6 as well.
In addition he created small covers for thin pocket sized notebooks. And now offers pen bands, card wallets, archive sets and dividers in a thick card stock.
The outside of these covers is smooth leather, the inside suede. Available in so many colour options, which you can buy as ready-to-buy options, or, if you like a very special combination, you can create your own bespoke model. Select the outside, the inside, the stitching color and if you like to have a pen loop or not.
The colours are very vibrant, blues and reds and pink/purple ones and others.
The leather is very lovely to touch, not too sloppy, not too sturdy, it just gets nicer with use.
The discs are fixed within the cover and cannot be taken out. They move along a thin rod or stick (don`t know the exact word for it), again made in stainless steel, and stay in place because of the mushroom holes of any pages.
These stainless steel discs are the best for smooth turning of any pages.
The best explanation all the features can be found on his webpage!
I have two of these covers right now, a black+crimson one and black+royal blue. Black+crimson is available in his shop, he does not offer the royal blue suede right now, but as far as I have heard, it shall come back.
The covers do not hold too many sheets of paper, you cannot stuff it like a ring cover with 30mm rings for example. They can fit comfortably the 60 sheets of your starter pack, the sheets can still be turned nicely with this amount of sheets.
You can easily take it with you as it has a slim design. The archive set which has bigger rings included, can hold up to 120 sheets I would say. Somebody in the Facebook group said that he put 140 sheets of 90gsm paper into these rings.
The covers themselves do not have any closure. But the pen bands made out of the same lovely leather can be used as a closure in addition to carrying one pen. They have a elastic back side and can be slipped over the closed cover.
William Hannah paper
but now to the paper which is actually the reason of this blogpost 😉
When you order a cover 60 sheets (120 pages) of his paper are already included. You can either choose 60 of the same or mix and match, for example 20 lined, 20 dotted and 20 plain.
In addition David offers preprinted planner pages, daily or weekly layouts, habit trackers, monthly pages and more.
For the daily pages you can choose the start date and then get a 100 day pack from this date. Or you can choose the undated version and insert your own dates.
the paper:
- 115 gsm paper
- manufactured in UK
- with grey and red print
- the outer corners are slightly rounded, the inner corners square
- the paper colour is white (not bright bright white but a bit whiter than the Filofax Notebook paper, more white than the Hobonichi Cousin paper for example)
and let me just put it in simple words: FOUNTAIN PEN FRIENDLY!!
Yes, this paper is soooo fountain pen friendly.
With all my inks which I use for testing, there is no bleeding, no feathering, next-to-nothing ghosting, the pen glids over the pages, the paper is not too smooth, but has a nice feedback.
It shows the thickness of any nibs very nicely, F like F and B like B, not like on the Midori MD Paper where M suddenly looks like F.
The colours of any ink show up nicely as well due to the white paper. Inks show shading as well.
as you can see the inks do not feather at all on this paper, even my finicky Levenger Greystoke ink looks very fine on this paper.
And the backside: no ghosting.
the drying times are within the normal time frame. Very similar to the Filofax Notebook Paper, a bit faster than on Midori MD Paper.
and my last test, which for me is the ultimate test of "ink on paper": the J Herbin Rose Cyclamen ink with a B nib:
Due to the thickness of the paper it is more on the hard side. It is not a soft paper like Tomoe River or Jibun Techo paper but I found it softer than the Midori MD paper.
Still totally acceptable for me 😉
But, this is the very small pro + con you will always have with paper: either very thin paper with a lot of ghosting but soft paper - or thicker paper with no ghosting but more harder paper. It just depends on your very own taste which is more important to you.
When I compare the WH paper to the Midori MD paper: the Midori paper was more glossy and hard, the lines of the nibs changed from M to F for example, on the WH paper they stayed their true width.
And if you want to print your own layouts on this paper, just ask David at time of ordering to not punch the sheets, you can then run the plain paper through your printer without having the problem of maybe getting stuck. The punched sheets sometimes did this in my printer.
This is just one feature of the lovely customer service that David has. When you receive the cover+paper it feels like Christmas as the unboxing makes you smile for sure!
And for punching you can use the Arc Staples punch or the ones from Levenger.
my summary for this paper:
I give it five and a half stars (out of max six):
- bleed or no bleed: ✔ no bleeding
- feather or no feather: ✔ no feathering
- ghosting or no ghosting: ✔ a tiny, tiny bit of ghosting
- white or cream paper: ✔ white paper
- smooth or feedback: ✔ smooth paper with nice feedback
- hard or soft paper: 1/2 ✔ a bit on the hard side due to the paper thickness but still ok
I have used this paper in the whole month of January! After the change from the Midori paper to the WH paper I stayed with it and I really enjoyed it!
Now in February I`m using the Midori Cotton paper with self-printed grid layout. Stay tuned for the March blog post of the test on this paper.
Thank you to all, stay healthy and (planner) peace to everyone!
Andrea ✒💖
P.S. I have bought all my planners myself, I paid for them, I state my own personal opinions about them. When you click a link which I have added for you to see the original planners I do not get paid for it.