Baron Fig Apprentice Pocket Notebook Review

Baron Fig Apprentice Package

Above you see the Baron Fig Apprentice (via BaronFig) with its packaging still intact, well minus the shiny plastic wrap because that makes for bad photographs.  This pack of three Apprentice pocket sized notebooks was sent to us by the lovely folks at Baron Fig who have always been very happy and proud of their product, just looking for honest feedback from people like yourselves so feel free to drop any thoughts below in the comments section if you have experience with these yourself, or just have feedback based on our review here.

Baron Fig Apprentice Yellow Thread Binding

One of the first things I noticed about the Baron Fig Apprentice pocket notebook was the cool yellow stitching used as binding instead of the standard staples you usually see on pocket sized notebooks like this.  Personally I like anything that reminds me of baseball and barring the yellow and grey colors, this totally just reminds me of stitching on a baseball, and I think it gives these some nice character.  I would love to see different color combinations going forward, but I know that this color scheme pretty much aligns with their branding as you saw with their Confidant Notebook that we reviewed in the past.  The grey covers on these are a fairly heavy card stock that feels like its in the same neighborhood as what you find with similar sized Doane Paper notebooks.

Baron Fig Apprentice Inside Yellow Thread Binding

Inside of the Baron Fig Apprentice pocket notebook  in the very center page you will find that same yellow thread, well because thats how binding works.  It appears that if you look at the top and bottom ends there is a double stitch of the binding here, which I assume is to provide a little extra durability and strength because nobody wants their notebook falling apart.  The Apprentice has 48 pages of a nice soothing ivory paper with light grey ruling that all matches nicely with the cover and yellow binding thread.  If the standard ruling isn’t your thing, these are also available with dot grid or blank pages as well.

Baron Fig Apprentice Field Notes Size Comparison

In terms of the size of the Baron Fig Apprentice, it is important to note that they are smaller than many of your standard pocket sized notebooks and journals.  I’ve seen other well done reviews that mention them as measuring 3.5 inches by 5 inches however I found that mine come in at almost exactly 1/16 of an inch shorter than that in both directions.  Not sure if this is a manufacturing defect in the batch that I got, or if this is truly the intended size and people are rounding.  Either way it isn’t a big deal but I wanted to point it out because I know some of you like using custom covers for your notebooks or just like knowing how these will fit in your pocket.  Speaking of pockets, in my trial runs I found that these fit nicely in the back pocket of my jeans without the top sticking out, thanks to the slightly shorter length of them, but they do still peek out the top of a standard dress shirt pocket.

Baron Fig Apprentice Fountain Pen Friendly Writing Samples 

Baron Fig Apprentice Pocket Notebook Writing Sample:

For the writing samples in our Baron Fig Apprentice pocket notebook, we went with some Pelikan Edelstein Aventurine, Noodler’s 54th Massachusetts, Caran d’Ache Infinite Grey, and Pelikan Edelstein Amber all of which were loaded up in pens with Fine or Extra Fine nibs.  Each of these ink and nib combinations performed very nicely on the Baron Fig paper and there was absolutely no feathering and there also didn’t appear to be any significant spreading of the ink once it hit the paper.  The paper itself seemed to have the slightest hint of a toothy feel to it, but overall a very nice writing experience.

Baron Fig Apprentice Fountain Pen Friendly Writing Experience Backside

You will notice that if you look at the back of the writing sample, the paper does tend to have a bit of show through with these inks and nib sizes.  Keep in mind too that with darker inks or wider nibbed pens you will most likely experience more significant show through than what you see here.  As I’m writing this and looking at the photo above I also noticed that I have yet to mention that the last six of the 48 pages of the notebook have perforations so you can fairly easily remove them.  Personally I like when all the pages are perforated but six is better than none, so I’ll take it.

I think the folks at Baron Fig did a nice job with these journals and I really appreciate their willingness to share them with us for the review.  Its great that they are so open to hearing feedback from users of their product to make sure they are living up to expectations of the writing and analog community that enjoy using fine notebooks like this.  This is a great little pocket notebook for jotting down your thoughts and ideas, and I personally don’t think you can go wrong by grabbing a pack or two for yourself over at Barron Fig.