Yamamoto Paper

Yamamoto Paper Canopus Note — A5 Notebook

$39.99 CAD

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Two years of paper development spent replacing one discontinued sheet

When Cosmo Air Light — the paper behind Yamamoto's earlier Cosmo Note, a favorite among fountain pen users for its ink shading and sheening — went out of production in 2022, the company didn't try to find a substitute. They set out to beat what they'd lost. Canopus, the paper developed for this notebook, is the result of roughly two years of trial and error, built specifically to go beyond what Cosmo Air Light could do rather than simply replicate it. The effort was recognized before most customers had even opened one: Canopus Note won the JetPens "Writer's Choice" Award at the Tokyo Stationery Award 2025, voted on by stationery retailers and industry professionals rather than the manufacturer itself.

What "going beyond" actually means on the page

Fountain pen ink shows its character in specific ways — shading, where tone varies across a stroke; sheening, where a metallic cast appears at the edges of pooled ink; and shimmer, where actual particles catch the light. Getting paper to display all three well is harder than it sounds, since the same absorption properties that create rich shading can flatten sheen, and vice versa. Canopus paper is built to let all three effects surface clearly, with a soft, almost silky surface that lets a nib glide rather than drag.

Where it specifically improves on Cosmo Air Light

The comparison isn't just marketing — reviewers who tested both papers side by side point to two concrete fixes. Cosmo Air Light had a noticeably spongy feel underhand, and it let fine nibs lay down lines closer to what a medium nib would produce, which made line width harder to predict. Canopus is firmer to write on, with the kind of light feedback people generally want from good paper, and it keeps line widths consistent with what a given nib is supposed to produce. One reviewer put it plainly: Cosmo Air Light was never something he wanted to commit to for a full 200-page journal, while Canopus is paper he's comfortable filling front to back — which is precisely the use case this notebook, at 176 pages, is built for.

176 pages, and nothing printed on them

Every page is blank. Instead of a fixed ruling, the notebook includes a removable guide sheet offering both a 12mm ruled option and a 6mm grid, slid underneath a page as a visible-through reference rather than printed permanently onto the paper — useful if you switch between ruled writing and gridded layouts depending on what you're working on, or if you just prefer keeping the option open.

Built to actually hold together

At 176 pages, this is a substantially thicker notebook than most of Yamamoto's other lines, so it's bound with thread stitching designed to keep that volume of pages secure through repeated use rather than loosening at the spine over time.

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