Closed and open black textured hardcover notebooks with white pages and ribbon bookmarks on a wooden surface.

768 Pages of Tomoe River S: The “Coffee & Beer” Notebook

Shirogane

September 27, 2026

Stationery

We’ve all been through this particular tech-and-lifestyle trap. You pick up a low-stakes analog hobby or habit like journaling to decompress from your screens. A few days later, you decide to check out what kinds of things other people are doing for their journaling on you socials. Suddenly your feeds are choked with stationery influencers churning out museum-grade calligraphy, immaculate spreads, and hustle-culture guilt trips about why you’re failing if you don’t journal every single morning. Soon enough the guilt creeps in, and you’re just staring at blank squares.

However, some of that guilt might be attributed to the tools we use. Most daily planners demand a kind of strict obedience: write every day or face your past neglect. Gosando’s new Coffee & Beer Notebook (コーヒーアンドビアノートブック) takes the opposite philosophy, giving you massive 765-page journal, letting you write whatever you want, whenever you want (or whenever you don't want).

An open notebook featuring various decorative stickers, illustrations of cats, and handwritten calligraphy on white paper. — Gosando's philosophy is pretty simple: "It's perfectly fine to have days when you don't write at all, or days when you write a lot."

The concept started with an offhand idea from an employee who happens to be an avid stationery lover: "I already have plenty of favorite notebooks, but wouldn't it be incredible if we could combine everything we love about all of them into a single volume?" Because the team wasn't a stationery manufacturer, they weren't chained to standard industry formats. Instead, they set out to build the ideal planner from scratch, turning the dream features of real notebook users into an uncompromising reality.

Gosando or 株式会社渡辺護三堂 is a 136 year old printing plate making company founded in 1890.

The planner was engineered for anyone whose thoughts don’t neatly fit into a pre-ruled box, the project launched on Japanese crowdfunding platform Makuake with an initial goal of ¥100,000. It quickly shattered that target, cruising past ¥449,300 at the time of this writing, well before the closing bell on September 27, 2026.

A thick A6 size notebook featuring Tomoe River S paper with a black cover and 665 blank pages. — The Makuake goal shows that there is a demand for guilt-free 700+ page notebook

Bible-Thick, Pocket-Sized, and Built to Lie Flat

Despite measuring a compact A6 in width and height, the book is an absolute unit on the shelf, clocking in at 2.6 cm thick. To pack a massive 768 pages into a handheld form without turning it into an unopenable brick, Gosando turned to Tomoe River S paper. Renowned worldwide among fountain pen users, the ultralight paper delivers exceptional ink resistance, minimal feathering, and vivid sheen while keeping total bulk to a minimum.

Open notebook with handwritten Japanese text on Tomoe River S paper featuring a small bird illustration. — The Tomoe River S paper is prized for its ability to take fountain pens well without bleeding or feathering

The notebook’s structural spine allows it to lay completely flat on a desk, solving the universal headache of fighting thick book bindings when writing near the inner margins.

Inside, the layout is broken into two distinct sections:

The Diary Block (103 pages): A clean calendar setup starting in January 2027, featuring monthly overviews alongside traditional Japanese Rokuyo calendar days and Zodiac signs. Fitting its cozy namesake, the calendar also marks fun domestic commemorative days dedicated to coffee and beer culture.

An open monthly planner page for April 2027 featuring a clean grid layout with Japanese kanji characters. — The diary section gives you ample space to write, draw, or even stamp boxes (if you feel like it).

The Blank Notebook Block (665 pages): Pure, unruled freedom. Designed for journaling, sketching, scrapbooking, ephemera pasting, or clear-stamp spreads, this section abandons daily page requirements entirely so you can write two lines on a Monday and twenty pages over a weekend beverage.