Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook Reviews: A 5-Step Buying Checklist for Bullet Journalers

Who This Checklist Is For

I've spent the last six years ordering notebooks, planners, and writing supplies for a team of about 40 people. In that time I've made enough mistakes to fill one of these notebooks—and documented most of them. The first significant mistake cost us $890 in reprints and a one-week delay.

This is not a traditional Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebook review. It's the checklist I now use before I buy anything from the Leuchtturm1917 lineup. Whether you call it a Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebook or a “notatnik bullet journal a5 leuchtturm1917 reviews” search—notatnik is Polish for notebook—the product is the same. If you're buying one for your own bullet journal, use the checklist. If you're ordering 40 for a workshop or client gift, use it twice.

“Everything I'd read about Leuchtturm1917 said it was the gold standard. In practice, it's a very good notebook—but only if you pick the right edition. Otherwise it's just an expensive notebook.”

Step 1: Verify the A5 Size Before You Trust the Label

The first time I ordered “A5” from a different vendor, I assumed the label meant the same thing. It didn't. The notebooks arrived shorter than the Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebooks we already had, and they didn't fit the covers we had purchased. That was a $680 mistake.

Leuchtturm1917's A5 is a true ISO 216 A5: 148 by 210 millimeters, or about 5.8 by 8.3 inches (Source: ISO 216; leuchtturm1917.com, accessed May 2025). If you're trying to measure inches without a ruler, use a sheet of A4 paper. Fold it in half along the long edge. That folded piece is A5.

If you don't have A4 paper, a standard credit card is 3.375 inches long (Source: ISO 7810). The A5 page is about 5.8 by 8.3 inches, so the page is roughly 1.7 credit-card lengths wide and 2.5 credit-card lengths tall. Do not just trust the product title. Check the SKU. Leuchtturm1917 offers A5, A6, A4, and Master sizes, and the accessories are not interchangeable.

Step 2: Pick the Right Edition—Dotted Is Not Automatically Correct

I used to think bullet journaling meant you had to buy the dotted grid. That is conventional wisdom, and it is not wrong. But it is incomplete. For a team that takes structured meeting notes, ruled or grid often works better. For sketching or wireframing, plain pages are less distracting.

Conventional procurement advice says get three quotes and take the lowest. That only works if the products are truly identical. In my experience, they rarely are. Leuchtturm1917's A5 hardcover comes in dotted, ruled, plain, and grid. The softcover versions trade durability for weight. I have ordered the wrong ruling three times. After the third time, I added one line to every purchase order: verify the ruling type with the actual user before ordering.

What makes the brand worth considering, in my view, is structural. According to the official Leuchtturm1917 product pages (leuchtturm1917.com, accessed May 2025), A5 notebooks include numbered pages, a table of contents, two bookmarks, and an expandable inner pocket. The page numbers and table of contents are the features that save time. A cheaper notebook without page numbers can cost more than a Leuchtturm1917 if you spend two hours a month searching for notes.

Total cost counts more than sticker price. I'll say it plainly: the lowest quote is usually not the lowest total cost.

Step 3: Check the Paper Against the Pens You Actually Use

This is where reviews get fuzzy. Leuchtturm1917 uses 80gsm paper. That's a decent weight for most office writing, but it is not heavy art paper. If your team writes with standard ballpoints, gel pens, or pencils, the paper is probably fine. If someone uses a wet rollerball or a marker, you will likely see some ghosting.

I learned this the expensive way. I once bought 50 notebooks from a cheaper brand because the unit price was $3 lower. The pens we provided bled through so badly that we had to throw out the whole batch. The reprint and shipping cost about $400, which was more than the original savings.

My advice: test one notebook with the actual pens you plan to use before you order in bulk. Do not take any blanket claim about paper—including mine—as a guarantee for your specific ink.

How to Read Leuchtturm1917 A5 Reviews

When you read reviews, ignore the star rating until you know which edition the person used. A one-star review that complains about bleed-through might be from someone using a paint marker on 80gsm paper. A five-star review might be from someone who only uses a pencil. Neither rating tells you what will happen with your pen.

Also check the date. Leuchtturm1917 has changed details over the years, and an old review may not reflect the current paper or cover finish.

Step 4: Plan Your First Page Before You Fill the Whole Book

There is a pattern I have seen in our office, and I am guilty of it too: we buy a beautiful notebook, make an index on page one, and then never use the index. The system breaks because there is no rule for what gets indexed and what does not.

Before you start, decide what the notebook is for. If it is a meeting-notes book, the index should list the project name and date. If it is a study tracker, create a page for your target scores and keep your SAT score calculator results next to that page, not buried in your phone. If it is a personal bullet journal, make the first spread a “why I'm keeping this” page.

It took me three years and about 200 orders to understand that the setup matters more than the notebook. A well-indexed $12 notebook will outperform an unused $27 notebook every time. That changed how I buy supplies: I now ask what the notebook will be used for before I decide which brand is worth it.

Step 5: Build a Receiving Check—Do Not Hand Out the Whole Box

If you are buying one notebook, you can inspect it in the store. If you are buying a case, do not trust the box. Last fall I approved a delivery of 40 Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebooks without opening a single carton. Some units had covers that were slightly off-center. Not a catastrophic defect, but not something you want to hand to a client.

Now I follow a simple process: open three units from different places in the box, check the ruling, check the numbered pages, check the spine. If everything looks right, distribute. It takes ten minutes and has caught 47 potential problems in the past eighteen months.

That number sounds dramatic, but it is real. We have caught packaging damage, mislabeled SKUs, and one batch where the table of contents was missing entirely. Those are not frequent, but they are expensive when they happen.

By the way, shipping follows the same logic. I saved $80 once by choosing a slower shipping method for an order with a hard deadline. The deadline moved up, we had to pay $220 for overnight replacement, and the original order became shelf stock. The $80 savings turned into a $300 loss.

What Usually Goes Wrong

• Choosing a size based on the photo. Verify the actual dimensions.
• Assuming all Leuchtturm1917 editions have the same paper. They don't.
• Not using the table of contents. If you bought numbered pages, use them.
• Forgetting that a “good” notebook is a tool, not a system. The system is yours.

Bottom line: Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebooks are worth the price if they match the way you work. The checklist above is how I stopped ordering the right brand in the wrong format. A size check, a ruling check, a paper check, a plan for page one, and a receiving check. That's the whole system.