Tomoe River Switchover: A Review

“The knell of the bells at the Gion temple

Echoes the impermanence of all things.

The colour of the flowers on its double-trunked tree

Reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall.

He who is proud is not so for long,

Like a passing dream on a night in spring.

He who is brave is finally destroyed,

To be no more than dust before the wind”

- From the Heike Monogatari

Tomoe River paper has been a staple of my fountain pen diet for years now ever since I first heard about it. It has all of the best qualities of fountain pen paper that you would want. It takes ink well, it shows sheen, it’s smooth, and it turns every color into the most vibrant version of itself. Best of all, it never feathers no matter what. But this year they switched the formulation of the paper and produced something much different.

The Switchover:

When I heard about the new Tomoe river paper and how different it was, I was concerned. Many people were sounding the alarm that the new Tomoe River was different. But how different? It didn't sheen as well, it doesn’t shade as well, ink feather more readily, and the colors look less vibrant. 

What happened was the machines that once made Tomoe River paper were old and are no longer being serviced. They needed to switch to new machines and, as anyone that has tried to duplicate exact colors knows, it's basically impossible on a large scale to fully duplicate things. So the new paper would be different.

The apparent differences are the thicknesses of the core pulp of the paper and the thickness of the coating. The coating is responsible for the properties that everyone loves about Tomoe like the smoothness and the sheen. Because the core pulp is thicker now Tomoe will be more rigid and get caught on sharp tines more often. The tradeoff is that the new formulation would have better dry times and less show-through and bleed. This resulted in a thinner coating which meant the paper would feather more and sheen less.

Supply:

But these weren’t aspects that I was willing to trade on. I love the old Tomoe River formulation and there isn't anything I want to be changed about it. So, naturally, I decided to buy as much Tomoe River paper as I possibly could.

There was plenty of old stock a few months ago while this was being announced so I decided to take advantage of that fact. First, I went on Amazon and bought around 15 packets of 100 pages each in 52 gsm white Tomoe River paper. I was able to order one to check to see if it was the old stock and after verifying I bought the others. Now I have plenty, right?

Then I got to thinking what if I wanted to use some notebooks? I then saw that Galen Leather was advertising that they only had old Tomoe River in stock and were selling their notebooks made of them. So I decided to buy 6 of their thick A5 journals to cover all of my bases. 

What I wanted was to buy as much as possible to make sure that I had enough to last me a lifetime. I kept doing the calculations trying to figure out if I have enough to last that long. 

Now, if you’re thinking that what I did was a little over the top, in buying so much, I’d say that you were right. Why did I want to buy all of this paper? I didn't use Tomoe River paper that often, only when I was testing some specific ink properties and just for some fun doodling. It just felt like I was trying to hold onto something that felt like it was slipping away. 

Storage and Usage:

Tomoe River paper has a strange property that when it gets humid the paper can lose much of its integrity and start to feather. Pages can become wavy and you have to just throw out the paper, as there's nothing you can do. 

Once I realized that I was careful to pack away the paper to make sure that it was always out of direct sunlight, cool, and dry. But the problem with storing paper like that is that it makes it that much harder to pull out a sheet of it. I had to get up and find where I stored the paper and get it out of boxes and bags. 

Once I started storing the Tomoe River paper like this it really decreased my usage of the paper drastically. I would forget that I even had the Tomoe and defaulted to using Rhodia pads. I only took out the Tomoe Paper when I was doing something special or trying to do larger ink swabs. 

Everything that I was doing was bent on making sure that the paper would last forever. I just wanted to make sure that whenever I wanted Tomoe River paper that it would be there. I haven’t even started any of the Galen Leather notebooks that I bought. They are quite thick and to be honest, I haven’t ever finished a notebook that long before. So what am I waiting for?

Imaginary Forevers:

It feels so banal to say that “nothing lasts forever”, but I think that looking at something so trite or trivial as “nothing lasts forever” can be important. When I thought about Tomoe River paper, what I wanted was not for it to last my lifetime, I wanted it to last forever, however long that may be. And so I’m reminded, whenever I come back to this impulse, of Amy Cross Rosenthal who had calculated how many days it would be until she turned 80 and said “How many more times, then, do I get to look at a tree?” and then concluded, “I’m thinking anything less than infinite is too small a number and not satisfactory”. 

How many more times will I really get to write on lovely paper or look at a tree? I want it to be infinite, but it can’t be. So often what drives me is this idea of an imaginary forever. That something can last and last and last, but it can’t. I think about this often when I buy something that will last me “a lifetime” or is “indestructible”. It's all just the same idea that somehow we can sidestep the question and avoid the confrontation: someday will be the last day we will use these things. 

Some day will be the last day I use Tomoe River paper, or my favorite pen, or look at a tree. It's all finite and most of the time we don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it. Time really is, in the most real sense, finite. It's all limited and that’s hard to look at directly. 

What to do about it:

I often think about the sakura when confronted with this feeling. Sakura are cherry blossoms and are one of the most beautiful things about Japan in the spring. You’ve likely seen pictures or had your own tree. They are a wonderful shade of palest pink, unlike anything else. But that is not why they are loved, they are loved because they cannot last. Cherry blossoms are around for a few weeks at most and a single storm can cut the sakura season in half, blowing everything away. 

The sakura are loved because you know they will disappear. And soon. So you must admire them while you can. If they were always blooming they would not be beautiful, they would be ordinary. Just part of the landscape. Nothing special. The beauty of the sakura can only be realized because you know they will not last forever, they are ephemeral. 

And so what would be beautiful if you always had if or if you had infinite time to use it. Understand that it can only be for a while, but that it is beautiful not in spite of that, but because of that. I’m not saying not to be sad or disappointed when something breaks or leaves. But I think we can always take solace knowing that it had to be this way and that there is only one thing that you can do when you know it will end. Enjoy it.

And so that is how I plan to use my beautiful paper while I have it.

I hope you enjoyed this review of the Tomoe River paper switchover and I hope it was useful.

-Minabeko

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