The best notebook
for Bible study

The notebook is not usually what goes wrong. What goes wrong is that eighteen months later you know you worked through Romans 8 and wrote something you would give a good deal to read again, and you cannot find it. Every recommendation on this page comes back to that, because retrieval is the failure that ends Bible study notebooks, and paper quality is the one people shop for.

A notebook you cannot search is a notebook you will not reread. And a notebook nobody rereads is a diary.

The two features that solve it

Numbered pages and a blank contents page at the front. That is the whole answer, and it costs nothing to use. Date each entry, write the passage at the top, and once a week add one line to the contents: Romans 8, p.41. Ten seconds. After a year you have something you can actually look things up in, which no amount of good paper will give you.

Most notebooks do not number their pages, and if yours does not, number them yourself in the bottom corner as you go. It feels fussy for about a week and then it is the only reason the book is still useful.

There are products recommended below and those links are paid, sponsored links — I earn a commission if you buy through one, at no extra cost to you. I have not written in these particular notebooks. What I can speak to is the specification each manufacturer publishes — paper weight, binding, page count, whether the pages are numbered — and what those specifications mean in practice.

Paper weight, and what it actually decides

Paper is sold by weight in grams per square metre. The cheap notebook in the supermarket is usually around 70 gsm. Better ones run 80 to 100. Your Bible, for contrast, is 28 to 36 gsm, which is why highlighters behave so badly in it and comparatively well anywhere else.

At 70 gsm a fineliner ghosts — you see the writing from the other side of the sheet — and a felt tip will come through properly. At 80 gsm ghosting is mild and bleed is unlikely with pigment ink and a fine tip. At 100 gsm you can write on both sides of a page with almost anything and not think about it.

Thicker paper means a thicker book for the same page count, and that is the trade. It is worth making only if you know you will use both sides of every sheet, which most people do not.

Binding: does it stay open by itself

Pick the notebook up and think about the actual posture. One hand is holding a Bible open. If the notebook needs the other hand to stay flat, you have run out of hands, and what happens in practice is that you stop writing while you read and then do not write at all.

Thread-bound and sewn books open flat. Glued paperback notebooks fight you for the first third and then crack. Spiral binding lies flattest of all and is the cheapest way to get it; the cost is that it snags in a bag and the wire deforms.

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Ruled, dotted or blank

Dotted is the default recommendation everywhere and it is a reasonable one: it takes ruled lines when you want them and disappears when you want to sketch a structure, draw an arrow between two verses or lay a passage out in the shape of its argument — which is the one thing Bible notes do that ordinary notes do not.

Ruled is fine. Blank suits people who diagram and irritates everyone else. This is the least important decision on the page, and no notebook was ever abandoned over it.

Size: it has to fit beside an open Bible

A5 — roughly six by eight inches — is the size that fits on a kitchen table next to an open Bible, on the arm of a chair, and on the passenger seat. A4 is a desk notebook; if your study happens at a desk it is genuinely better, and if it happens anywhere else it will stay on the desk.

Pocket notebooks are a trap for this job. You write two lines and stop, because the page ended.

What not to buy

A dated planner. Pre-printed dates turn every missed week into a visible gap, and a book that displays your failures is a book you avoid. Undated pages have no opinion about the fortnight you skipped.

Anything you would be sorry to ruin. Leather, gilt edges, a gift with a name embossed on it. A study notebook should be scribbled in, crossed out, corrected and dog-eared. A beautiful one produces careful handwriting and cautious thinking, and it will end up with fourteen immaculate pages and nothing after March.

A branded Bible-study journal with a template on every page. Observation, interpretation, application, three lines each. It works until the week the passage does not fit the form, and then the form wins and the thought gets thrown away. If you want a structure like that, write the four headings yourself and ignore them when they do not fit.

Set it up in five minutes

Leave the first two pages blank for the contents. Number the pages, or check they are numbered. Start every entry with the date and the passage on the top line — date first, always, for the same reason it goes first in a margin note: it is the single piece of information that is worth most in ten years and costs least to record. Add a contents line once a week.

That is it. No colour code, no tabs, no system. The structure is the date and the index, and everything else is thinking.

Who should not buy one

If there is a half-used notebook in the house, that is the best notebook for Bible study, because you already know you are willing to write in it. Start on the next blank page, number from one, and spend the money later if you fill it.

The purchase does not produce the habit. It is nearly always the other way round — buy the good notebook as the second one, when you know what you actually do with it.

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 2 Timothy 2:15