Kokuyo Campus Notebook

The Campus notebook is a slim, soft-covered exercise book, semi-B5 in its standard size, a little smaller than A4. Its thirty sheets of ruled paper are glued at the spine, not sewn or stapled, and the spine is wrapped in a coloured tape on which a title can be written. The card cover carries the word Campus, a box for the subject and the owner's name, and a sample of the ruling inside, so that a student can tell a 7 mm book from a 6 mm one at a glance.

Its maker, Kokuyo, was founded in Osaka in 1905 to make covers for account books. The company says it first produced a glued, unsewn notebook in 1959, when thread binding was the norm, and in 1975 launched the Campus for students across Japan. The first had plain covers, orange for the wider ruling and blue for the narrower, and cost 90 yen. Glue binding made it easy to open flat, and it was sold as a good notebook at a modest price; Kyodo's report for its fiftieth year calls the method unusual at the time.

Since then the notebook has been redrawn about once a decade. The 1983 cover printed the ruling on the front and introduced the logo still used; the 1991 design stood the logo on end and won a Good Design award; in 2000 the spine tape was strengthened so that the book would not split before its last page, and small dots appeared on the lines to help in ruling columns. In 2011 the tape became writable.

None of these changes altered the object: it is still a glued, taped, ruled notebook sold cheaply in vast numbers. ITmedia counted 1.7 billion sold by 2005; Kyodo put the total above 3.7 billion by 2025. It was aimed at students and taken up by office workers too, and the semi-B5, thirty-sheet book remains at the centre of the range.