Choose A4 if it is going to live on a desk and A5 if it is going to live in a bag. Both are spiral-bound with 50 lined pages, and the spiral lets the book lie flat instead of fighting you halfway down the page.

The printed cover is the reason to pick one of these over a plain pad from the supermarket. It also makes the notebook easy to find in a bag full of near-identical books, which is worth something by week eight of term.

The same prints run across pencil cases, backpacks and laptop sleeves if you want the desk to line up. Designed in the UK and made to order rather than pulled off a shelf. Every order plants a tree.