I have seen a few Extra Large 5.5 X 9.97 Moleskine soft-cover notebooks, and also the extra-large cahiers. I have never been able to find the ruled variety: I understand the soft-covers haven't arrived yet, and someone always gets to the cahiers before I do. Rather than experiment with a blank soft-cover at $20, I bought a pack of the Cahiers.

I've liked the idea of Rod Graves' <a href="http://rodgraves.com/moleskine/">template</a> and tried to make my own the same way. My math skills hadn't atrophied to the point where I couldn't convert the 1/9 and 2/9 margins to what I hope were decent measurements. However, I had to trim the inner edge of each template by about 1/4 inch or they wouldn't slip down enough beneath each page. I suspect this will change as I work my way towards the center pages and back out again.

I think this leaves me with about the writing room of a ruled large Moleskine, but with plenty of room on the margins for glosses or even sketches. Also, if I wanted to leave a page blank for sketching or to insert an illustration, I have that option.

Here's a few pictures of the result. In the first few pages, the notebook chronicles its own design.

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That's very aesthetically pleasing, for lack of a better expression. Thanks for sharing. Best,
David

Apparently the most aesthetically pleasing books have pages with a 2:3 width/height ratio and outer left/right margins of 2:9, inner margins of 1:9, top margins of 1:9 and bottom margins of 2:9.

I know having thinner inner margins makes an equal distance of white space between two text blocks on two facing pages, but I have no idea how the upper/lower margins function. I would assume scholars would have room for marginal glosses. I found some of this information on a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canons_of_page_construction">Wikipedia article</a> on page construction. I look forward to writing a page or two in calligraphy, but I'm afraid my chops have atrophied!

Resurrecting a thread because I think this looks great, AND, because I just realized that while Modo e Modo moleskine pages are proportioned according to the very harmonious Golden Ratio (one of the big reasons I think they just feel right at 13 X 21 cm & 9 X 14 cm), Quo Vadis Habanas have the 2:3 ratio described above (16 x 24 cm & 10 X 15 cm). Cool!

Ryan.