A school-supplies wholesaler and a ring patent.

Atoma grew out of a Brussels stationery business. The Brussels news outlet BRUZZ, in a report carried by VRT NWS in July 2026, says that in 1924 Georges Mottart started a wholesale business in school supplies in Vorst — Forest in French — on the south side of Brussels, and that he also produced his own notebooks there. Atoma’s own website names Papeteries Mottart as the company behind the brand.

The ring system came from two Frenchmen. Both BRUZZ and the company name them as André Tomas and André Martin, and the Atoma catalogue explains the brand name as their initials run together: A-To-Ma. La Libre Belgique, in a 2019 report, spells the first surname Thomas and describes the two as engineers who worked on the idea at Mottart’s initiative. BRUZZ puts it differently, saying the entrepreneur bought the patent in 1948 and that from then on the first Atoma notebooks came off the line in Forest.

The year 1948 is the date the brand itself uses. Atoma calls its notebook a typical Belgian product since 1948, and its catalogue describes the idea as plastic rings combined with a distinctive perforation, a concept it says has not changed since. La Libre Belgique adds that the notebooks were sold from 1948 with covers in red for mathematics, blue for French, and also yellow, green or black.

The factory in Forest stood on the rue Decoster, according to La Libre Belgique, where there was a printing works. That building has a second life. L’Avenir, carrying a Belga report in September 2026, describes it as a former paper works from the 1920s and says it was being turned into the Atoma Art Center, a contemporary art centre due to open on 7 October 2026 under the architect Gilles Dehareng and the artist Nina Anduiza.

A patent, its copies and a family firm.

For decades the system belonged to Atoma alone. When the patent ran out, copies followed: BRUZZ says the patent lapsed at the end of the 1980s, while La Libre Belgique wrote in 2019 that it had expired about twenty years earlier. Both reports say other makers then brought out their own ring-bound notebooks.

The company has answered with the idea of the original. Its website says the Atoma notebook became an established concept and a generic name in several languages, comparing it with brands such as Bic and Tupperware whose names became household words. It gives buyers ways to tell a real Atoma: the company says its A4 notebook has eleven rings, that its logo appears with or without its fan-shaped emblem depending on the material it is printed on, and that it uses a heavy register paper strong enough to hook behind the rings.

Atoma is still a family business. La Libre Belgique reported in 2019 that the third generation, Chantal and Pierre-Michel Vancanneyt, had run the company since the early 2000s, she on the management side and he on operations. The website’s copyright line names the company as Atoma bvba. Production has moved out of Forest: BRUZZ says the notebooks have been made in Dilbeek, just west of Brussels, for some time, and La Libre Belgique gives Dilbeek as the firm’s base.

Where things are made is part of the brand. The company calls Atoma “Made in Belgium”. La Libre Belgique reported that the notebooks are made in Belgium, that paper once came from Intermills in Malmedy and later from Germany, and that the rings are made in Belgium or France.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all office and paper names: Hamelin, Oxford, Exacompta, Atoma, Brunnen, Landré and Avery. Office and paper brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger stationery groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a school-supplies aisle to a corporate stationery cupboard.

An office or paper brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single notebook or file than by a cover, a name and the system it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its paper goods are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its covers and packaging have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Rings, rulings and designer covers.

The product is built around flexibility. The company says an open Atoma lies flat and stays open while you write, that pages can be taken out, reordered or moved between notebooks, and that the left half can be turned right round to save space on a desk. The Atoma puncher lets users add their own sheets, and the range includes refills, spare rings, inserts, sleeves, covers and pencil cases.

Ruling follows the reader. La Libre Belgique noted in 2019 that Atoma supplies different rulings for different markets: squares for Luxembourg, lines for Brazil and the Nordic countries, the French Seyès ruling, ten-millimetre squares in China, and within Belgium a preference for small rectangles in Flanders and five-millimetre squares in Wallonia.

Covers are where the look changes. Atoma’s catalogue names designers it has worked with: Alain Berteau, whose studio works across product design and architecture; the Milan-based Luca Casini, credited with the Leopard and Pastel Plus collections; the interiors designer Chris Mestdagh; and Luc Vincent, who drew the Abstract collection. Alongside them run cardboard, polypropylene, leather and loden-and-felt notebooks, and a Traditional Colours line that the website calls a revisit of the 1948 series.

The press has followed the brand for years. Atoma’s site lists coverage in La Dernière Heure in 2004, Het Nieuwsblad in 2010, RTBF in 2013 and 2019, Le Soir in 2018 and La Libre Belgique in 2019, among others.

For a design guide, Atoma shows how a single mechanism — rings and a perforation — can carry a brand for generations while the covers change with the season. Compare Clairefontaine, the French notebook maker, and Herlitz, the Berlin exercise-book brand. For this guide we use a maths red, a French blue, a cover yellow and a cover green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Atoma’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.