What’s On Paper View Tonight?

I final­ly got around to writ­ing in the Claire­fontaine note­book I bought back when I start­ed this whole inves­ti­ga­tion into note­books and Mole­sk­ines and all this fun stuff that goes along with hav­ing good pens.

First the com­plaints: it’s ruled too wide. 8mm per line makes me feel like I’m in grade school writ­ing on the paper with the dot­ted lines mark­ing out the x‑height. The blue rules with a sin­gle red mar­gin stripe does­n’t help either. The paper is bright white, and I pre­fer some­thing a lit­tle off-white. That’s just pref­er­ence though. The lam­i­nat­ed card­board cov­er, while stur­dy, does­n’t real­ly make the thing feel like an object to be trea­sured like the Mole­sk­ines or Miquel­rius­es do. The end papers are a nice touch, but pow­der blue? Aside from the end papers, this note­book does not have any bonus fea­tures like pock­ets in the back or an elas­tic clo­sure strap or rib­bon bookmarks.

Now that the minor quib­bles are out of the way, how’s the paper?

Fun­ny you should ask, because this paper is amaz­ing. Miquel­rius should be send­ing spies out for the for­mu­la and Moda & Moda should be hang­ing their heads in shame for call­ing the Mole­sk­ine pre­mi­um when paper this good is out there.

I wrote with the Pilot Knight, Rotring Ini­tial, and Park­er Pro­file, loaded with Pri­vate Reserve and Noodler’s inks. Under a 10x loupe I was able to detect a hint of spread in the Noodler’s Polar Black from my Park­er Pro­file. The spread­ing is real­ly not notice­able to the naked eye.

The paper is opaque with­in rea­son. There is the hint of show-through, but not enough to be dis­tract­ing, even with the Noodler’s. They hit this out of the park. The paper is exact­ly what note­book paper should be.

Back to those lit­tle quib­bles. I think there may be a solu­tion. Claire­fontaine makes Exa­comp­ta jour­nals, both with leather-look cov­ers and jour­nal refills for leather jour­nals. If the Exa­comp­tas are as good as the Claire­fontaine, I can let the book­marks and clo­sures and so forth be attached to a jour­nal cov­er and sim­ply swap the paper out when I fin­ish one. My hopes for Exa­comp­ta: off-white paper with grey 6mm rules. That would make my day, and a quick search through the Web indi­cates that I may have my day made soon. Looks like Exa­comp­ta comes in a vari­ety of col­ors and rul­ing options, between 6mm and 10mm. I’m not going to start buy­ing it up sight unseen, but after I get my hands (and pens) on one jour­nal I’ll report here about the qual­i­ty of the paper.

For now, this is flat-out the best writ­ing paper I’ve encoun­tered in a note­book. Claire­fontaine, thank you for pay­ing atten­tion to the qual­i­ty of paper.