Rhodia notebooks series#

The line is not as dark as the Blackwing, but it is still plenty dark enough to read.

Uni Kuru Toga Mechanical Pencil (0.5): The Kuru Toga also worked great.

It doesn’t erase very well, but otherwise it worked beautifully. The line is dark and fine, and I can write quite a bit before the pencil needs sharpening.

Palomino Blackwing: The Palomino woodcase pencil is super smooth on this paper.

The two pencils I use for these tests both performed well. It stays open to the page just fine, but pages on one side will Alfalfa on you.Ī lot of people have trouble using pencils on coated paper, but I’ve never had an issue. But if you open it to another page, the lay-flatness is iffy. If you open it to the centerfold, it will lay flat pretty easily. Although they’re a bit smaller than most pocket notebooks, they do have 48 pages, so I think they’re a pretty good value. The Rhodia pocket notebooks, though, are sold individually, and you can usually find them between $2.50 and $2.75. Most pocket notebooks you find these days come in three-packs and cost between $10 and $13. The overall design is simple: a logo on the front cover, a few product details on the back cover, and nothing else except the grid lines printed on the pages. Well, they’re more clipped than rounded…the clipping does the job, but it’s kind of sloppy. The cover stock isn’t very stiff, but seems sturdy enough to jot notes down without a desk, and the corners are rounded. The notebook sports 48 pages and is bound by two staples. The graph lines are a little too dark for my liking, so I would have liked to see them come in blank or DotGrid. The Rhodia pocket notebook comes in three different cover colors: orange, black, and ice (white), although all of them come with 5 mm graph ruling. Standard A7 dimensions are 74 x 105 mm, so this pocket notebook is a little larger than an A7, but still quite a bit smaller than a standard Pocket Notebook (90 x 140 mm). The width is close (75 mm), but the length is quite a bit longer (120 mm). Rhodia markets this notebook as A7, but it really isn’t. If you’ve used Rhodia paper before, you’ll pretty much know what to expect from this pocket notebook. With the exception of their high-end R line, all Rhodia notebooks use coated, 80gsm Clairefontaine paper, which is excellent with fountain pens. I’m a huge fan of the Rhodia A4 and A5 DotPads, so when I was buying up all the pocket notebooks I could get my hands on for this series, I couldn’t leave Rhodia out.

The company was purchased by Clairefontaine in 1997, but they kept the Rhodia lineup intact, and continue to produce a robust and vibrant collection of paper products under the Rhodia name. The two trees in the logo represent the two brothers, these trees are epiceas (spruce). People born in this region are called Rhodaniens. The first Rhodia pad was made in 1934 in Lyon. Here’s a little blurb from their site describing where the Rhodia name and logo come from: But the short version is that Rhodia began as a family company in 1931 by two brothers in Lyon, France (Verilhac Brothers, Paper-Maker). There is a really nice company biography on their site, so I’m not going to get into too much detail here. They really do make something for everyone and for every occasion. But in addition to these more famous products, Rhodia makesĪ lot of other notebooks in many sizes, formats, and ruling types, from their composition-sized Heritage collection, to their business-focused Meeting notebooks, to their sewn-binding Rhodiarama notebooks, to just simple, staple-bound pocket notebooks. Webbies), which resemble the famous Moleskine Classic Hardcover…except for the paper that’s actually fountain-pen-friendly. I think Rhodia is probably best known for their top-bound A4 and A5 notepads (especially the much-heralded DotPad notebooks) and their hard-bound Webnotebooks (a.k.a.

This notoriety is well deserved: Their paper is excellent and they’re fairly inexpensive. In fact, if you’ve used fountain pens for more than a day, you’ve probably come across the name Rhodia on every blog you’ve visited. Rhodia is not an unfamiliar name for most of you reading this blog. Rhodia Pocket Size Side-Stapled Notebook Introduction: Note: This is a work in progress and will take several weeks to complete. You can also open the massive Master Spreadsheet to see all the aggregated data on these notebooks. You can visit the main Mega Monster Review page for a listing of all the notebooks reviewed in this series.

Rhodia notebooks series#

This is Part 9 of my Mega Monster Review series on pocket notebooks.