Moleskine vs. Black n'Red

[sonia_simone]

Hmmm, now what pen to give to the guests to use in it???

Something little, elegant, and terribly expensive.

[Mary P]

It was a lot of discussion of BnR. Well, I went to my local Office Depot, which has almost full line of these notebooks. They looked great to me, so I bought one, 5 ¾ X 8 ¼ spiral bound, to try. Brought it home and tried different pen/ink combinations. The paper is actually bullet-proof in terms of feathering and bleeding. Inks dries significantly faster on that paper than on Clairefontane or Rhodia. But…

 

It is wide ruled and is not available in narrower spaced lines or gridded. Ruling lines are not tidy and look blurry and irregular. When I was in the store I checked a lot of different BnR notebook samples and all of them had the same looking paper.

 

Your local Office Depot must not carry the Black and Red line. Black and Red notebooks are manufactured in narrow rule and quad as well as wide rule. My Office Max carries the quad in several formats but not the narrow rule. The whole product line is aavailable from several internet sources if you need quad of narrow rule.

[london]

Mark, surely you need a Smythson notebook with featherweight paper. (And if you end up not liking it, feel free to send it along to me.)

 

Sonia, guess what?

 

I'm a lucky boy. On the day before our wedding, I came home to find a little box left on the bed for me by my beloved......Smythson pocket notebooks!! And I hadn't said a word.

 

The first entry was the speaking notes for Groom's speech, written with a medium nibbed Dunhill Sidecar Limousette - and no bleed through. The two accompanied me for the big day, the perfect discreet truely 'pocket' notebook. Sorry, won't be forwarding them on though - love them.

 

- Mark

[Latro21]

i love my moleskines, especially the pocket size. the paper is a bit suspect, but i have zero problems with my medium pilot knight with pilot blue ink, or my medium phileas with florida blue. i can even write with brush pens in it with no bleed. maybe i got lucky?

 

however, i am blown away by the paper in the black n red notebook. the paper stands up to nearly everything i have, including a sheaffer viewpoint with fine nib that bleeds horribly with the red skrip ink in the moleskine. i just wish these notebooks were styled more like the moleskines so i could fit it into a pocket easily, and without the spiral binding. plus i would like it if i could get a squared BnR rather than the really wide rule paper.

 

if i could take the paper from the BnR, put it in a moleskine with squared ruling, it would be a perfect notebook.

[JohnS-MI]

BnR does offer gridded paper (5 mm) in the US. They also offer a casebound hardcover. The A6 (their smallest) approaches pocket-size.

 

BUT you can only find the full line online. My Staples only carries 4 styles, for example, A4 and A5, each in two cover styles.

 

This page shows the full range they offer in US. With model numbers, maybe you can find a retailer for what you want.

http://www.blacknred.com/pagetemplate.php?pid=38

 

There is more information on their European pages. Ruled = 8 mm. There is narrow ruled offered in UK, not in US; it is 6 mm. The gridded paper is 5 mm square.