Looking out for affordable spiral bound FP-friendly notebooks

[NgunnawalJack]

My current FP journal in which I write notes about pens and inks is filling up quickly.  It was a left over from my masters (finished in 2012 🤪).  So I checked out some from my “local” supermarket, actually in a nearby city, that I have been using for work over the past few years with pencils and gel pens.  (I’ve only just got into the habit of using FPs at work since I discovered Jinhao.) They are about 6€, so not the cheapest, but not 15-25€ like the Japanese and German bound notebooks.

I was looking at spiral bound because I find the bound notebooks hard to use as many of them don’t lie flat.

Here are the 2 I tried with a random sample from my currently inked pens.

I think both will be suitable.

[Karmachanic]

Don't do spiral myself, but the following come to mind:

Black n' Red/Oxford

Mnemosyne

Clairefontaine

Rhodia

[Cipher Factor]

I'll second the vote for Black n' Red. I prefer their casebound notebooks, myself. They also usually lay pretty flat for me, especially if I break the spine a bit (which may be controversial, but I don't worry too much about it because I use them for journaling). However, I occasionally used the spiral-bound ones many years ago, and they were very nice too, though I didn't use fountain pens at the time. It's worth noting that the spirals on the Black n' Red notebooks are smaller than those on most regular notebooks. 

 

A notebook that impressed me recently is a notebook from a line called "U Style Groovy" by Continental Accessory Corp. I have a few of them, and they aren't advertised as fountain pen-friendly at all. I bought several of them at a pharmacy or grocery store because they were cheap, one subject notebooks with narrow line spacing that came in a variety of colors, and I liked the texture of the front covers. I bought them years before I started using fountain pens. Recently I attended a virtual event where I took pages of notes in one of them. I used my wettest ink in a pen with a broad nib, and I was extremely pleasantly surprised. There are only about three instances of bleed-through in 23 pages of notes, most of it not severe, and none enough to damage the paper or prevent the other side from being read. I will say that it looks like it's highly absorbent paper, as opposed to heavily coated, because 1. The ink shows up a much lighter color than it does in any of my other notebooks, whether they are intended for fountain pens or not and 2. Those twenty-some pages of notes used up about half of a pretty full fill in a TWSBI Eco which is...a lot more than I'm used to for a comparable amount of writing. But I'm still extremely happy with the results, and plan to buy more of those notebooks if I can find them.

 

 

[A Smug Dill]

@NgunnawalJack But what constitutes “affordable”? Specifically, where is the line that “affordable” is drawn, assuming there is a significant range in the subset of, ”affordable as in my budget will stretch to it, but more expensive than I am comfortable with spending and/or feel is a ‘fair’ market price”, from one's individual perspective?

 

On 10/17/2021 at 7:32 PM, NgunnawalJack said:

They are about 6€, so not the cheapest, but not 15-25€ like the Japanese and German bound notebooks.

 

Milligram Outlet is selling (new and not as seconds) Studio Milligram 224-page spiral-bound B5 dot-grid notebooks for A$11 and A$14 each, depending on the colour of the covers. (I managed to get offered a bunch of those for $2 each, but that's a whole another story.) Milligram's 80gsm Taiwanese-milled maple paper is pretty good; I have many thousands of pages of that now in spiral-bound books.

 

If I recall correctly, the Maruman 80-sheet A4 and B5 ‘spiral note’ notebooks are not cheap but not ridiculously expensive, even from Kinokuniya in Sydney CBD (which is not exactly going to offer such Japanese products at any significant discount). I see them on Amazon.com for something like US$12 apiece.

[NgunnawalJack]

On 10/27/2021 at 8:38 AM, A Smug Dill said:

But what constitutes “affordable”?

I guess I was looking at what a middle school student would be spending… probably about 5he same as a scottish hamburger with chips and a can of drink.

 

@A Smug Dill I realise affordable is relative depending on one’s disposable income.  Perhaps I should be more direct and say for me that is less than 10€ in my market.

[katerchen]

On 10/17/2021 at 6:23 AM, Karmachanic said:

Black n' Red

Mnemosyne

 

I was going to suggest those as well. I can't speak for local availability in the EU, but every now and then you can find a good price on them on Amazon.

 

Oh. Almost forgot (again, sorry for the Amazon US link) these:

 

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MMW8M7M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

I have gone through several 5-packs of these. For $22 I think it's a steal. The paper is very good, especially for fountain pens. I do *not* like them for pencils though, surface's too smooth.

 

Edit: Just checked on amazon.de and the exact same thing is 51E ... that's crazy.

 

[NgunnawalJack]

22 minutes ago, katerchen said:

Edit: Just checked on amazon.de and the exact same thing is 51E ... that's crazy.

I hadn’t look,  but it’s not unexpected. And shipping from the US is through the roof atm, and then I have to pay 24% VAT on arrival plus customs clearance charges.

☹️