Rhodia Pad No. 16 - Dot - Orange (A5)

I love this paper. It's Rhodia so I don't have to say how fountain-pen-friendly it is, even with the wettest of inks (Diamine, Pilot Iroshizuku) and nibs (Noodler's flex, TWSBI stub). I find the pure white shows off ink colours to their best advantage, more so than the supposedly more luxurious 90 gsm ivory paper, and the dot grid is everything they say it is - helps keep your writing on a level but subtle enough to fade away when you need it to. Bleedthrough isn't an issue because, profligate that I am, I'm only writing on one side. But - and you know there's a but - can we talk about the perforations? You know, they're marketed as allowing you to remove sheets with a clean tear and a nice even straight line? They don't always do that. In fact, they don't more often than they do. That's the only reason I'm not giving it five stars. (I'd give it four and a half if I could.)

I purchased this alongside a Clairefontaine notebook ($20) from Wonder Pens. Although I am pleased with both paper, I'm significantly more impressed with what this Rhodia notepad provided vis-a-vis the notebook.

The notepad is very simple, it's contained in a relatively secure orange binding, the paper is of excellent quality, and the staples hold it together well. The perforations mean that, if you decide to take sporadic notes on alternating subjects, you may simply remove the unrelated notes.

My only complaint is marginal, it's that when you are writing on the second-side (which you should when you're using paper of a higher price-point) you will be hard pressed to make use of the part of the page closest to the binding. This is a small price to pay for the rest of the product.

Having used regular $0.25 for 100 pages lined paper, I was skeptical about spending $5 for the same number of pages. Having used the pad for a time now, I can say that the difference is easily worth the cost: Ink doesn't feather, or bleed through to the other side, it is incredibly smooth to write on, and it has a weight that makes it feel "nice", which is a huge plus when writing letters.