on saleClairefontaine Classic Clothbound A4 Notebook - Lined

I love this notebook. Some people complain about it not lying flat. You just have to gently break in the spine and then it lays nice and flat. The paper, of course, is great. This is a wonderful option if you want fancy paper without the cost of a hardback journal. This works just as well for me. The one downside is the vertical red line that goes down the page to great the margin. On the left pages, it cuts off nearly a quarter of the page, which leaves the writing space feeling confined and narrow. My solution is just to ignore the line and fill up the entire page. It doesn't look as pretty that way, which is a bummer, but it still works. Oh, and the cover is also impressively durable, which is nice.

Going through nursing school at the moment and wanted a notebook that could handle abuse and write well with a fountain pen. This notebook is perfect because its clothbound nature means the pages are very, very secure. Not wire spiral that gets bent or glue that wears out with abuse. The paper writes amazingly smooth with my italic nib. The paper refuses to bleed even with a broader nib, no feathering, good drying time!

They are amazing!!! But as I said, one thing though, the line spacing(not sure if that's the right term) is 8 mm, I prefer them 6 mm... If you could have a 6 mm type, it would be just perfect!!!

Clairefontaine seems to hit a sweet spot between other higher quality papers, some of which I find too spongy, and others which I find too waxy and hard for fountain pens - a matter of personal taste but I tend to use wetter fountain pens and I write pretty fast. The Clairefontaine seems to grab enough ink but not too much; I've used a vintage Parker 75 in this notebook, with a "broad" 14K nib (a "67" for all you pen freaks), and black Quink, and it took the Parker like a dream - the line came out more like a medium, while the same pen+ink wrote a huge broad wet emotive line in an everyday composition book, which just about feathered if I didn't write as fast as I could move my hand. I also like the slightly larger format of this book - it's good for first drafts and outlines, lots of room on the page.

I love Clairefontaine paper, so I thought I'd give this notebook a try. This notebook has a very nice look and feel to it. My only complaint is the ruling. There are vertical guide lines along the left margin of each page, which by itself is fine, but the bad part is that the guideline on the left side takes off 1/4 of your writing space, and because the notebook doesn't really lay flat (which I expected), you lose another 1/4 of the page against the spine, leaving you with a very narrow space to write. I guess I'm just going to write over the line, which will look super weird, but oh well. If I'm going to buy fancy paper, I want to be able to use the whole page. It seems like a small issue, but it's going to affect my writing experience so much that I can only give two stars because it's really going to bug me.