Rhodia Pocket Size Side-Stapled Notebook Review

This is Part 9 of my Mega Monster Review series on pocket notebooks. You can visit the main Mega Monster Review page for a listing of all the notebooks reviewed in this series. You can also open the massive Master Spreadsheet to see all the aggregated data on these notebooks. Note: This is a work in progress and will take several weeks to complete.

Rhodia Pocket Size Side-Stapled Notebook

Introduction:

Rhodia is not an unfamiliar name for most of you reading this blog. 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. This notoriety is well deserved: Their paper is excellent and they’re fairly inexpensive.

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. Webbies), which resemble the famous Moleskine Classic Hardcover…except for the paper that’s actually fountain-pen-friendly. But in addition to these more famous products, Rhodia makes

a 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. They really do make something for everyone and for every occasion.

About the Company:

There is a really nice company biography on their site, so I’m not going to get into too much detail here. But the short version is that Rhodia began as a family company in 1931 by two brothers in Lyon, France (Verilhac Brothers, Paper-Maker). Here’s a little blurb from their site describing where the Rhodia name and logo come from:

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.

Description:

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. With the exception of their high-end R line, all Rhodia notebooks use coated, 80gsm Clairefontaine paper, which is excellent with fountain pens. If you’ve used Rhodia paper before, you’ll pretty much know what to expect from this pocket notebook.

Rhodia markets this notebook as A7, but it really isn’t. The width is close (75 mm), but the length is quite a bit longer (120 mm). 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 Rhodia pocket notebook comes in three different cover colors: orange, black, and ice (white), although all of them come with 5 mm graph ruling. The graph lines are a little too dark for my liking, so I would have liked to see them come in blank or DotGrid. But the graph is certainly functional.

The notebook sports 48 pages and is bound by two staples. The cover stock isn’t very stiff, but seems sturdy enough to jot notes down without a desk, and the corners are rounded. Well, they’re more clipped than rounded…the clipping does the job, but it’s kind of sloppy. 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.

Most pocket notebooks you find these days come in three-packs and cost between $10 and $13. The Rhodia pocket notebooks, though, are sold individually, and you can usually find them between $2.50 and $2.75. 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 notebook mostly lays flat. If you open it to the centerfold, it will lay flat pretty easily. But if you open it to another page, the lay-flatness is iffy. It stays open to the page just fine, but pages on one side will Alfalfa on you.

 

 

 

Pencil Results:

A lot of people have trouble using pencils on coated paper, but I’ve never had an issue. The two pencils I use for these tests both performed well.

• Palomino Blackwing: The Palomino woodcase pencil is super smooth on this paper. No real feedback at all. The line is dark and fine, and I can write quite a bit before the pencil needs sharpening. It doesn’t erase very well, but otherwise it worked beautifully.
• Uni Kuru Toga Mechanical Pencil (0.5): The Kuru Toga also worked great. Very smooth. The line is not as dark as the Blackwing, but it is still plenty dark enough to read. It definitely erases better than the Blackwing.

Ballpoint Results:

Ballpoints ain’t fancy, but they get the job done.

• Uniball Jetstream (0.7): Continuing to impress me despite its ballpointedness, the Jetstream is extremely smooth and works great on the Rhodia paper. It’s pretty dark for a ballpoint, although I could see a little bit of “railroading” (there’s a little bit of white space in the middle of some strokes), although I have to look with a loupe to really see it. The Jetstream continues to be a very good pen with every paper I’ve tested.
• Fisher Space Pen (0.7): Regular oil-based ballpoints tend to have a sludgy feel to them, but the Space Pen is very, very smooth on this paper. This might be the smoothest writing I’ve gotten out of this pen. Typically, the Space Pen writes a fatter and lighter line than the Jetstream, but on the Rhodia paper, they seem about the same in both respects.

Gel Results:

Pretty typical results with the gel pens. I’m very happy overall here.

• Uniball Signo 207 Ultra Micro (0.38): Nearly perfect, as usual. It writes a very fine, very dark line. The only thing I notice is that it gave a lot of feedback. Not quite scratchy, but not smooth, either.
• Pilot G2 (0.5): Mostly okay. It’s super smooth on this paper, and the line comes out very dark. I can write with my typically small handwriting with nice, clear text to show for it. My only gripe is that the G2 actually feathered a little bit. It wasn’t often, but it’s definitely noticeable.
• Zebra Sarasa (0.7): Usually a very wet and sloppy writer, but the paper holds the Sarasa’s ink well. It’s not as sloppy as usual. I can still write somewhat small letters without it getting muddy and messy. I’m not sure I would want to use this pen for note taking because it’s too broad for my small handwriting, but it works well. There is some very, very minor ghosting on the back side of the page, but no bleed-through. The back side of the paper is completely usable.

Liquid Ink Rollerball Results:

Out with the old, in with the new! I ditched the horrid Uniball Vision Elite pen I had been using for these reviews and replaced it with a Retro 51 Tornado. I might end up not even hating rollerballs.

• Pilot Precise V5 RT (0.5): On this paper, this rollerball pen performs almost exactly like (gasp) a gel pen! The lines have very clean edges, there’s no spread, no feathering, and no bleed-through. There is some faint ghosting if you really look for it.
• Retro 51 Tornado (0.7): The Tornado is very smooth and very dark. It’s almost as dark as the Pilot G2 and Zebra Sarasa. It produces clean lines with no real spread. Looking under a loupe, I can see a couple of the lines aren’t very crisp and have those little blobby feathers, but you can’t notice them without the loupe. Despite being a really wet pen, there is zero bleed-through zero and only minor ghosting. The back side of the page is absolutely usable.

Fountain Pen Results:

I use Rhodia paper all the time, so I pretty much knew what to expect with fountain pens. Because the paper is coated, dry times are a little slow. But pen performance is perfect across the board. If you absolutely need fast dry times, then you’ll want to avoid coated paper.

• (EF) Platinum Preppy with Noodlers Midnight Blue ink: Perfect. No feathering, bleeding, spread, ghosting…nothing. Nice, crisp, fine lines. Unsurprisingly, the 10-second dry test was not successful. If you want to use coated paper, you’ll have to be forgiving with dry times.
• (F) Lamy Safari with Lamy Petrol ink: Excellent pairing of pen and paper! The Safari is super smooth and the ink almost fully dried within 10-seconds. Probably only needed an extra second, but otherwise it was it was pretty good.
• (M) Platinum Cool with Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo ink: This combo gave me some decent shading: lots of lights and darks. The 10-second dry test was an absolute failure. Even the word “test” smudged, so this is probably a pen and ink combo that would need closer to 20 seconds to dry. No spreading, or feathering.
• (0.6) Nemosine Singularity with KWZ Standard Turquoise ink: This fine stub and KWZ ink produces very nice shading. No feathering or bleed. The ink still needed another 2 to 3 seconds to fully dry.
• (1.1) Conklin Duragraph with Robert Oster Midnight Sapphire ink: Clear, crisp lines. Nice shading. No feathering, spread, or bleed. Strangely enough, this is the one pen/ink combination that fully dried within 10 seconds. Huh?

Vital Stats

Conclusion

If you use fountain pens and value dry times, you’ll want to look elsewhere. The coated paper requires extra time for liquid ink to dry. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a pocket notebook that can show off shading and sheen and you can spare a few extra seconds for the ink to dry, then the Rhodia pocket notebook will serve you well. And if you use pencils, ballpoints, or gel pens, this notebook will work very well for you.

Other than dry times, my only complaint is the ruling. The purple lines are just too dark. If they came in blank or DotGrid versions, I’d buy a pile of them. $2.50 is a great price for 48 pages of fountain-pen-friendly paper.