Leuchtturm Review at Guardian.co.uk

At the Guardian website, Steven Poole takes a look at a Leuchtturm notebook:

The most bruited feature of the Leuchtturm, meanwhile, one to which a circular sticker on the cellophane packaging is devoted, is that the paper is “ink proof”. They are not claiming that the mere addition of ink to the pages causes all other notebooks spontaneously to self-destruct; but that you can use a fountain pen and the ink won’t “bleed through” to the next page. In the spirit of scientific notebook-reviewing duty, I conducted a robust experiment. With a Rotring ArtPen Sketch EF (a bit like a fountain pen), loaded with sepia ink, I drew a grumpy man in both the Leuchtturm and the Moleskine. No bleed-through in either. Then, with a Rotring Tikky Graphic 0.3 (black ink), I drew a surprised sheep in each notebook. FAIL! The sheep’s solid-black face and legs were too much: a couple of spots of black ink bled through onto the next page of both notebooks. So I am, sadly, unable to report that the Leuchtturm is clearly superior in this regard.

Read more at Notes on notebooks | Books | guardian.co.uk.

2 thoughts on “Leuchtturm Review at Guardian.co.uk”

  1. The comments always astound me. They are full of people who are, with great pride, denigrating a decent US$10 notebook in favor of cheap, no-name spiral bound notebooks. I can understand using spiral bound (although I prefer composition books), but not the chorus of complaints about dropping a few more dollars for much higher quality and often more pages.

    This is the equivalent of an article about quite nice shoes or boots at a very reasonable price, and the comments being full of people scoffing and saying, “I *only* wear plastic shoes from the nearest dollar store… walking is about where you go, not what you wear”. It bewilders me, as we’re not talking about $450 notebooks, nor even $45 ones. These are hardly high luxury items. And yet there’s a very vocal contrarian population out there who seems to lambaste them whenever possible.

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