I’ve written about a few Fabio Ricci notebooks in the past. This Turkish notebook brand makes some of the Blackwing branded notebooks I also reviewed, and I really liked one of their notebooks I bought in Istanbul. Today’s Fabio Ricci notebook was part of my quest to try every Moleskine clone in the universe. It’s actually one of the Moliest mole clones I’ve found.

The first thing that hit me when I opened this notebook, though, was not like a Moleskine at all. The Fabio Ricci notebook has a weird smell, sort of like waxy crayons with a touch of BO. After a while the BO note faded but the waxy crayon smell remained.

The exterior of the Fabio Ricci notebook is a red just a bit brighter than the shade currently used by Moleskine, though older Moleskines have a similarly bright, almost orange-y tone. The cover texture is also almost an exact match, just a wee bit shinier. There seems to be a very subtle scoring of the front and back cover near where it folds along the spine, I’m not sure why.

The design of the paper band is very close to Moleskine’s old design. There’s a stamped logo on the back cover, of course, but here you notice a slight difference in how the elastic closure is attached– on the Fabio Ricci notebook, the holes are very open and you can see the edges, where on a Moleskine they are always smaller, more tightly tucked around the elastic. To me, this small detail makes a big difference– the bare cardboard edges just don’t look as nice.

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The cover overhang is pretty similar to today’s Moleskines. (In the photos above, the Fabio Ricci notebook is in the middle, between a pre-2011 squared Moleskine with almost no cover overhang, and a current day dot-grid Moleskine.) When you open the notebook, the spine feels a little stiff and creaky, but it loosens up a bit and opens pretty flat. But I’m sure over time the corners of the spine will start to wear out because of the stress from it not bending inwards.

The inside front cover has a typical logo placement, and space for contact details. The back pocket has a nice extra detail: a slot that will hold a business card. It is 2-ply, so the business card is isolated from the contents of the expanding pocket. The sides of the pocket are paper, without any cloth reinforcement, but they are a snazzy orange to match the triangle/horse logo on the edge.

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One of the main reasons I bought this notebook was that it had plain white paper– I hate it that so many notebooks only come in lined versions. The paper is slightly creamy white, just slightly brighter than Moleskine paper. It is quite smooth, and feels good with a variety of pens, but like Moleskine paper, it works best with fine gel pens, ballpoints, and pencils. Fountain pens and wetter rollerball pens will bleed and feather a bit. The paper weight is not specified but again it feels very much like current Moleskine paper, and gives a similar amount of show-through.

All in all, this notebook is pretty good but not great. I won’t be buying any more, which is just as well because the availability in the US now seems to be limited. When I bought mine in late 2019, the price was $9.95 and the total including tax and shipping from Amazon was $13.96. Not too bad, especially compared to the price of the almost identical Moleskine. While these are no longer listed on Amazon, Pencils.com has some available– they came in white, black and brown covers, and lined and squared versions, but not all versions are still in stock.

This Fabio Ricci notebook is not going to be a daily carry for me anytime soon, but it will be in a box of back-ups that I can turn to if I ever deplete my [huge!] stash of notebooks that are better! But I’ll have to take it out of that box a good long time before I want to use it to see if I can air out that weird crayon smell.