I was very interested in this notebook review at Future; Nostalgic: Review: Asda Executive Notebook.
I love the way this notebook has 3 sections in the back pocket! And the prices seem great too. Drawbacks: there is no pocket size version, and it’s only sold at Asda in the U.K.
I like this week’s Notebook Addict because you get to see not only the pile of notebooks, but what some of the interior pages look like:
All the pen and paper blogs seem to have been buzzing for months about the Rhodia Webnotebook. Fountain pen users in particular were eager to have a Moleskine alternative containing their beloved Clairefontaine paper. When these first hit the market, you could only get a version with 80g paper. Now, finally, the long-awaited 90g paper version is available, and the good people at Rhodia were kind enough to send me a sample for review. So let’s take a look!
The notebook I was sent was the 3.5 x 5.5″ orange notebook. I have to say, if someone is going to send me a free sample, I won’t presume to be picky. But I really hoped I’d get an orange one, so when this arrived I was psyched! I love the color– though I’m very fond of all my little black notebooks, sometimes it’s fun to have a change! The color is not what I was expecting– it’s not the solid orange of other Rhodia notebook covers, but instead a slightly lighter, textured-looking orange. When I say textured-looking, I mean it seems like a printing technique to use tiny dots of slightly varied shades of orange to replicate a texture-y look. It’s very subtle, and I liked the resulting effect. The actual feel of the cover is smooth and slightly soft.
The cover has the Rhodia logo stamped in quite deeply. The soft, slightly padded cover takes impressions easily, as you can see from the areas where the elastic presses into it.
The orange endpapers are more the classic solid Rhodia orange, with no print or area where you’re supposed to write your name. The back pocket is also made of this orange paper.
Strangely, this notebook is ever so slightly narrower than the 80g Webnotebook, shown here in black. But you can also see quite well that the heavier paper bulks the notebook up more so it’s thicker and somewhat less pocketable than other similar notebooks, such as the Markings notebook shown on the top of the pile at right below.
I would guess that the paper weight is also why the notebook is a little stiff in the spine– it really doesn’t open flat as the 80g Webnotebook (shown below with a black cover), and at least when new, it retains a bit of springiness and tends to pop open a bit after you’ve pressed it open as flat as you can go.
The paper has lines running to just short of the edges and margin, and the Rhodia logo appears in the bottom right corner. The logo shows through a bit from the back on the 80g paper version, but hardly at all in the 90g paper.
And when you write on it, yes, it’s blissful. That smooth, creamy texture is absolutely sensual. It just cries out to be written on with a fine rollerball pen. Drawing a line on it with a Uniball Signo RT 0.38 is like… like… I don’t know, like slicing into the flesh of a ripe avocado… stroking the arm of an infant… drinking melted butter… maybe I’m getting carried away here. But I did have fun writing on it, and even used an orange pen for the first test! Show-through was fairly minimal– noticeably better than the 80g paper shown below.
Bottom line, it’s a very nice notebook, but I’m not sure it will make it to my daily usage pile. Why? Like the Pen & Ink sketchbook I reviewed a while back, it just feels a little “big” somehow– that wee bit of extra size makes it seem more formal, more stiff, more like something that would live on one’s desk as opposed to a scrappy little notebook you can toss in your bag and write grocery lists in. I also find it hard to make myself use notebooks with lined paper– I love unlined paper and graph paper because I find them more conducive to drawing. But the Rhodia Webnotebook would make a great journal for just writing– it’s substantial and the quality of the paper and construction are excellent, giving it a weighty, permanent feel. For my personal usage preferences, I’d love to see a plain or graph paper version with a softer, more flexible cover, or perhaps just fewer pages, but I’m sure many notebook users will be quite thrilled with the Rhodia Webnotebook just the way it is!
Rhodia Webnotebooks are made in France, using PEFC certified paper. They come in orange and black, in two sizes:
3.5 x 5.5″, suggested retail price $15
5.5 x 8.25″, suggested retail price $20
Rhodia products are widely available, and I’m sure the Webnotebooks will soon be stocked in all stores that carry the brand. I’ve seen the small 80g paper version at The Container Store for $12. Vickerey and The Daily Planner have the 90g pocket size for $15, large for $20.
A thought-provoking quote from Mark Twain:
It is a troublesome thing for a lazy man to take notes, so I used to try in my young days to pack my impressions in my head. But that can’t be done satisfactorily, so I went from that to another stage– that of making notes in a note-book. But I jotted them down in so skeleton a form that they did not bring back to me what it was I wanted them to furnish. Having discovered that defect, I have mended my ways a good deal in this respect, but still my notes are inadequate. However, there may be some advantage to the reader in this, since in the absence of notes imagination has often to supply the place of facts.
From Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, Volume I [1]: 1855-1873 (The Mark Twain Papers)
I have noticed a similar problem sometimes when reading over my old notebooks– I find references to events I can’t remember, and cryptic phrases that make no sense to me now. I usually have a pretty good memory, so to have written down something and still not be able to recall it is quite disturbing! But every once in a while, I’ll find something totally random that now has an interesting ring to it and I enjoy imagining some funny story that could have happened to me but probably didn’t!
So often, I’ll see a really cool image pop up in the Moleskine Flickr pool, and it will turn out to be by Kathrin Jebsen-Marwedel. See her photostream here. She fills each page of a daily Moleskine planner with the most wonderful sketches, and the result is an extraordinary visual journal.
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Last weekend, I read a wonderful novel called Andorra
I decided to visit the stationers. The front part of the store exhibited the expected paraphernalia, and a hall led to a room in back which contained fine paper from around the world. These papers were draped over wooden rods that skirted the room at various levels: one sheet of each, on display, like paintings. In the center of this room a glass case displayed an assortment of journals of varying sizes, bound by a variety of materials. It was not until I saw these journals that I realized that I wanted to write a book to record my new life. I wanted to put down, hour by hour, day by day, in some artful way, what I encountered, what had meaning to me, what I said and what was said to me, how I felt, and what I saw, so that if this new life failed, I would have a record, something left: a souvenir.
The books were all beautiful: bound in various leathers and fabrics, but one in particular drew my attention. It was a tall volume, almost twice as tall as it was wide, and its boards were covered with an exotically patterned fabric, in shades of rust and indigo. At my request a young man extracted this book from the case and explained to me that it had been created in Florence, from Japanese paper and Balinese fabric. I liked the fact that materials from the East had converged so beautifully in the West; it seemed to me to be a book of the world, and I bought it. From a case in the front of the store I selected and purchased a fountain pen made from some amber resin, which a clerk carefully filled with thick black squid ink, and I carried my two purchases out onto the plaza with a feeling of euphoria and expectation.© Peter Cameron
If you’re a true notebook lover, surely there’s no other response to this than a sigh and the word “Yes.”
Here’s one for all you hard-rockin’ notebook fans:
A pair of handwritten lyric notebooks (see photo below) by late AC/DC frontman Bon Scott, dating from the late 1970s, was among an array of 300 musical items that went under the hammer at a Christie’s pop memorabilia auction on June 22 in New York.
A description of the item reads as follows: “A pair of notebooks containing handwritten lyrics by AC/DC lead singer and lyricist Bon Scott, composed by Scott during his time with the band from 1974 through his death in 1980. The notebooks contain 25 handwritten song lyrics, comprising songs found on the band’s first three albums, including ‘High Voltage’, ‘T.N.T.’ and ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’. Written in various colored marker, it also includes a drawing of a woman and humorous notes, including on the inside cover of one of the notebooks.”
From BLABBERMOUTH.NET.
There was an interesting article a few weeks ago in the New York Times, about electronic tools for note-taking: Bringing Order to the Chaos of Notes:
MODERN life is a mess of notes, a tangle of countless scraps of information that we accumulate during our waking hours. In the morning, you attend a meeting with the boss and jot down everything she says. Later, you get a call from the vet and transcribe results from your dog’s lab tests. At lunch, a friend gives you the name of a Mexican place he says you’ve got to try. And then there are the to-do lists, grocery lists, recipes and all those brilliant ideas for screenplays you get while taking a shower.
The piles of notes are even more ungainly if you’re in a profession that demands constant transcription — if you’re a student, lawyer, journalist or executive assistant, a job in which every utterance should be recorded, archived and made searchable.
The puzzle is where to write all this stuff down. Computers have revolutionized how we manage information, but for many years they’ve offered meager help for that most pedestrian of paper-based tasks — saving all the ephemeral data that streams into your life.
Most people reading this blog are probably quite happy to solve this problem by buying more notebooks to stick those paper bits in! But if you are interested in using electronic solutions too, here are some programs mentioned in the article.
Evernote
OneNote
NoteBook
Yojimbo
Together
The writer does acknowledge that pen and paper still win sometimes:
…physical notebooks have their advantages. They’re highly portable and extremely flexible; they let you draw, scribble in shorthand and you can curl up the corner of a page to remember something important.
But pen and paper have their limitations. You can’t search paper, and you can’t easily organize a stack of notes into a meaningful collection without retyping them first. Most important, pen and paper don’t last. Notebooks are hard to keep safe and secure, and if you move apartments or offices, you’re bound to lose something important. Paper notes have a habit of going through the wash and coming out as papier-mâché.
Your electronic data, meanwhile, is replicated on the Web and on all your machines, and will probably be safe for years. This can make all the difference: With computerized notes, your daily musings are permanent. In time, they could add up to something grand.
Like most people, I’ve found that a combination of electronic and paper makes the most sense for me. I love keeping my calendar and contacts in Outlook, and I use it for to-dos and many notes related to my work and personal life also. But I still keep a paper journal and use my notebook to jot down personal to-dos, ideas, lists, doodles, etc., and I can’t imagine any electronic invention that would change that.
Don’t forget that the contest continues today! To enter, follow me on Twitter @notebookstories and tweet this message:
Win a cool notebook this week @notebookstories https://www.notebookstories.com
Details and notebook review here: Review and Contest: Old Style School Quaderno from Vickerey.
