Karen from Exaclair (and on Twitter @exaclair) recently sent me a pair of notebooks and a calendar to review. Since I have been pretty busy catching up with everything since being sick last month, this review has been languishing on the back-burner.

Let’s start with the plain, ruled notebook. On first impression I like the color, and so did the Lovely Bride. (in fact I had to hide this notebook because she wanted to take it for herself before I could check it out!)

I will say that I am not too impressed with the cover, simply a thick card-stock. I prefer a hard cover to my notebooks since they get quite a workout due to carrying them around in my bag. The spine, however, is another story. The 96-page notebook is built of 6 stitched signatures that are glued to a cloth backing. Very nice. The notebook opens right up and with some time I am sure that it will lay flat nicely.

There is an embossed Clairefontaine logo in the bottom-right corner of the front cover, but as you can see in the picture, it does not stand out.

Of course, the next question is about the quality of the paper inside. Well, I like it a lot. The paper is nice and smooth, and the Standard-ruled pages take pen, highliter and pencil very well. While I prefer College-ruled (or narrower) for notebook paper, the light-blue lines are just the right shade.

The pics below show the results of the writing test:

click image to see this full-sized

I used a Pigma Micron 05, a Pilot G2 05, a blue highliter, and an everyday #2 pencil for the test. As you can see the paper took the ink smoothly. As for bleed-through, well, there is pretty much zero:

click image to see this full-sized

I have to say that I like the quality of this notebook, except for the sturdiness of the cover, and I look forward to passing it on the the Lovely Bride to see how she likes it. You can check out the full line of Clairefontaine notebooks (not an affiliate link). The website lists brick-&-mortar retailers and online sources, pricing will vary, I am sure.

The next post in this series will take a look at the Rhodia classic meeting book.

[Editor's note to the FTC: I did receive this notebook for free in exchange for a review, no other compensation or expectation of a positive review was expressed or implied.]

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