(Susan M. Pigott is a fountain pen collector, pen and paperholic, photographer, and professor. You can find more from Susan on her blog Scribalishess.)
Goulet Pens now offers its own brand of notebooks in various sizes, including A5, Traveler’s Notebook regular size, Traveler’s Notebook passport size, and Pocket size. Each style is offered in blank, ruled, dot grid, and graph options, and all are filled with Tomoe River Paper.
I’m reviewing the A5 size dot grid notebook. It comes simply packaged in cellophane paper with a sticker on the front identifying it as a Goulet product. The back sticker indicates the thickness of the Tomoe paper, the size, and the type of ruling.
The notebook itself has absolutely no branding. The cover is made of dark brown kraft paper. You get 32 sheets of 68gsm Tomoe paper for a total of 64 pages. The notebook is staple bound (two staples).
I like dot grid paper because it is less distracting than ruled paper and it allows you to write in any direction.
The dots on the Goulet paper are visible but aren’t so dark that they overwhelm the page.
I tested out the paper in various ways. I wrote a forthcoming review about the Visconti Divina Elegance fountain pen. The paper behaved wonderfully. The ink doesn’t bleed, but it sheens pretty dramatically on this paper.
Close up of writing. Ink: Robert Oster Peppermint.
I did a currently inked pens page with swabs, and the paper handled all the inks and swabs well.
And I tried out several different writing instruments (ball points, fountain pens, and mechanical pencils). No problems at all.
The paper is what you’d expect from Tomoe: creamy, smooth, and thin. Except for pencils and super fine ball points, you do get quite a bit of show-through on the reverse sides of pages.
But the only significant show-through I experienced was with a swab of some super wet Kyoto ink. None of the ink actually penetrated through the paper, but the show-through is much more noticable.
The show-through you get with Tomoe River Paper may be so distracting for some writers that they will only want to write on one side of each page. That is what I wound up doing with my Visconti Review. However, I use Tomoe River paper in my daily journal. I write on both sides of the page, and the show through doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I love how crinkly the pages become as I fill them in. I’m weird that way.
The Goulet A5 Notebook Dot Grid is $8.00 at Goulet Pens. I am a huge fan of Tomoe River paper, and Goulet offers it in the sizes most pen folks want. I highly recommend you try some if you haven’t already.
(Goulet Pens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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