I apologize for taking so long to post another review, but other things have occupied my life recently and I haven’t been able to post. I will be back posting regularly again soon. I have many great items waiting to be reviewed and I am excited to let you know about my experiences with them. I apologize to those who are waiting to see product reviews and I promise I will get to them as soon as I can.
For now, I want to tell you about a GREAT notebook I have been using. It is a spiral bound notebook designed by Joshua Davis for Miquelruis and can be found here. I have covered what I think are the most important categories for a notebook, but please let me know if there is another aspect you would like to know about that I have not covered here.
The Company: Miquelruis is located in Barcelona, Spain and has been in business for 150 years. The company started making cards, bindings and accounting books. Now it carries notebooks, pads and various other accessories; as well as offering collections by several guest designers. As of yet, I have only tried the notebook featured in this review, however I have a few more of them to test. If the others follow suit to my experience with this notebook, Miquelruis’ products arer going to be some of my favorite. For more on the Miquelruis and to view the product catalogue, visit http://www.miquelrius.com/eng/portada.
The Cover: As described on the Miquelruis website, the cover is “note book (sic) card covered with printed paper laminated in plastic.” The plastic is shiny and looks nice. The plastic on the corner of mine is slightly creased, like when you try to lay contact paper on a shelf and you get a line instead of it laying completely smooth. I have the “Maps” cover, which is mostly black with some splashes of color. It has a good contrast of brightness against dark, without being too flashy. It also comes in several other cover choices, which should suit a variety of tastes. The hard cover also makes it easy to write while resting the notebook on one’s lap instead of a desk.
Size: I have notebook model A4, which is 9 x 11 in. (210 x 297 mm). It may be too big for some as a normal journal, but is also too nice for messy note-taking. I suggest picking a particular purpose for a great notebook like this.
Binding: As mentioned, this is a sprial bound notebook. I was never a huge fan of spiral bindings because: sometimes the pages do not properly fold back around the spiral; the spiral unravels, catching on clothing or stabbing me; or the spiral gets in the way when I’m writing. However, I was very impressed with the spiral binding on this notebook. Each page folded back around the spiral without getting stuck around the spiral’s curve. It did not unravel, which means no catching or stabbing, and the spiral did not get in the way when I was writing.
Paper: The paper is 70 gram with 5mm ruling. The paper is divided into four sections, each section with a different color border and ruling. My notebook has 35 sheets each of blue, red, grey and bright green, for a total of 280 pages. This is great for separating subjects, as well as matching or contrasting with ink colors.
The paper is smooth and is great on which to write. It is not glassy like Clairefontaine paper, but is also a really pleasurable writing experience. There were a few waxy spots where the ink would not properly adhere to the paper, but this was only on several pages. I imagine this is not a recurring or common problem.
The best thing about this paper is that there is very minimal bleed-through. For some reason, it shows up more on the picture below than what I actually experienced when writing in the notebook. I used a variety of inks on this paper, including dark and saturated inks like Private Reserve’s DC Supershow Blue, and there was still no bleed-through. I could see that there was writing on the other side, but could neither read the writing nor see the ink color. The fact that the ink did not bleed through the paper made writing on the reverse side of pages almost as pleasurable as starting a fresh sheet. The DC Supershow Blue did take a long time to dry on this paper, but all other inks had normal drying time.
Overall: I love this notebook! I am really happy with it and have enjoyed using it. I definitely want to use more of these notebooks in the future.
