Tuesday 5 September 2017

Seawhite Half Ruled Notebook review


It seems to be the week for looking at different types of notebook, the thought occurred that I've lost my way in recent days/weeks/months, too many projects live, too many things going on, no time to recover in between them.  In the meantime, all the things I should have been doing kept on stacking up.

So, there's going to be a bunch more reviews coming in the next very short while, at least till I catch up.  Todays book is something new, a half ruled book, by which each double spread has a blank page and a ruled page.  Ideal for putting ideas and sketches in the same book, but for people who pretty much write exclusively (like me), it was a calculated gambit.

And it paid off...

The Seawhite has a feel similar to medium Leuchtturms, thick card with a PU cover, heavy duty elastic binder and a single bookmark ribbon.  The paper in the Seawhite is 130gsm, very close to cartridge paper in its feel, and as evidenced below, holds the ink without feathering at all.






Those on the fountain pen forums will note I've also included a biro and a rollerball on the ink test, the reason for this is that I've had a number of people who've asked if there's any difference in papers for ordinary pens without fountain pen ink.  My comment has always been that there isn't much when you come to use Biro's, but for sake of completeness, I'm including them in the tests.

So to the bleedthrough test.





It's 130gsm, trying to get bleedthrough on it is like trying to get through Kevlar with a BB gun, an amusing exercise, but doomed to failure.  The interesting part of this is that I expected that the line on  the other side of the page wouldn't be visible either, but if you hold the page down, the line shows through just enough to get a faint line on the plain pages.  That in turn is enough to be able to keep a straight line on all the pages, which has allowed me to use it as regular notebook. 

So, summation, Seawhite notebooks are fairly cheap, the A5 I'm using was £5.99, an A4 is £6.99, I'm using mine mostly for scribbling at the moment, the solidity of the book lends itself well to carrying anywhere.  The full range is available at https://www.seawhite.co.uk/online/ although a number of other online suppliers stock them as well.