Clairefontaine My Essential Notebook Gray A5 - Dot Grid

It was a great book :-)

I really love the feel of this paper and notebook; the dots with their colour and spacing are nice guides, but the paper itself is almost smooth to a fault. It doesn't "absorb" inks as well as other notebooks I've used, and some ink/nib combos seem to skip and have issues unless you're writing with a really wet pen. A drier pen/ink is going to skip, and the ink that does lay down needs to dry, otherwise it's not uncommon to see ink spots transfer onto the adjacent page. I had problems with my broad nib Pilot Capless skipping on the page while using Kyo inks, but my medium nib Lamy Al-Star writes much more consistently with the same ink.

Otherwise, I had no problems with ink bleeding through, and when inks do dry there is no feathering. Writing remains clear, and it's nice to have a paper which is resilient enough to write on both sides without too bleed through and too much "shadow" of the other side.

The paper is everything you'd hope for with Clairefontaine - smooth, easy to write on, no bleedthrough even when I used a wet nib or doodled and crossed over the same space multiple times. There's a little ghosting, faint, not distracting.

I love the design! Classic grey cover, grey ribbon, light-medium dots and numbered pages throughout - beautiful! I'm halfway through the notebook now, the spine is still in great condition and it laid flat well from the very beginning. I've tried other dotted notebooks and prefer this one over the others - it's simple, sleek, and ready to go at all times.

Good news - I was pleased to discover the last 8 pages are perforated (this isn't in the description), it's wonderfully useful :)