(Susan M. Pigott is a fountain pen collector, pen and paperholic, photographer, and professor. You can find more from Susan on her blog Scribalishess.)
The Rhodia Goalbook is a soft, leatherette-covered notebook designed primarily for bullet journaling. The book has two ribbon bookmarks and a built in envelope pocket on the back cover.
It has six table of contents pages, which is quite ample. I really love this feature whether you use the book for goal planning, journaling, or general writing.
A vertical calendar (perpetual) follows the table of contents pages with six months on two facing pages and the other six months on the next two facing pages.
Next are monthly pages divided horizontally into three months per page.
The remainder of the notebook is comprised of 224 dot-grid pages with page numbers printed in the bottom corner.
Since I don’t use the bullet journal method, I decided to use my Rhodia Goalbook as a Commonplace Book. A Commonplace Book is simply a notebook used to compile notes, quotations, and other information you want to keep. I’m primarily using mine to keep track of what I’m reading along with quotations and other snippets of information I find relevant or interesting.
I’m using the vertical calendar to keep track of when I start and finish reading a book.
In the monthly section, I list all the books (or short stories) I’ve read that month along with my rating for most of them.
I set aside the first few pages of the notebook to test different inks and nib sizes to see how well the paper holds up. There’s a bit of show through, but no bleed through.
In the remainder of the book, I’ve been writing out selections from the books I’ve been reading along with some quotations and other material, such as the theme song to one of my favorite television series, The Expanse. Cool fact: did you know that the title song is in Norwegian (apparently not grammatically correct Norwegian, but still)?
You can see that next to the book quotations I’ve identified major themes. I plan to index these at the end of my notebook.
I also wrote a summary paragraph describing what I thought of the book.
I think the Rhodia Goalbook works well as a Commonplace Book since it already has a table of contents and enumerated pages. Obviously, it would also be perfect for bullet journaling.
Rhodia’s cream-colored Premium "R" 90 g paper paper is smooth and very fountain pen friendly. The dot-grid pattern makes it easy to write either vertically or horizontally, and of course you can use the dots to make check boxes if you’re bullet journaling. The two ribbons are handy so that you can bookmark two sections of the journal for easy reference.
You can purchase the Rhodia Goalbook from JetPens for $24.95. The Goalbooks come in a wide array of colors: sapphire, iris, purple, black, chocolate, turquoise, yellow, anise, silver, tangerine, orange, taupe, beige, lilac, poppy, and raspberry. I think it’s another terrific offering from Rhodia.
(Exaclair provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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