My last review was for the Roterfaden Taschenbegleiter, a super great notebook cover system that utilizes clips instead of elastic bands or pockets to keep notebooks in place. Naturally, Roterfaden has their own line of notebooks that are made to be used with this cover.
The Roterfaden notebooks are very minimalist. The cover is thin kraft cardstock. The brand is stamped onto the front, as well as an abbreviated infographic of notebook specs. The binding is sewn with red thread (in keeping with the brand name). There is no spine to cover the stitching--it's an open edge that facilitates in the notebooks' main feature: it lays perfectly flat on every page, with no training necessary. It does this very well. With no thick cover and no spine, it feels more like writing on a pad of paper than in a notebook. Frankly, it takes some getting used to.
While there are a lot of benefits to this notebook's structure, it does feel a little flimsy. The kraft cover is not much thicker than printer paper, and the loose binding feels like it's going to fall apart (it hasn't). It doesn't feel like a substantial book. Of course, it's not meant to be used alone. It's supposed to be inserted into the Taschenbegleiter with several of its siblings--and that becomes its actual cover. It does work well when used with the Taschenbegleiter, and I think it would work okay in an elastic system, too, but it would likely not work in a notebook cover where the insert cover needs to be slid into a pocket. It isn't quite sturdy enough to hang on by one cover.
Between the covers are 84 pages of very decent paper. It is a cream color, and this one has a dot grid pattern. Lined and blank are also sometimes available. The paper handles all inks very well with minimal showthrough, and no feathering or bleeding. My Sharpie has run dry, so it didn't bleed through as much as it would have--you can see in the picture that even the dry ink did get through a bit. A fully-loaded Sharpie would do what it normally does to paper: annihilation.
This is a good notebook that serves its purpose well. It works for what it was designed to do, though it doesn't work for me outside of its intended purpose. That is, I wouldn't use this notebook without a sturdy cover system like the Roterfaden Taschenbegleiter. My biggest issue with this product is the price. $14.50 for an insert is...well, it's too much. It's good paper, and nicely bound, but it's also possible to find A5 notebooks that fit these specs for a third of that price. Buying these, especially in triplicate, as refills is not very cost effective. It's not a bad notebook, and if you like matching brands, it might be worth it, but it hasn't won me over.
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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