Today we are taking a look at this awesome new Clairefontaine Triomphe Notepad in A4 size (buy via JetPens) that I picked up as part of our sponsorship with the great folks over at JetPens.  This is essentially the same size as your average yellow notepad, but unlike your average yellow notepad its a more than respectable place to break out your fountain pens for.  Lets take a closer look at this and see what makes it so special.

Besides the 50 sheets of beautiful bright white 90gsm, acid free, ph-neutral Clairefontaine paper in this notepad, the other great thing about it is the fold-over cover that is perfectly scored for folding.  You can see here that it lays right over back on itself, and since the pages rip clean out from the binding but also fold back pretty nicely you will always have a pretty clean looking notebook.  The close up above shows the pre-creased lines at the top of the cover that allow for the neat fold-over effect.  It does take a little bit of pressure to get it to lay flat when closed again though.

Here is a closer look at the back cover of the Clairefontaine Triomphe Notepad after its been folded over.  You can see how flat and clean it lays.  This is great because your standard yellow legal pads don’t usually have covers on them.  This can lead to not only a messy looking notebook when your pages get banged up, but it can also be a security issue.  If you have any sensitive information written down on a standard yellow notepad its obviously left exposed on the top page with no cover to protect it.

Clairefontaine Triomphe Notepad Writing Samples:

Like I said before, the paper in the Clairefontaine Triomphe Notepad is pretty amazing.  Its got the bright white finish to it with lavender rulings spaced at 8mm.  But the smooth and soft surface of the paper can handle just about anything and it handles fountain pen ink especially well.  The pens shown above all handled well with near zero show through, and the pencil eraser on the Blackwing even cleaned the markings better than it does on some other papers I’ve tested it on and there is zero paper loss in doing so.  I did also test with a regular Sharpie permanent marker, and while there was obvious show through it didn’t bleed onto the next page.  You can be confident that most if not all pens and inks will do well on the pages of the The Clairefontaine Triomphe notepad.

Overall, the Clairefontaine Triomphe Notepad is not super inexpensive, but it provides a world class writing experience that you simply are not going to find with any other notepad in this format.  If you want to treat yourself with a great notepad for some special notes or just to be fancy at work and look down on all the yellow notepads, the Clairefontaine Triomphe Notepad is your first and only choice.  Again, thanks to JetPens for supplying this, you can grab your own right here and also see other sizes/formats or get matching envelopes.

©2017, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.