One of the great readers here (thanks Michael!) gave me a heads up about this Filofax Notebook (via Amazon) that I never knew existed. They are an interesting Levenger Circa disc binding alternative since they offer similar functionality so I wanted to take a look and see how they compared.
So similar to Levenger Circa’s disc binding, the pages in these Filofax Notebooks are removable and can be placed back anywhere in the notebook rather easily. The biggest difference is that these pages are bound with a double coil wire binding rather than a disc binding system. For the most part, they function just the same, its very easy to remove and place the pages back in elsewhere in the notebook without doing any damage to the paper. The only real difference I noticed was that its actually easier to remove and replace large quantities of paper all at once as compared to the Levenger Circa or other disc binding systems. Much like the Levenger Circa notebooks, these also lay flat and can be folded over back to front in order to save desk space.
One thing that I REALLY like about this notebook is so simple yet not done often enough by other notebook makers. The simple notch on the covers to aid in keeping the elastic strap in place and also avoid damaging the cover itself. Maybe its just me but I think this needs to be standard on any notebook with an elastic closure strap.
Filofax Notebook Writing Sample:
The Filofax Notebook comes with four plastic tabbed dividers, and one of the dividers also has a pocket in it. To the left of the dividers you can also see that it comes with a page finder and ruler which is always a nice convenience. Although the convenience of the page finder, tabbed dividers, and pocket is nice, I feel that the plastic that makes up each is a bit flimsy and could have been made a bit stronger. I’m not sure if having them stronger would impact how easy they were to move around, but it was surprising how flimsy they felt.
Inside the A5 Filofax Notebook there are 56 sheets of 100g ruled paper, but it also comes with a small sample pack of 4 squared and 4 blank sheets too which is nice. Writing on the paper seemed to be a pretty smooth experience, but I was a bit off put by how some liquid inks such as fountain pens and the Uniball Air wrote on the paper. There seemed to be a decent amount of spreading of the ink once it hit the page. It wasn’t feathering, but it was definitely laying down wider lines than I was expecting.
On the flip side, the paper does moderately well in terms of show through for these same liquid inks. A few of the liquid inks showed a bit through on the other side of the page. The Uniball Air was the biggest offender, but both of the blue fountain pen inks that I tried had a few random places where this was an issue too. Overall I’d say the Filofax Notebook is passable for many pens, but not ideal for all pens, so its a hit or miss type situation.
If you took the time to read this far I’m going to guess that you might at least have a passing interest in the Filofax Notebook, which is why I’m going to give it away to one of our readers here. There is a catch though, this isn’t just a random pick a winner giveaway its going to require some smarts about office supplies on your part. If you examine the photo above, there is a “mistake” in there somewhere, first person to find it and leave a comment below that accurately describes the mistake wins the notebook. No time limit on this…first one to find it wins. If you don’t want to enter to win and are still interested in one of these Filofax Notebooks, Amazon is the place to go as usual. Good luck to those that want to win though! 🙂
©2017, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.
