Paper for Fountain Pens and Inks
It’s a never ending discussion about what’s more important: the ink, the fountain pen or the paper?
Does every ink write in the same way in every fountain pen and on every paper? Spoiler: No.
For me the paper is really important. There are so many differences: the texture can be soft, it could be coated, it could be smooth or rough. And then there’s also the possibility that the ink “sits” on the paper or soaks into it.
So while making ink swatches I always test the inks on different papers. Coming from the bullet journal community I have a lot of journals and different kind of papers at home – and my collection is still growing.
These are the papers I use the most:
- Hobonichi Tomoe River Paper, 52gsm, grid
- Leuchtturm A5, 80gsm, dotted
- Leuchtturm A6, 80gsm, dotted
- Leuchtturm A5, 120gsm, dotted
- Oxford A4 Optic Paper, 90gsm, dotted
- Brunnen A4 & A5 Premium Paper, 90gsm, dotted
- Brunnen A4 Premium Paper, 90gsm, blanco
- Kokuyo Jibun Techo Idea Book B6 slim, “Thin” Paper, grid
- Stalogy A5, Editor’S Series 365 Notebook, grid
- Rhodia Dotpad A5 & A6, 80gsm, dotted
I have a lot more notebooks, notepads and paper samples, but I don’t have to test every ink on every paper I own to find out how it flows, shades, acts.
So which are my favorite papers?
For everyday use I prefer Tomoe River Paper. All of my inks look so much better on this paper, sheen is immediatly visible and I almost never have problems with bleed through. As this paper is very thin there is a lot of ghosting. I don’t care for that, because I really like it when the pages look used.
Also a paper I use regularly on a daily basis is “Thin” Paper by Kokuyo (it’s the paper in my Jibun Techo). I’d say it’s similar to Tomoe River paper, but it’s whiter and feels a little bit thicker. I had no issues with bleed through except for Monteverde inks. I’m still observing this – I just have two Monteverde inks, so I can’t say yet if this is a general problem.
The third paper that I really like is Leuchtturm A5 80gsm dotted paper. I have to be super precise with this because with a friend I found out, that Leuchtturm uses different paper in different sized journals. A4+ is 100gsm paper for example, and some A5 journals have 120gsm. Even within a notebook you can feel differences while touching the paper: some pages are smooth, some are rough.
But: overall the inks perform very well on this paper. There’s a lot of shading visible and bleed through didn’t happen yet. There is ghosting – so thats a problem for people who don’t like that.
How about other papers?
I use other papers I own for letters or testing, but usually I don’t buy them again when the journal is full or the notepad empty.
There are some that I don’t like too much: Clairefontaine and Rhodia makes my handwriting very thin. A fountain pen with an F-nib looks like an EF-nib on this paper – and I dont like that. Also it makes weird scratchy noises while writing with some pens on it, I guess that’s because of the smoothness of the paper.
And something I cannot recommend for fountain pens is Kokuyos “Mio” Paper. Almost immediatly the ink soaks into the paper, bleeds to the back and even to the next page.
But I also buy new papers to try things out! Maybe there’s a paper you would like to recommend to me? Feel free to write a comment or a mail to me!
Nothing in this review was sponsored, I paid everything with my own money.
