Bought a 200 page A5 notebook advertised as 100gsm, and every ink I own spreads into little hairy lines, worst with a medium nib. The same pens on 80gsm printer paper are crisp. I assumed heavier paper meant better performance. Is there anything I can do with this notebook or is it a write-off for fountain pens?
Test before you commit next time. Buy one, write a page, then buy the three-pack. I have a shelf of expensive lessons.
Also worth knowing that the same brand can change paper supplier between print runs, so "this notebook was fine two years ago" isn't a guarantee.
Humidity affects this more than people expect. Paper that's been sitting in a damp room feathers noticeably worse. If yours has been in a cold cupboard, leave it somewhere dry for a week and retest before writing it off entirely.
Genuinely true and easy to test. My winter feathering problems mostly vanish by June.
Use it for pencil, ballpoint or drafting and buy something else for the pens. A 200 page notebook is not worth fighting for a year.
@gimbal_gus · 5mo ago · 3 replies
Weight has almost nothing to do with fountain pen friendliness. It's about sizing and fibre. A heavily sized 68gsm paper takes ink beautifully and an unsized 120gsm sketch paper wicks like blotting paper. Thick and coated get marketed together and they are not the same thing.
What you can do with the notebook you own: use a finer, drier nib, since an EF steel puts down a fraction of what a medium does, and pick drier inks, because the well-behaved document inks and most iron galls feather far less than saturated dye-heavy ones. Writing slower helps more than you'd expect, since contact time is what lets it wick.
What you can't do is fix the paper. Nothing you apply to it helps enough to be worth the effort.
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@scope_of_work_sky · 5mo ago
Swapped to my EF with a drier ink and it's usable. Not lovely, but usable. Lesson learned about gsm.
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@upright_uma · 5mo ago
Rough shorthand for future purchases: if a paper is sold to fountain pen users specifically it will say so, and if it's sold on thickness alone, assume nothing.
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