(Susan M. Pigott is a fountain pen collector, pen and paperholic, photographer, and professor. You can find more from Susan on her blog Scribalishess.)
The JetPens exclusive Kanso Noto Notebook comes in four colors: black, dark green, navy blue, and deep purple. It's an A5-size notebook with 52gsm Tomoe River Paper in a dot grid format.
The notebook is simple with cardstock covers, a sewn binding, and a taped spine. There are no extras, such as page numbers, an index, or ribbon bookmarks.
It has 320 pages (front and back) of dot grid paper. The dots are a light grey color--so light they are a little difficult to see except in bright light.
The cardstock covers are easily bent. In fact, my notebook already had creases when I opened it. If you don't want this notebook to get beat up in your book bag, you might want to put it in an A5 cover.
Tomoe River Paper is best known for being smooth, thin, and fountain-pen friendly. Inks are displayed at their very best on this paper, which brings out shading and sheening properties.
I tested ten fountain pens in this notebook. As expected, all the inks worked well with the paper. There was no bleeding and no bleed through; however, because of the thinness of the paper, show through is quite visible.
I used Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo in my Nakaya with a medium flex stub nib to write out a longer passage. You can see good shading properties in the writing sample. Again, show through is obvious, so you may not want to write on both sides of the paper.
I love doing ink swatches on Tomoe River Paper. There's just nothing quite like it to bring out the qualities in various inks. I tested ten inks from different manufacturers in the notebook. All the swatches are vivid (though the cream color of the paper may mute them slightly), and pooling, sheen, and shading are dramatic. I did my swatches with a paintbrush, so they were quite wet and some did bleed through to the other side.
Tomoe River Paper is now ubiquitous, being used in notebooks from many manufacturers. It's good to have options. If you want a simple notebook at a decent price ($19.00) the Kanso Noto is a good choice. Although JetPens is currently out of stock, you can sign up to be emailed when the notebook is back in stock.
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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