Midori MD Notebook

For fountain pen friendly notebooks, try Leuchtturm, Clairefontaine, Rhodia or a whole host of Japanese brands such as Midori MD, Travellers Notebooks, Hobonichi, Jibun Techo, etc. Jetpens has great guides to notebooks options on their website. There is no reason to suffer Moleskines terrible and overpriced paper quality today with so many better options available for every use case.

I then discovered Midori MD notebooks at Maido in San Francisco, and they allow testing of most of the things they carry in store, including notebooks and a huge variety of fountain pens! They also have a giant swatch book for all the inks they carry, which was amazing. I really liked the Midori's simplistic design, the whole cover is just plain white thick cardstock with visible binding.

* Prefer white pages vs ivory like the Rhodia. * I only use Ohto Flash Dry Gel Pen refills in my pens. Recently I've been using the Maruman Mnemosyne A4 at home, I really really enjoy the paper, too bad it doesnt come with a thicker cover and stiching. I've also been enjoying the Midori MD notebooks, they look and feel amazing but they wont really hold up unless you get the plastic cover (ugly) or the leather cover (expensive and a bit too much).

I’m a huge fan of Midori MD notebooks. The grid is 5mm. I use these notebooks almost exclusively with fountain pens and they perform exceptionally well.

I think it was partly because I’d never really finished an entire notebook from start to finish and the main way I got over it was to get some good but plain and relatively cheap notebooks (Midori MD, for example) and use those first, so it wasn’t a big deal if I ruined them because they’re easily replaceable. It helped me feel more confident about using the more special ones after a while, too.