Category: paper

One of the delights of the Rhodia pad as a product is it’s consistency – the iconic orange colour, the unchanging format and presentation, the year after year weekend newspaper reports “discovering” the writing pad manufactured for longer than most of us have been alive. So it’s alarming to see something different. What are these splashes of non-orange colour on my Rhodia pad?

It looks like Paul Smith has embellished a Rhodia Pad! Leave my Rhodia pad alone!

The Paul Smith version looks nice – no doubt – but brand managers should know that some of us just don’t want these classics tampered with.

Is the memo-pockets the most useless Moleskine variant?

One of the charms of the Moleskine notebook is the useful backpocket. So why not add even more pockets? Why not go even further and remove the paper, and offer a Moleskine with nothing but pockets? Well, this has actually been done.

What one gets is the world’s most expensive unusable accordion folder. I bought the small version two years ago. My intended use was to help organize a trip. But even in 2003, most tickets and receipts were much too large for the Moleskine pocket. There are only six pockets, so what can be done with them? The pockets are not labelled, and it would probably be quite hard to do so, due to the need to fold everything back into the cool Moleskine form factor.

My fault I thought – I need the large model. Wait – it’s still too small for train tickets, hotel receipts, and most documents that I’d want to put in there.

So – what can be done with them? Any ideas?

The Rhodia pad is an icon for many. The classic pad is easily recognizable by the famous orange cover. It’s a model of efficiency and design – the front cover has three designated folding points, known as scores, which allow the cover to be neatly folded over the back. The standard pad has 80 sheets of fountain pen friendly 21.3 lb. “High Grade Vellum Paper”, with a light purple squared 5×5 mm rule. The sizes range from 3.3″x4.7″ ( 8.5cm x 12cm) to the magnificent desk filling 12.5″x16.5″ (31.8cm x 42cm) . It’s not too hard to learn this – the backs of the larger pads all have charts of the standard offerings. The sheets have perforations that line up with the top score so that the pad stays neat as sheets are removed.

Apart from the classic pad, there are ruled and blank versions, and a special accounting variant. There are also a couple of yellow paper models, and the delightful No. 120, the Rainbow model with four colours of punched A4 graph paper!

The Rhodia line also has coil ring notebooks (which one wouldn’t typically classify as “pads”) and even a graph paper mouse pad, with detachable sheets. I won’t discuss these here.

I first discovered these pads when I saw the No. 38 (the giant 12.5″x16.5″ pad) at a local fountain pen shop a few years ago. It just looked awesome to me. I had never seen such a giant pad of graph paper. I like to draw charts and figure things out on paper, and it just seemed like a very useful aid. Also, the paper itself is much nicer than found in the writing pads at typical office supply stores.

Here’s a link to their corporate catalogue:
Rhodia