Black Cover

Since this website began a year ago, finding black notebooks has become an increasingly difficult task. We’ve covered everything from the common to those of the no-longer-available variety, and very rare is it that someone brings to our attention to one we haven’t heard of. So needless to say, I was thrilled when a package showed up at my door with a fantastic little black notebook made in Italy and sent via a UK’s The Journal Shop.

Before we review the notebook, I’d like to highly recommend The Journal Shop, an amazing notebook retailer based in the UK. They sell everything, from Moleskines to Ciaks, but here’s what makes them extra special: they offer a 3-for-2 deal on all their products. Seriously, you can grab two Ciaks and get one free. Definitely worth a look if you haven’t heard of it before.

OK, now to the product at hand: the Cartesio. Hailing from Florence, Italy and named after the Latinized name of French philosopher Rene Descartes (”I think, so why am I obsessed with black notebooks?”), these leather bound soft cover journals have a very distinct feel from the numerous others we’ve previously reviewed.

The notebook measures in at 9cm x 14cm, or 3.5″x5.5″ - exactly the same as a standard Moleksine.

The notebook is also about as thick, with 96 leaves or 192 pages. The cover is made from recycled leather, and definitely has a far more “wrinkled leather” feel to it than any other journal we’ve reviewed, which is very cool. It also is available in an orange a bit more dull than the standard Rhodia color. You can make out the patterns in this picture:

Yes, embossed on the front is a small, raised “C”, which is disappointing for those of us who would like our notebooks free from product names; but after reviewing notebooks that are far more egregious in their cover choices, I’m just glad it’s subtle. The notebook is a soft cover, but it’s the firmest we’ve reviewed - definitely not as much flexibility as the soft cover Moleskine or the Miqeulrius, but this is a good thing. It’ll fit in a pocket, but it’ll also stand up to frequent bending, and what’s more, feels like it has some weight to it.

The cover is bound by a rounded elastic band, nearly identical to the Ciak’s. I used to be a purist about elastics being of the flat Moleskine variety until I used the Ciak for my vacation journal recently - without question, it does the job just as well and quite possibly better.

The pages are section sewn, but not attached directly to the binding. I really wish more notebook would follow the Alwych with this - it really cuts down on broken spines. However, the pages are very closely attached, and I really like the square spine, as opposed to the rounded one found on most soft cover journals.

Open it up, and you find an inner cover TOTALLY different from every notebook we’ve reviewed. As you can see, it features a great world map, the product name, and three simple lines for your indentifying information (seriously, in this day in age, what else do you need to write other than your email address and “Reward”?). I really don’t think this picture does it justice. The picture really lends itself to the company’s philosophy: “a world of your thoughts in a notebook.”

The pages are a creamy white, slightly brighter than the Moleskine. The lines are also slightly wider apart, but not enough to make much of a difference. They’re also of a thicker paper stock. As you can see, the notebook also comes with a bookmark.

Finally, in the back is a little pocket similar to the Moleskine. This is the only area where the notebook disappoints - I swear this pocket was a last minute addition. Not only does it not feel like the rest of the notebook, it’s attached in what I consider the wrong direction, has no cover flap, and is very poorly attached to the notebook.

Update: Ruth from The Journal Shop has informed me that we may have been accidentally sent a prototype of the final notebook, as the final version does have a cover flap and is much more firmly attached to the notebook.

It’s definitely not a deal breaker - I put a little glue on it, and it’s perfect now. And I continue to maintain that, as cool as a notebook’s back pocket is in philosophy, I’ve never actually used it for holding anything. But I would highly suggest to Cartesio not to skimp on this detail when they’ve clearly worked very, very hard on the design of rest of the notebook.

Overall, the Cartesio is an excellent little black notebook, and one highly worth checking out if you’re looking for a Moleskine replacement. It’s a soft cover, but it feels as sturdy as a hard cover, and the wrinkled leather cover gives it a great air of quality.

Currently, it seems that the Cartesio is only available at The Journal Shop, for the price of £8.50 each plus £3 shipping to the US (cheaper, of course, in the UK) - all totaling about $20. It’s a little pricey, but keep in mind the 3 for 2 deal, which brings down the price significantly.

Company: InTempo
Where to buy: The Journal Shop - £8.50 each (£3 shipping to the US)

Hey everyone,

Just got back from a long vacation, and am ready to post some new notebook reviews, but before we get to that, the winner of the Rhodia Webnotebook is…

K, from Kay’s Place! Congratulations! Thanks to everyone for entering - we’ll have another contest soon, and will make it accessible to everyone, including those who are blogless. More soon!

Update!: Hey everyone - thanks for all the entries! The contest is now closed, and we’ll be announcing the winner today.  Thanks for all the support!! More journal reviews to follow shortly, including an Italian notebook I don’t think anyone knows about.

If you remember, we were recently sent some sample copies of the new Rhodia Moleskine-esque “Webnotebook,” (which to my knowledge, is not available yet in the USA) and we’re going to be giving one away!

How to enter? Easy! First, you have to have a blog. Got one? Great! Now write a small entry about Black Cover, with a link to our site. It doesn’t have to be detailed; it can be as simple as:

“Check out this cool site dedicated to finding Moleskine alternatives called blackcover.net”

or

“Here’s an interesting site run by an obsessive nut who has an unhealthy addiction to stationery products! Check it out!“

After you do that, post a comment here (DO NOT EMAIL!) with a link to your blog entry. I’m heading off to Spain and Italy for the next two weeks (hopefully will find some interesting new little black notebooks in my travels), so we’ll draw a winner when I return. One entry per person. Good luck!

Update!: For those of you asking if old blog entries you’ve posted about Black Cover count, they do if they were made after May 1.

If you’ve ever been to Venice, you are probably familiar with the tourist phenomenon of handmade leather journals.  I have yet to find a guide book that doesn’t recommend the best “authentic” store in Venice to pick up a handmade leather-bound notebook in which to record your travel adventures. Of course, how a place can truly be authentic when nearly all of its business is due to tourism is beyond me…but I digress.

Regardless, I’ve been to a number of these places while visiting Venice, and never managed to find a journal that suited me. They were all generally on the bulky side, and it’s very difficult to find one smaller than a composition notebook. And while they’re “hand-made,” there’s generally not enough originality to merit the high price. Why am I bringing this up, since we’re definitely not reviewing a handmade Venetian notebook?

Since I started this blog nearly a year ago, I’ve been getting emails about the Ciak line of notebooks. At prices ranging from $15 to $25, the Ciak isn’t exactly a cheap purchase, and a lot of people have wanted to know - is it worth the price? Is the notebook used by V, of V for Vendetta fame, a worthy Moleskine alternative?

The main reason I haven’t featured a Ciak review on Black Cover as of yet is because I’ve come across the notebook in a number of New York City art stores, and I’ve always been underwhelmed.  There is something a bit bulky, a bit more “diary” feel to it than “all-purpose notebook.” It’s not that the notebook lacks quality; it’s just that it didn’t fit my paradigm for a good notebook. But now, actually using the notebook for the first time, I realize that I was looking at the Ciak through Moleskine goggles.  The Ciak is not a Moleskine; the Ciak is the notebook I wish I could’ve bought in one of those small stores in Venice.

Ciak is actually a company based in Florence that opened shop in 2001. Their products are made entirely in Italy, suggesting a significantly higher level of quality than those that hail from the conveyor belts of Chinese factories (ahemMoleskineahem). What’s more, emblazoned on the back of this particular notebook are the words “Handmade in Italy.” That’s right: handmade. I have NO idea about the accuracy of this statement. The company’s website doesn’t go into any aspects of being handmade, but if it’s at all true, it’s a great selling point.

The notebook we’re reviewing today is the 9cm x 13cm “Piccolo” black pocket notebook - but these dimensions aren’t entirely accurate. A standard Moleskine is 3.5″ x 5.5″; the Ciak measures about 3.9″ x 5.1″ - shorter and wider.  Here’s a comparison:

One of the reasons for this is the way the spine of the cover is attached:

As you can see, the spine is unnecessarily rounded away from the pages, one of the few flaws in an otherwise fantastic notebook.  While it’s got its stylistic merits, not having the pages attached is a major problem in most of the black notebooks I’ve reviewed.  The spine is much more likely to break without the extra support. The cover actually bends far back from the spine when opened, which can be a bit annoying:

But enough of the bad - let’s get back to the good (and there’s a lot of it).

The cover is made of an excellent leather material - a much smoother, richer feel than the Moleskine.  It feels durable and firm, yet smooth and flexible. This is a soft cover, but the amount of bend is limited, which is good - you won’t notice this in your back pocket, but you’ll also feel like it’s got some weight when you hold it to write something.

The Ciak also has a rubber band running horizontally around the book. Why? Well, for starters, for those of you looking for a notebook with a way of holding a pen, this is it.  Otherwise, it’s purely stylistic - Ciak was definitely going for a distrinctive design with this one.  At first, I was critical of this, but it’s definitely grown on me since. Note that the elastic band is thick - more noticable than the flat Moleskine version but perhaps more durable as well.

Opening up the first page, one finds a single blank starter page with a few lines for name, address, or reward info. Perfect, great - doesn’t assume for a second what I want to write on these pages.  Ah, simplicity. The pages are firmly attached to the cover, and it doesn’t seem likely that the corners will start to pull up, something that happens on cheaper softcover notebooks.

The Ciak has 96 sheets of very high quality, creamy white paper (they say “ivory”, but it’s a lot less harsh on the eyes than I imagine true ivory paper would be).  The lines are very nicely spaced, and begin at the top of the page and go right to the bottom.

Because of the binding system, it’s difficult to get the Ciak to lay flat.  This is about as far as it’ll go without applying unnecessary pressure:

You can see how far the cover spine has to bend to accomodate this.  It’s sort of disappointing, but more so in terms of an all-purpose notebook that you’d like to drop open easily for quickly jotting down notes.  In terms of a diary, or notebook you’d treat with a little more respect, this feels like a measure of quality.

And I guess that’s what this comes down to.  The Ciak is, without a doubt, an excellent, top of the line notebook. The quality is lightyears beyond the Moleskine, and it immediately stands out as having its own design and character.  And I don’t want to give the impression that this can’t take a beating - as I said, the cover feels far more durable than a Moleskine, even though it’s a soft cover.  Ultimately, it’s a higher quality - and more expensive - notebook, and it’s got the feel of being exactly that.

So you might feel you like shouldn’t kicking this thing around, a negative in some people’s view.  But every notebook has it’s place, and I can tell you that I’ll definitely be using this one on my upcoming trip to Spain and Italy to keep a journal of my travels.  It may not have come from a small Venetian notebook shop, but it feels like it could have.

Company website: CIAK Firenze
Where to buy: $18.50 (via Sam Flax South - thanks to reader Steve!) or $12.99 + $6.00 shipping (Amazon via Moleskine Books - says 3 to 5 weeks shipping, so I’d definitely email before buying)

I imagine that the vast majority of you who read this site are familiar with Rhodia products. Decked out in a distinctive shade of orange, they bring a level of style, quality, and most importantly, brilliant simplicity to all of their products, from fliptop pads to staple-bound notebooks. Rhodia products hail from France, where the company was started in Lyon in 1932.

Recently, word has been getting around of a new Moleskine-esque product called the “Webnotebook,” and we’ve been rabidly trying to get our hands on one. For a while, the only available means were wholesalers selling in expensive large bulk orders, and as much as we like black notebooks, we don’t like them that much!

Luckily, after a few emails, Exaclair Inc., the American distributor of Rhodia products, generously sent us some samples. Thus, Black Cover is proud to present what I think is the first Rhodia Webnotebook review on the internet.

From most pictures online, you’d think this notebook was identical to the Moleskine. Thankfully, it’s not, and for a variety of reasons.

The major difference is the cover, which is a thick, smooth yet firm Italian “leatherette” (according to the website).

To the touch, it feels very smooth and soft, unlike the hard, wrinkled texture of the Moleskine oil cloth. But this isn’t a soft cover - there’s slightly more give to it than the Moleskine cover (which is actually very nice for back pocket travel) but is still very much a hard cover.  It’s also thicker than a Moleskine cover, which gives it more weight in comparison.

Frankly, holding the two, the Moleskine feels cheap against the Rhodia, which seems to have a lot more quality to it - more like a high end journal you’d keep around for a while. Indented in the front is the familiar Rhodia logo, something I’d personally put on the back but is trademark of all their products.

Size-wise, it’s exactly the same as a standard Moleskine - 3.5″ x 5.5″ (9.5 cm x 14 cm). It’s slightly thicker because of the cover, but otherwise has 96 sheets of lined paper, or 192 pages total.

Inside, the lined pages are a nice shade of off-white, lighter than the Moleskine’s, but pleasing on the eyes. The lines are well spaced, and go right to the top and bottom of each page. There’s a little Rhodia logo in the bottom corner which is TOTALLY unnecessary, but it’s not too distracting.

However, here’s a downside that some of you will be very disappointed with: the Webnotebooks do not come with the standard Rhodia paper. According to Exaclair, they were disappointed to learn that Rhodia hadn’t included their highly regarded stock of paper, and have been urging them to change their decision. It’s true that the paper here feels very thin, and tends to get page wrinkles pretty quickly from use. On the other hand, it’s still thicker than Moleskine paper, and I’m not one of those people who uses anything heavier than a cheap Bic ballpoint pen. So this is a pretty negligible complaint in my eyes.

As you can see above, the notebooks come with a nice ribbon bookmark, and attached to the back cover, a black pocket folder.

Overall, Rhodia’s (badly named!) Webnotebook seems like a higher end version of the Moleskine - a notebook you could use as a journal without feeling like you were skimping a bit on the quality, yet is still simple enough to carry around on your travels.  The two types of cover (Rhodia’s leatherette vs. Moleskine’s oil cloth) are like apples and oranges, and I think it comes down to personal taste on which you prefer.

Ultimately, the Rhodia webnotebook is definitely worth a test run, and it’s the second notebook after the original Stifflexible that’s made me realize there’s more than one way to skine, er, skin a cat (sorry for that). But where to buy them? Though I can’t find a product page on their websites, Exaclair tells me the best way is to write to either The Daily Planner or Pendemonium, both of which have access to Exaclair’s Webnotebook supplies. I think they retail for about $12, but I’m not sure.

Also, for those looking for something a little bigger than a pocket notebook, Exaclair sent me samples of a larger softcover journal (similar to Miquelrius’s soft cover) called the ePure (thanks to reader Pat for the correct name!).

The notebook measures 8.5″ x 5.5″ wide (the size of a normal sheet of paper folded in half), and features a soft imitation leather cover with the Rhodia logo engraved in the center. The inside has beautiful thick white drawing paper, which makes it a great sketch book for those with artistic abilities (not Black Cover, sadly).

There’s no elastic band, bookmark, or back cover pocket, but it’s still a very nice addition to the Rhodia line.

Overall, both notebooks confirm the continued quality of Rhodia’s products, and we’re hoping the Webnotebook hits stores everywhere to give Moleskine some fierce competition.

Company Site: Rhodia-Block
American Distributor: Exaclair, Inc.
Places to buy: Write to either Pendemonium or The Daily Planner and ask about availability

Special thanks to Rhodia for the review samples!!

[Update! Several readers have written in to say the durability of these notebooks is pretty shoddy - see below]

Let’s get one thing straight: we don’t hate the Moleskine. Yes, this website is dedicated to finding alternatives to what is widely considered the end-all, be-all of little black notebooks. But that has less to do with actual problems with Moleskine products, and more to do with the accepted belief that there is just one way to do a little black notebook, and Moleskine owns the patent. And to prove our lack of animosity, here’s our quite positive review of their very impressive softcover Moleskine.

Sometime last year, a page appeared on Amazon advertising a then-forthcoming Moleskine product: a softcover lined notebook. We received numerous emails about this, but other than a mention on the Moleskine website, no other information was available.

Many were excited about Moleskine’s first venture into the flexible world, but we here at BC were skeptical - because this, in fact, wasn’t Moleskine’s first softcover. In 2006, Moleskine put out a 2007 softcover weekly planner that was very disappointing. Badly planned, the rear pocket folder was so thick that it fully prevented the softcover from bending at all. Take a look:

That’s seriously as far as it would bend without basically folding it in half. Luckily, Moleskine clearly worked hard to correct the problem, as this is the current flexibility with the new softcover notebook:

It seems like we’ve reviewed far more softcover black notebooks than hardcover, which is too bad because I prefer something a little more durable. That said, Moleskine has come up with a good firmness to their softcover. While I like the popular Miquelrius, I’ve found it too be too flexibile - there’s no weight to it at all, and it’s good to have some amount of resistance. I was recently impressed by the Alwych notebook, which is more rigid than the Moleskine softcover - but in that case, the Alwych’s flexibility is appropriate to its smaller size.

Besides being flexible, the cover is made of the standard Moleskine oil skin cloth (without being backed by a thick piece of cardboard). I was a little surprised to find some nicks and a scratch in the cover when I took it out of its shipping box - time will tell how durable it is to wear and tear. But for the moment, I’ll chalk that up to the postal service.

Size wise, this notebook is ever so slightly smaller than the standard Moleskine, clocking in at about 5.5″ x 3.5″.

I still maintain this about a quarter of an inch too large, but with the softcover, the dimensions are a lot more manageable. I put this in my back pocket as I drove home from work today, and completely forgot it was there.

This first page has the standard Moleskine reward info - nice and simple, as it should be:

The pages are of the creamy, off-white variety, of which I’m a fan (not too harsh on the eyes). The lines go right to the top of the page, without the annoying margins that some notebooks choose to include. The line spacing is nice and tight, but I do have a complaint: they’re crooked!

I don’t know if it’s clear in this picture, but the lines do not run parallel to the top and bottom of the page! You can see it most clearly at in the top of the left page in the above picture - that difference in spacing is not due to the way the notebook is bending. In fact, it’s lying flat on the table (something this notebook does very well for a softcover). Very strange…perhaps one of the drawbacks of mass-manufacturing your products in China?

Finally, the notebook is rounded out with the back cover folder and ribbon bookmark.

All in all, I was very impressed with the Moleskine softcover. It’s firm enough to be durable, yet flexible enough to carry in pretty much any pocket. It comes with all the perks of the standard hard cover Moleskine, and besides the crooked lines, is a very strong little black notebook. To date, I haven’t seen these sold in stores, but you can order them easily enough online.

See? We don’t the Moleskine after all! Special thanks to Stacy for letting us know these were finally available to buy.

Update: Apparently, readers haven’t found the durability of these notebooks to be pretty bad:

I just started my first softcover pocket Moleskine two days ago. You will not do well carrying this in your back pocket. The paper block is already splitting from the binding. The only thing I have found that works in the back pocket over time is the pocket reporter notebook, always slipped into the pocket with the spine at the top. Sitting flexes the spine and breaks regular casebound books - a standard Moleskine in a few weeks, a softcover in a couple of days.

And:

OKAY, I have been using a softcover molie for 6 weeks, i keep it in my back pocket. and let me tell you there are some big drawbacks, first is the paper block coming away from the binding, it is only attached at each end of the block and not along the whole of it, basically meaning i had to sticky tape the first and last pages to the card pieces on the inner cover. Also the skin does come away from the inner card as it is not rolled, this can be easily fixed with some superglue though. also my ribbon fell out when the paper block came loose! Although the paper in mine is straight so 1 good point. i have noticed that the paper in some cahiers is often wonky yet not always.

Not very promising. At some point in the near future, I’ll be doing an update on how the various notebooks we’ve reviewed have held up over the past year.

BUY: Amazon.com ($12)