Review by Laura Cameron
Last month North of Rosemont contacted us and asked if we’d be interested in trying their pocket notebooks. Of course I wanted to try!
North of Rosemont is headquartered in Montréal and produces pocket size notebooks based on a few key principles.
To use only the highest quality, premium paper. To be sturdy and stylish for everyday use. To be made in Canada yet remain affordable.
NO+RO generously sent me a pack of two notebooks ($14.95 CAD), one in the Deep Blue color and one in the Grey 67 color.
Let’s start from the beginning: the outside. The covers of these notebooks are made out of 100lb paper with a vellum texture. The Deep Blue and Grey 67 are colors in the permanent collection, and it looks like there are other colors available as limited editions. The books are staple-bound.
Inside each notebook are 48 pages of 70T bright white paper, with NO+RO’s signature dot grid. The grid is actually made up of little crosses rather than dots! The paper is advertised to be high quality and super smooth and the second part is definitely true! There are also grey and white speckled front and end pages.
The interesting thing about these notebooks is that they are advertised as “smart size” and have 20% more surface area than regular pocket notebooks. This means that rather than being the standard size of 3.5″ by 5.5″ (9cm x 14cm), they are 4″ x 5.75″ (or 10cm x 14.5cm). While I’m often of the school of thought that more is better, at these dimensions, your notebooks may or may not fit in your pocket notebook covers (something to be wary of).
I do have to say that the paper in these notebooks is excellent. It is actually super smooth, and ink goes down beautifully and dries super quickly. The paper does show some ghosting and a bit of bleed through in heavy applications (where I added extra strokes on my letters), but with regular writing and fountain pen inks, both sides of the paper could still be used easily which is always a sticking point with me.
Overall, I was pleased to try North of Rosemont and I look forward to their future offerings!
DISCLAIMER: Some of the items included in this review were provided to us free of charge for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
