black n' red Recycled Casebound Notebook

In my opinion, the Black n’ Red Coil Bound Notebook with ruled perforated pages is one of the most practical, best performing, and cost-effective notebooks that I’ve used.   Naturally when I saw this hard cover Black n’ Red recycled notebook, I couldn’t resist grabbing it to see if the same performance translated into their recycled line.  This review will take a look (with fingers crossed) to see if it compares to its non-recycled cousin.  Before I get started, one thing you might notice in the pictures is that the cover is a bit warped, and you can see a slight curve in it.  I am going to just assume that this is a minor defect that is not a common issue with these notebooks because I truly hate returning stuff and couldn’t be bothered in this case.

black n' red Recycled Notebook Inside Cover

The inside front covers of the notebook have a nice calendar and table of contents section for you to fill out.  I like the calendar layout,  you can get a closer look at it if you click the photo above.  Essentially it has a horizontal listing of each month, with anywhere from 29-31 boxes below each month for the dates, so you can start using it at any point during the year, and just wrap back around.  Clearly you wouldn’t be able to do that if this had assigned years, so that is a nice little touch.  One thing that this layout makes me realize is though is that the pages should have been numbered so that the table of contents would be easier to fill out.

black n' red Recycled Notebook Useful Information

The first inside page of this version of the Black n’ Red notebook has the same set of helpful info that is found in other versions, including conversion tables, and maps with all of the time zones.

black n' red Recycled Notebook Subway Maps

The back inside cover has multiple maps including a NYC Subway Map, a Los Angeles Street Map, and Washington DC & Chicago Metro System Maps.  Not sure how often I’d really use maps like this because I don’t typically carry a notebook with me when I travel, but I can definitely see how it would be useful for some.  I should probably clarify that statement though, I do carry a notebook with me EVERYWHERE I go, but its much smaller than this one, it is my Moleskine Volant Mini.

black n' red Recycled Notebook Binding

The binding on the black n’ red Recycled Notebook is very well done, and feels very sturdy.  The only issue I have here though is that the notebook doesn’t open flat very easily.  If you flip the notebook open to the middle, it will lay flat, but if you try the same with the pages towards the front or back, it doesn’t come close to laying as flat then.  In the photo above you can also see a little glimpse of the red ribbon bookmark.

black n' red Recycled Writing Sample

The above writing sample shows multiple pens and inks on the recycled paper of the Black n’ Red Notebook.  The top half of the page was written with a fine point Sharpie Pen grip, which performed very nicely on this paper.  The remaining inks included fountain pen inks, gel inks, and liquid inks, which all performed very well withe the exception of the Noodler’s which did feather a tiny bit.

black n' red Recycled Show-through

On the flip-side of the writing sample, you can see that most of the inks did really well, but you can see some bleed-through with the Uniball Vision Elite.  For the most part, any of the other pens that I used would make for a very smooth and fantastic writing experience that would also allow you to write on both sides of this recycled paper.  I did notice that the one Amazon review posted for this notebook mentioned that the paper is not identified as being acid free, which makes the archival quality of it questionable, but I don’t have anything that important to write.  With that said though, this recycled notebook does make me wish I actually had important stuff to write down because the book style binding and hard solid cover really make me feel like I should be documenting something other than the boring day-to-day writings of a guy who writes about office supplies.

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