Here’s a nice detailed look at one user’s switch from Moleskine to Leuchtturm: Hello Leuchtturm1917, goodbye Moleskine!.
The blogger at Recording Thoughts has been using squared Moleskines for a while but started to find the quality inconsistent:
Ever since Moleskine moved their production to China every book is a little different than the previous one. The cover feels different, or the binding is tight, or it smells funny, or something.
His main complaints were that the graph paper lines had become darker and thicker, and aren’t as precisely aligned as they used to be:
I have to agree with him on the darkness of the graph lines– Moleskine squared notebooks have always been one of my favorites and I’ve used many of them over the years without ever having such dark lines as in the one I just opened most recently. It really is distracting.
Of course, Moleskine’s production has always been in China… but they definitely seem to be having some trouble finding factories with the capacity to higher volumes of notebooks at the quality people have come to expect.
I have to agree here. The moleskine hardcovers seem to have a waxy feel and odd smell to them. I tried a leuchtturm notebook and I prefer it for fountain pen use. It doesn’t bleed thru like moleskine. As the notebook is comparable in price to moleskine I think I will just buy them now on.
My wife is happy, I gave her a bunch of my unused moleskines and since she uses a conventional gel ink biro it suits her fine.
:( The link is 404’ing :(
Thanks Viktorja– both posts are still viewable at http://www.recordingthoughts.com, and the author has also posted a followup:
Original post:
http://www.recordingthoughts.com/index.php/archives/2011/10/11/hello-leuchtturm1917-goodbye-moleskine/
Followup post:
http://www.recordingthoughts.com/index.php/archives/2011/10/15/moleskine-replies-to-my-qc-complaint/
I’m a Paperblanks fan myself. They’re pretty much the rolls royce of notebooks (so they’ll definitely cost you…) but there’s no way you’ll ever be disappointed by their paper, binding, cover designs, etc. Moleskine is cheap and boring by comparison.
I’m an entomologist at a research university and I use Leuchtturm notebooks both in the field (the small size) and laboratory (the medium size). The page numbers, index and archival paper serve equally well as both field books and research books and the sticky labels for the cover and spine are really handy for archiving purposes. I’ll never go back to Moleskine.
I just bought my first Leuchtturm1917 and I really love it.