I’ve reviewed and mentioned the Pen & Ink brand sketchbooks several times on this site (see here, here, here, and here.) They are the closest substitute for a Moleskine sketchbook with the heavy-weight card stock paper, and they’re affordable and well-made. But I’ve never reviewed their other notebooks with standard weight paper. Squared notebooks are my other favorite go-to for everyday use, so how does the Pen & Ink squared version hold up? Let’s take a look.

The exterior is what you’d expect– same cover that feels slightly thicker and almost padded. Not too much cover overhang. You get the standard back pocket and a ribbon marker. Pretty much the same size as a pocket Moleskine, but a little chunkier, and as with the sketchbook, it feels well-made and solid and just nice.

But when I opened the notebook for the first time and saw the pages, I was very disappointed. I think I physically recoiled at those glaringly dark lines! The paper itself is a bit brighter white than the creamy Moleskine paper, and the graph lines are very thick, so it is a really distracting combination. I like to use fine point pens and I’m not sure I could get used to the lines on the paper competing so much with my small handwriting in thin ink lines. Other than that, show-through and bleed-through are about average, and fountain pens work pretty well. I bought a second notebook like this some months later in hopes that I might have gotten one from a bad batch, but the dark lines were the same, so I guess it is deliberate and unlikely to change unless someone at Art Alternatives gets enough complaints! Rather than use this as an everyday notebook for lists and things, I may end up using it for collages or drawing and painting with bolder, opaque colors that can stand up to the dark lines.

Pen & Ink notebooks are available on Amazon, Blick, or at JetPens.