Trying to stick with the alliterative titles here! As discussed in my recent post Filofax Fever, I do have a soft spot for Filofax organizers, particularly the vintage ones made of nice leather. I’ve used several of them over the years, and have filled them with a wide variety of Filofax inserts– plain, grid, and lined pages, various calendar formats, maps, dividers, plastic pockets, sticky notes, address/telephone formatted sheets, you name it. I still have some blank Filofax inserts, but I’m not sure I’ll be using them. Why? Because the paper quality is not consistently good for fountain pens.

When I was most actively using my Filofaxes, I wasn’t using fountain pens, and I don’t remember ever having any issues with how the papers performed with the roller ball and ballpoint pens I used back then. Or I just wasn’t as conscious of preferring papers that wouldn’t show ink bleeding through. But in recent years, I got curious when I saw people in online forums talking about using fountain pens with Filofax inserts– some people said they were fountain-pen friendly and others said just the opposite. So I decided to do some testing myself. I went through my stash of Filofax papers, and pulled out some blank sheets from various years. I can’t tell exactly when I bought them, but they all have copyright dates on them, which Filofax updates from time to time, so I can at least roughly determine the dates. (I’ve written the copyright dates in pencil on each sheet to save you some squinting.) But they could be a little off– Filofax didn’t start selling 6-ring pocket organizers until 1994, so the sheet dated 1993 below is probably newer. (Never mind whether it seems absurd to have copyright dates on a sheet of plain paper.) My stock dates from 1991 to 2012, so it’s not totally up to date, but it is interesting to see the variations nonetheless.

The 1991 sheet seems to perform best on show-through and bleed-through. But the 2007 and 2012 sheets might be second best, so perhaps there is some hope that they’ve gone back to making them the way they used to?

Given how much I’ve talked about my continued use of Moleskine notebooks, which also aren’t good for fountain pens, you’d think I wouldn’t care about the Filofax paper. But I’ve discovered Plotter’s inserts, which work superbly with fountain pens. Since I’ve been using my Guildford Pocket Extra Slim Filofax as an organizer for certain long-term notes and lists, I filled it with Plotter papers. I always have fountain pens handy when I’m using it, and I like keeping it (almost) fountain-pen only. If I start using another Filofax organizer, I’ll probably try to do the same. I also like the look, feel, and size of the Plotter inserts, which are slightly taller and narrower than Filofax’s. The downside is that they don’t seem to be quite as widely available in the US, though it does seem like more and more online pen and stationery specialists are starting to stock them.

If you have been using fountain pens with more recent Filofax inserts, let us know how it’s going!