Nuuna. Never heard of it? Well me neither! Until a couple of months ago, when Cultpens (not affilated) started carrying their notebooks. I was intrigued with the product specs on these: Jeans fabric covers, mirror covers, even heat-sensitive designs (you read that right! Heat-sensitive!). However their price also intrigued me! These things definitely don't come cheap, so they just had to be amazing quality, right?
Let's start from the beginning: These notebooks look good! I have to admit I bought it mostly for its looks. And it certainly doesn't dissapoint in that regard. The 'jeans' fabric cover looks and feels like a mixture of fibrous paper and felt, which is actually very pleasant to the touch. The soft material is covered with a bright orange paint that contrasts nicely with the subtle gray base color. As I said in the beginning, these notebooks come in a variety of different styles and colors, and they all look really nice. (I chose this one because I didn't really have much choice in the store I got it from.)
One of the coolest things about it, is the fact that the dotgrid on the pages inside is actually matched with the color of the cover, so mine came with very bright orange dots.
These orange dots are actually really useful. I was somewhat afraid that bright neon orange would interfere like crazy with my writing, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all! My only gripe here is that -being the Large notebook (A5 size), I would have preferred the dots to be slightly more spread out.
Unfortunately, where it shines in build quality and unique design, it lacks in paper quality. Which is unfortunately the most important aspect of a notebook for us fountain pen users! I can say in advance that, if you're a ballpoint pen or pencil user, you won't have any issues with it at all.
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| Still noticeable feathering with my Kaweco Sport (medium nib) |
On paper (Oh, the pun!), specs are surprisingly good: 256 pages, 120gsm paper (Munken paper, not sure if that's supposed to ring a bell). But in reality most fountain pens will still have a hard time. I found the biggest issue to be the fibrous nature of the paper, which makes pretty much every fountain pen feather (even the finer nibs). I wrote the written review with a Kaweco Sport Skyline with medium nib. The results with this pen were rather acceptable, though feathering and showtrough was still consistently present. As you can see in the writing sample, the Nuuna was no match for my Pelikan M1000 BB nib and permanent marker! These two did most damage (obviously), with considerable bleedthrough and pretty bad feathering.
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| Not completely flat, but enough to stay open on itself. |
Now for the shocking part: these notebooks (this is the large size) cost as much as 24 EUR/ 28 USD! That's a whole lot of money, I can't remember ever paying more for a notebook! With the poor fountain pen results in mind, would I buy this again? Perhaps yes, but solely for the awesome and original design, not for the paper quality. I definitely wouldn't recommend using it with fountain pens. Fountain pen users beware!
