There comes a point when pocket-sized, and A5 notebooks just don’t cut the mustard (note for North American peoples, this means they’re just not up to the job; and no, I have no idea whatsoever why that should have anything to do with mustard). Enter, the Life Japanese Stationery Company’s Noble Report A4 Writing Tablet. One hundred sheets of their usual, high-quality, gloriously smooth, light-weight, ever-so-slightly-shiny, off-white paper. OK, so you get the idea already, it’s another winner.

I like the way the Life brand have called their notepad/book range Noble, I’ve always kind of thought that’s a good word for the big A4 brother (or sister) of their smaller pads…

As if it isn’t weighty enough (and it is pretty sturdy), I like to carry mine in my university’s leather pad folder, that my wife got me when I started my PhD. Just a bit pretentious, but it looks great when I’m in meetings with my supervisor. I don’t know exactly how much it weighs, but I’m sure there are set techniques in styles of karate, that involve incapacitating an attacker with one of these.

Each page is incredibly smooth, with that subtle off-white shade that is typical of the Life Noble stationery.

Each sheet is gloriously fountain pen friendly, and detaches cleanly from the glued strip at the top of the pad. Each of the lines are 8mm (0.3in) wide, which is quite roomy, even for my scruffy script. As ever, Life’s attention to detail is written through every aspect of the product.

Whatever nib/ink combination I use, just glides across the page. The ink patch drawn using the J. Herbin Perle Noire did bleed through the Noble report paper, seen in the following image…

… but, to be fair, this was a heavy patch of ink, drawn with a large nib, and it was the only patch to do bleed through. I don’t think this is so much a failure of the paper, as a vindication for not doing the same thing with all of the ink patches.

Summary

At $23.50 Canadian, you’re unlikely to buy many of these at one time, not least because you won’t want to carry them back home, and (at the time of writing), I can’t find any of my usual suppliers with any stock; but when they do get them back in, I’ll have at least one more, after all, I’ve used a few sheets now, I wouldn’t want to run out… and that’s about the best recommendation I can give.