Review: Grandluxe Monologue Notebook

I love getting stuff as much as I love giving away stuff, so you are entitled to a treat today! Some time ago, Grandluxe Singapore has sent me 4 Monologue notebooks to review. FOUR! There is an A6-sized black sketchbook and 3 A5-sized notebooks.

In my opinion, there are no other colours as beautiful as this combination of gold, red, and pink. Well-chosen, Grandluxe!

On the notebooks there is a sleeve cover surrounding the cover pages with the Monologue brand on it, and at the back there is a description of each notebook. Here are the descriptions:

Monologue Basics (Hardcover sketch book, A6) – that’s the black one
Italian heavyweight 140gsm Acid Free Drawing Paper. Section sewn, lies flat.
Paper size: 148 x 198 mm.

This paper has a rough surface suitable for drawing with the following techniques: Charcoal – Chalk – Graphite – Pencil – Pastel – Oil Pastel – Wax Crayon – Red Chalk – Acrylic – Collage – Oil – Marker – Spray – Tempera.

There are 128 pages of delightful sketch paper in this little notebook for you to do all your artistic masterpieces!

Monologue Contrast Ruled Notebook – the red one
A5 / 96L / 80gsm of cream acid-free paper
Ruled notes
Contrast coloured elastic closure (the closure is a contrasting black-coloured strap)
Expandable inner pocket

And even though the gold and pink notebooks look similar to the red one, they are different!

Monologue Ruled Notebook – that’s the pink one
A5 / 96L / 80gsm of cream acid-free paper
Ruled notes
Matching elastic closure & pen loop (all pink in colour!)
Expandable inner pocket

And last but not least, the golden coloured one:

Monologue Platinum
A5 / 96L / 80gsm of white acid-free paper
Ruled notes
Matching elastic closure & pen loop
Expandable inner pocket

Not to mention that the Platinum notebook comes in a leathery look and golden-coloured paper edges!

The notebooks have an expandable pocket at the back for you to slip little namecards, postcards, whatever cards that need slipping into an expandable notebook pocket (credit cards?). This can be really convenient if you tend to be rushing all over the place like I do sometimes, and people slip you pieces of stuff that you tend to lose. Lose ’em no more with expandable pockets! I wonder if people put cash in there…

I opened up the red contrast ruled notebook to try out. Red is the colour of passion, of stop signs, and of love. Before it gets a bit too cheesy, I’ll just explain that I chose red because it just jumps out at me on first sight, not very much unlike love at first sight. Gold may be a little too “wham-bam royalty” for me, while pink is really really girlish (okay, pink would have been my second colour choice of the three, but it just didn’t make it to the top choice).

80gsm weight of paper is really thin for me, but we will only know how it performs after putting it through the Pen on Paper Test. So, I carefully selected a representative posse of pens to subject the paper to:

From left to right:

• Lamy Joy AL Calligraphy pen
• Noodler’s Creaper flex
• TWSBI Diamond 530
• ZIG Brushables Brush pen
• Sista VIP Chinese Brush pen
• Rotring Rollerball pen
• Sakura Tiara Golden Gel pen
• Stabilo Pen 68 Marker
• Cheap ballpoint pen

I just realized everything looks blue and silver. Sorry for the lack of beautiful eye-candylicious pens…

Alright, subjecting the 80gsm paper to the Pen on Paper Test, I dared not get my hopes up too high. Here are the results:

From the front…

From the back…

Yikes, yikes, yikes! The ink bled through the paper for the fountain pens and the marker. As I said, it’s really thin paper, and the paper will probably have to be pretty amazing and expensive to be able to withstand fountain pen writing at just 80gsm weight.

The verdict reads (for those who cannot understand my handwriting):

Because of the thin paper, the notebook can’t seem to withstand very inky stuff… such as calligraphy pens and markers. Nevertheless, you can still use “normal” rollerballs, ballpoints and (of course) pencils and it will do you just fine.

These notebooks are handy everyday notebooks, and you can use them at work, at home, anywhere. I reckon they will be thick enough to last me a decent amount of time before I deplete the pages, but not so thick that you can’t stuff it in a laptop bag. What’s more, the nice polyurethane-ish cover is smooth and does not have strange drawings on it. I have already started using the red notebook to scribble down notes of my website grand plans…

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Hurray, hurray! Now for the giveaway! All you need to do is to visit http://www.grandluxe.com/ and have a browse around the products there, then let me know which one is your favourite product. Leave a comment on this blog post with your choice and you already get 5 chances of winning a notebook.

In addition to the blog post comment, there are additional means of winning such as following me on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, tweeting about the giveaway, and so on (1 point each).

The winning entry will be drawn after the contest closes at the end of the month, and the winner will be contacted to claim the prize. So basically, you’ll be able to make a choice between the Monologue Platinum (gold-coloured) or Monologue Ruled Notebook (pink-coloured). Don’t you love options!

This giveaway is open to everyone, wherever you live (as long as postal mail reaches you, you are eligible for entry).

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Maybelline

I am the founder of this website.
Chemist by day, slacker by night, fanatic of stationery all the time.
I write with my left hand, but can also do the same with my right hand – it just won’t look very pretty.

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