If your office has fountain pen users in it, buy Rhodia's No. 16 dot pad and stop comparison shopping. It's the best Rhodia fountain pen paper for general office use — five years, roughly 200 pads, and it's the only one we've stocked that nobody complains about. About $8 for an A5 pad.
The catch isn't quality. It's dry time.
Rhodia's paper is coated, and that coating is exactly why ink doesn't feather and doesn't bleed through: the ink sits on the surface instead of soaking into the fibers. Which also means a wet nib needs 15 to 25 seconds to set before you can close the notebook and walk. If half your staff writes left-handed, that number matters way more than the gsm. So does the second thing most buyers miss: the same purchase order that carries your Rhodia pads carries the filing cabinet, the label stock, and — in my case last spring — a garden calculator for the facilities team. I'll get to all of it, but the paper decision is the one people actually ask me about, so that's where I'm starting.
Why I'm the one writing this
I'm the office administrator for a 180-person company. I manage all facilities and office supply ordering — roughly $85,000 a year across 11 vendors — and I report to both operations and finance. That last part matters, because it means I hear about it when a cheap legal pad shreds somebody's nib. Finance hears about it too, just in a different tone.
I took over purchasing in 2020 when we were consolidating three supply closets into one. Since then we've run about 200 Rhodia pads through the building: mostly No. 16 A5s, a stack of No. 18 A4s for the finance team, and a bunch of the little No. 12 pads people keep in jacket pockets for site visits.
I want to be straight about the limits of that sample. I don't have hard data on how many pads an individual burns through per month. What I can say anecdotally is that our two heaviest note-takers go through about 1.5 pads a month, and everyone else sits closer to one every six weeks. It's enough to plan an order. It's not enough for me to tell you what your numbers will look like.
One thing I did learn the hard way: my vocabulary and my vendor's vocabulary aren't the same language. I said "the dot grid ones." They heard "the graph ones." Result: 40 A5 pads in 5×5mm graph ruling that sat in the closet for nine months because nobody wanted to write on graph paper. I now send a photo of the cover plus the product number. It sounds dumb. It's saved me at least two returns a year.
What "fountain pen friendly" actually means
This took me an embarrassingly long time to understand. Fountain pen friendly doesn't mean heavy. It means the surface doesn't wick ink sideways.
People assume thicker paper is automatically better for fountain pens. What they don't see is that weight and surface treatment are two completely separate variables. Rhodia's standard paper is 80 gsm. That's roughly 21 lb bond — barely heavier than the 20 lb bond copy paper sitting in your printer tray.
For reference, the standard conversions: 20 lb bond = 75 gsm, 24 lb bond = 90 gsm, 80 lb text = 120 gsm, 80 lb cover = 216 gsm. Those are approximations, but they're the ones the paper industry uses and they're close enough for ordering decisions.
So Rhodia isn't winning on weight. It's winning on the coating. And that same coating is why your ink takes forever to dry.
The tradeoff is real and it's not negotiable. A cheap absorbent pad will set your ink in three seconds and turn the line into a fuzzy caterpillar with a halo. Rhodia won't feather and it'll make you wait. You pick which problem you'd rather have.
One more practical thing, and I've watched three people learn this the hard way: keep a scrap sheet under your hand. The surface is smooth enough that the oils from your palm will make a wet nib skip mid-word. It took me a month to figure that one out and I was blaming the pen the whole time.
The three pads I actually order
Rhodia's memo pad numbering looks like a code. It isn't — it's just size, and once you know three of them you can order without thinking about it.
- Rhodia No. 16 (A5, 148 × 210 mm), dot grid, staplebound. This is the default and it's a no-brainer at our volume. Folds back on itself, thin enough to carry in a bag, sits on a desk without sliding around.
- Rhodia No. 18 (A4), 5×5mm graph. Finance and anyone sketching layouts. The larger pages stay put better, and the staplebound version doesn't have a wire that can get crushed in a laptop bag.
- Rhodia No. 12 (85 × 120 mm). Pocket pads. Buy a dozen. Half of them will walk off, and that's fine, because they're the ones people actually use in the field.
If you've got executives who insist on something heavier, the "R" line uses 90 gsm ivory paper and a black cover. It's a nicer object. I've never seen it change anyone's notes. The dot grid, not the cover, is what people come back for.
Staplebound versus wirebound is the other decision. Staplebound folds back and lies reasonably flat. Wirebound stays flat on its own and won't fold back at all. If your team writes at a desk, wirebound. If they carry the pad around, staplebound.
How to use a fountain pen (the five-minute version I give new hires)
We keep a drawer of loaner pens, so I've had this conversation more times than I can count. Here's the version that actually sticks:
- Nib up, point down. The metal point goes on the paper. This sounds obvious and it is genuinely not obvious to everyone.
- If it takes cartridges: unscrew the barrel, push the cartridge in until it punctures, then wait 30 to 60 seconds. The feed has to saturate. Writing immediately and declaring the pen broken is the single most common mistake.
- Hold it at about 40 to 45 degrees and let the nib do the work. Don't press. Pressing splays the tines apart, which causes hard starts and eventually a bent nib.
- Cap it the second you stop writing. An uncapped nib starts drying in a couple of minutes, and a dried nib skips until you flush it.
- Flush with water every four to six weeks, or any time you switch inks. Cool water, no soap, dry it nib-down on a paper towel overnight.
That's it. If someone tells you fountain pens are fussy, they're describing a pen that needs a cleaning.
Everything else on that purchase order
Two line items on the same P.O. are worth a paragraph, because people get both wrong.
The filing cabinet
Buy letter-width, not legal-width, unless you actually have legal-size records. A legal cabinet runs about three inches wider per unit. Three inches doesn't sound like anything until you're trying to fit eight of them into a records room and the aisle disappears. And if you're printing labels for the folders, use 300 DPI at final size — that's the commercial print standard, and it's also what your label printer should be set to if you want barcodes that scan on the first pass.
The garden calculator
Last spring the facilities team asked me to source a grow a garden calculator for the courtyard beds — something that would work out seed spacing and germination windows instead of guessing. Bottom line: it's a free web tool, not a purchase order. Which is the honest lesson of that line item. Half the requests that land on an office admin's desk aren't things you buy, they're things you look up once and then answer for three years.
Where Rhodia is the wrong answer
I'd rather spend ten minutes explaining the limits than have someone order 200 pads and resent them.
If you write left-handed, test one pad before you commit. Fifteen to 25 seconds of dry time is a real problem when your hand travels across what you just wrote. Some lefties adapt by rotating the paper. Some never do.
If you're using very wet flex nibs or heavy sheening inks, coated paper can still bleed. We've had exactly one complaint in five years, and it came from a flex nib loaded with a saturated sheening ink. One complaint in 200 pads is a good record. It's not a guarantee.
Don't run it through your printer. Coated paper and laser printers don't love each other — toner adhesion is inconsistent and you'll get smudging. This is handwriting paper. Print your forms on something else.
And if nobody in your office actually uses a fountain pen, don't buy it. Rhodia costs roughly $8 for an A5 pad. A generic pad costs a couple of dollars. Paying four times as much for scratch paper is just buying a nice label.
The last thing I'd say, and it's the part my own purchasing history argues against: most offices need less than they order. If you're 30 people and two of you use fountain pens, buy two pads. The worst version of this decision is stocking premium paper because the cover looks professional while everyone else writes on the back of a printout.
