On a Wednesday in March 2024, I was about to bite into a hamburger when my phone buzzed. The caller ID wasn't good news. It was the director of a writing retreat that was scheduled to start in 36 hours.
"The notebooks arrived," she said. "They're wrong."
I'm an emergency procurement specialist for an office supplies distributor. In five years, I've handled 200+ rush orders, including same-day turnarounds for event clients. The first thing I ask in any emergency is not "what happened?" but "how much time do we have?"
This time we had 36 hours to fix an order that should have been done a week earlier.
The Original Order
The retreat director had ordered 24 Rhodia Pocket Web Notebooks and 18 Rhodia Classic Staplebound Notebooks from a discount reseller. The price looked great. The delivery arrived on time. But when she tested one with a fountain pen, the ink feathered across the page. For an event where every session involved writing with fountain pens, that was disqualifying.
A normal turnaround for that quantity is five business days. We didn't have five days. We had one.
I pulled out a percent off calculator to see where the savings actually came from. The reseller advertised 25% off list price. On a $16.50 pocket notebook, that's $12.38. Our regular supplier price was $14.20. The difference was $1.82 per notebook. Over 42 notebooks, the discount added up to about $70.
Then I ran a markup calculator. The reseller's wholesale cost was probably around $8.70 per notebook. At $12.38, they still had a healthy markup. They weren't losing money. They were just not providing the level of service that the sale price should have flagged.
The replacement order from our supplier cost $70 more in product plus $180 for overnight shipping. That's $250 extra that nobody budgeted for.
That $70 savings turned into a $250 problem. And if the retreat had fallen apart, the venue penalty alone would have been $4,200.
The 36-Hour Reorder
I called our main supplier at 5:15 PM. They had stock in two different warehouses. The first warehouse had the Pocket Webs but not the Classic Staplebounds. The second had enough of both. It would take overnight shipping from the second warehouse, which is where the $180 came from.
Had I had more time, I would have gotten three quotes and compared them with a markup calculator. But there were only two hours before the courier cutoff. I made the call based on trust and past experience. That's not the ideal process, but sometimes time pressure forces you to make a decision with incomplete information.
At 2:37 PM the next day, the boxes arrived. We unpacked them in the retreat's conference room. The first box held the Rhodia Pocket Web Notebooks.
Rhodia Pocket Web Notebook Reviews
Most Rhodia Pocket Web Notebook Reviews focus on paper quality, and for good reason. The Pocket Web is a small notebook that fits in a jacket pocket or a pen pouch. We use the A6 size. It has 96 pages of 90gsm ivory paper, numbered pages, and a place for a table of contents. The orange cover is soft enough to bend but sturdy enough to survive a week in a messenger bag.
I tested one with a Lamy Safari and a fine nib. The ink dried quickly. There was no visible feathering and no bleed-through, even on the dotted grid pages. I also tried a broad nib with a wet ink. It didn't ghost as much as I expected, though I wouldn't call it heavy-weight paper. For fountain pens, it's one of the most reliable options in this price class.
The binding lies flat. That may sound like a small thing, but when you're writing on a retreat table with your notebook open to page 47, it matters.
Rhodia Classic Staplebound Notebook Review
The Rhodia Classic Staplebound Notebook is the notebook that made Rhodia famous. It has 80 sheets of 90gsm paper, a satin-smooth finish, and the classic orange cover with a black spine. The paper is not identical to the Webnotebook's ivory pages—it's a little whiter, and it handles ink just as well in my tests.
The staplebound construction is lighter than the Webnotebook. It doesn't lie flat as thoroughly as the Web, but the pages are micro-perforated, which makes them easy to tear out cleanly. For handouts, worksheets, or quick notes, this is the notebook I'd choose.
I'm not going to say it's 100% impossible to make ink feather on either of these notebooks. I haven't tested every ink ever made. But in the inks I've used, including some very wet custom blends, both notebooks handled them without drama.
How to Cite a Journal Article APA
After we unboxed the notebooks, one of the retreat participants asked me how to cite a journal article APA style. She was drafting a paper based on the retreat and had been scribbling everything in her new Pocket Web.
I didn't need to open the APA manual. The basic format hasn't changed:
Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of the article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages. https://doi.org/xxxx
For example:
Chen, L., & Smith, R. (2024). Notebook culture in the age of fountain pens. Journal of Analog Writing, 12(3), 45–58. https://doi.org/10.1234/example
That's the version I keep in my head. The official APA guide is the best source if you're writing something formal. I'm an emergency procurement guy, not a citation expert.
Lessons Learned
Looking back, I should have asked the retreat director which vendor she was using when she first mentioned the order. At the time, I was too busy to dig into it. But the same math that saved us now was sitting in plain sight.
Here's what I want you to remember:
- Run the percent off calculator before you feel smart about a discount. A "25% off" label on a $16.50 notebook is about $4.13. Saving that per notebook isn't worth missing the whole event.
- Use a markup calculator to see if the price is actually unusual. If a vendor still has a healthy markup, you're not getting a deal. You're getting a product at the price that market power allows.
- Judge total cost, not unit cost. The replacement shipping alone destroyed any savings from the discount vendor.
The retreat went ahead. The participants wrote with their fountain pens, and the notebooks held up. Since then, our company has added a rule: any client ordering notebooks for an event gets a 48-hour buffer written into the timeline. We also keep 20 Pocket Webs and 10 Classic Staplebounds on the shelf at all times.
This pricing was accurate as of Q1 2024. The market changes fast, so verify current rates before budgeting.
If you've ever had a discounted order fail at the worst possible moment, you know the sinking feeling. Trust me on this one: a calculator at the beginning is cheaper than an emergency at the end.
