Rhodia Pads

The Rhodia pad is an icon for many. The classic pad is easily recognizable by the famous orange cover. It’s a model of efficiency and design – the front cover has three designated folding points, known as scores, which allow the cover to be neatly folded over the back. The standard pad has 80 sheets of fountain pen friendly 21.3 lb. “High Grade Vellum Paper”, with a light purple squared 5×5 mm rule. The sizes range from 3.3″x4.7″ ( 8.5cm x 12cm) to the magnificent desk filling 12.5″x16.5″ (31.8cm x 42cm) . It’s not too hard to learn this – the backs of the larger pads all have charts of the standard offerings. The sheets have perforations that line up with the top score so that the pad stays neat as sheets are removed.

Apart from the classic pad, there are ruled and blank versions, and a special accounting variant. There are also a couple of yellow paper models, and the delightful No. 120, the Rainbow model with four colours of punched A4 graph paper!

The Rhodia line also has coil ring notebooks (which one wouldn’t typically classify as “pads”) and even a graph paper mouse pad, with detachable sheets. I won’t discuss these here.

I first discovered these pads when I saw the No. 38 (the giant 12.5″x16.5″ pad) at a local fountain pen shop a few years ago. It just looked awesome to me. I had never seen such a giant pad of graph paper. I like to draw charts and figure things out on paper, and it just seemed like a very useful aid. Also, the paper itself is much nicer than found in the writing pads at typical office supply stores.

Here’s a link to their corporate catalogue:
Rhodia