HUGE pen test on pocket size notebooks!!

This post was born out of writing a post for Nero's Notes on whether my dislike of Moleskine and Field Notes was justified (spoiler alert... it is). They really don't play nicely with fountain pens, but then I wondered which pocket notebooks actually did.

Enter the biggest test I've done yet, with 10 notebooks getting tested. I used 5 fountain pens and I also tested 11 non-fountain pens too.
Warning! Post is very picture heavy!

The Notebooks:
Field Notes
Moleskine
Whitelines
Story Supply
Word.
Rhodia Webby
Clairefontaine 1951
Darkstar
Pebble Stationery
Telegraph

The Fountain Pens:

(top to bottom)
Parker Vector with calligraphy nib. Ink = Iroshizuku Shin kai
Tombow Object m nib. Ink = Iroshizuku Ku jaku
TWSBI Eco m nib. Ink = Diamine Burnt sienna
TWSBI Diamond 540, 1.1 mm stub nib. Ink = Sailor Yama dori
Conklin Durograph, 1.1 mmstub nib. Ink = Iroshizuku Shin kai
Platinum Preppy - UF nib. No idea what the ink was and anyway, it ran out...

The Other Pens:

(top to bottom)
Pilot V5 hi-tecpoint 0.5
Uniball vision needle micro
Scheider slider memo XB
Uniball signo RT 0.7
Uniball Jetsream 1.0
Stabilo worker medium 0.5
Zebra J roller RX 0.5
Zebra Z-grip medium (biro)
Uni jetstream 0.7 (biro)
Calepino bic biro
Field Notes bic biro

The results:
A lot of pictures... left side of the picture shows the pen test; right side of the picture shows the reverse of the page.

The Good!

The Bad

The Ugly

A Special Category All On Its Own
Pebble Stationery. They use the lightweight Tomoe River paper, so there's a ton of ghosting. But... there's amazing sheen, hence a category of its own!

In essence... go for Clairefontaine! They are very reasonably priced, have a lot of pages per book and play nicely with every pen I own. The only (minor) downside is that drying time for fountain pens is longish, so they could smudge. I can live with that!