On my recent trip to Staples, the brightly colored Poppin display caught my attention so I took a look at the notebooks that they had to offer and thought it would be a good idea to do another review of a more student oriented notebook as opposed to some of the premium notebooks that we usually review. The Poppin 3 Subject notebook is available online via Staples and direct from Poppin online.

The first thing that I noticed about the Poppin 3 Subject notebook was the ruler that was conveniently printed on both the front and the back of the sturdy plastic cover. On the front cover, there is an inch based ruler while on the back there is a centimeter based ruler. The fact that the covers are pretty sturdy makes it easy for them to actually be used as rulers if needed.

On the inside of the Poppin 3 Subject notebook you will find two plastic dividers that have pockets on each side. Although the pockets are obviously quite convenient , I did find one minor issue with them. Because of the material they are made of, they tend to build up a little bit of static electricity, which makes the pages stick to them, and can make the pockets a little hard to open if you don’t already have something in them. Not a huge deal, but it is a little bit of a nuisance.

The most important part of any notebook is the paper, so here is a nice close look at the inside of the Poppin 3 Subject notebook. I personally like the style of ruling (college ruled in this case) that does not go to the very edge of the page, but I can understand that some people may not like this. Personally, I think it provides for a clean margin with your writing. Each page is micro-perforated and has been three hole punched, and the rulings themselves are a light gray color. The paper is a nice bright white paper which is nice for making different color inks stand out a bit more. In the writing samples above you can see that I used many different pen types including fountain pens to test out the paper. I would say that everything tested very well on this paper on the front, including the fountain pen inks. I would have expected the fountain pen ink to feather a bit, which was not the case at all, although it did seem to spread a slight bit with some of them, which isn’t really that big of a deal.

Although its a bit hard to pick up on in the above photograph, the show-through on the paper in this Poppin 3 Subject notebook is noticeable, but not really all that bad. In person you can see a slight bit of what looks like light shadowing from the writing on the other side of the page, but its certainly not as bad as I would have expected in this type of a more utilitarian type of notebook. My only caveat here is that I usually only use F or EF nibs for my fountain pens, so a wider nib might present a little bit more noticeable show-through. Overall I was pleasantly surprised by these Poppin 3 Subject notebooks in terms of the quality of paper and how nicely even fountain pens performed. Certainly a great option in the back to school category for notebooks, so don’t hesitate to pick one up if you need to grab some school supplies. As I said before, they can be found via Staples and direct from Poppin online.