Most notebooks sold as "bullet journals" use 80–100gsm paper. Our A5 journals use 160gsm. That number is the weight of one square metre of the paper in grams, and it changes three things you will notice on the first page.
1. Bleed-through
Bleed-through is ink soaking to the back of the page. On 80gsm paper, a fountain pen or a wet marker will show through almost immediately. At 160gsm the fibres are dense enough that most inks stay on the surface. You can write on both sides of a page and still read both.
2. Ghosting
Ghosting is the faint shadow of your writing visible from the other side, even when ink does not physically bleed. Heavier paper reduces it but does not eliminate it with very wet nibs. If you use a broad fountain nib with a wet ink, expect a light shadow on any paper.
3. How the page feels
This is the part reviews rarely mention. A 160gsm sheet has almost no flex. Pens do not dig in, pencil erasers do not tear it, and washi tape lifts off cleanly. The trade-off is weight: 160 pages of 160gsm paper is a heavier book than the same page count at 90gsm.
What to check before buying
- Paper weight in gsm, not "thick paper" in the marketing copy
- Whether the page count includes both sides (ours is 160 numbered pages, 80 sheets)
- Binding: lay-flat binding matters more than paper once a book passes 120 pages
If you want to test a pen on our paper, every SeQeS A5 journal uses the same 160gsm stock.