New Montblanc Notebook "Fast Dry Paper"

I recently noticed that some of the new Montblanc notebooks on the website were marked as "Fast Dry Paper" but they had no description of what that meant. My sales associate just happened to text me about something else that same day so I asked them what that meant but they also had no further information. Turns out they had them in stock so I ordered a notebook and when it arrived today I tried it out. Here is what I found:

It's really fast dry paper!! I lined up four of my frequently used fountain pens from wettest to driest and loaded them all up with Montblanc Amethyst ink. Then I wrote out a sentence with the pen name and wiped right after writing. Nothing smudged on the fast dry paper...I even tried harder to smudge the ink by just writing one letter and wiping it immediately but no smudging at all. It is pretty impressive. Until you flip the paper over and see how badly it bled through to the back side.  

Something I didn't expect and did not like was that with my wettest pen, a vintage Montblanc 149, the paper was sucking the ink in so fast that the pen was skipping occasionally and the feathering was pronounced. The Pelikan M800 behaved the best and the Sailor MF felt like a Medium. Talk about everything you think you know being upended!

The new paper is significantly heavier. Both notebooks contain 96 sheets of paper and are marked Uncoated, Matte Paper. The weight of the regular notebook comes in at 360g and 1.3cm in height and the fast dry paper notebook is 460g and 1.8cm. 

If I can find the "right" pen combination for this paper I think I will love it because it does dry immediately...a Montblanc notebook is pretty pricey so I am going to see how many pens I can test on this one sheet. If/when I discover the magical combination I will update you!

(Addendum...I just tried a pretty wet rollerball on the fast dry paper and it writes very well with no bleed through...unfortunately I don't journal with a rollerball  🤷♀️)