Fairy Moon Leather Journal

A five by seven leather journal with a fairy and a moon embossed into the cover.

The wings and the flower hat are much newer than people assume, and they are not Victorian. Winged fairies are Georgian. Pope gave his sylphs wings in 1712, and Blake, Fuseli and Stothard were painting butterfly-winged fairies in the 1780s and 90s. The flower fairy specifically is Cicely Mary Barker, whose first book came out in 1923. The whole look is barely two hundred years old.

What is older is a set of rules for handling dangerous neighbors. You do not name them, which is why the Gaelic and Welsh records are full of ways around it: the Good Neighbors in Scotland and Ireland, the Fair Folk from the Welsh Tylwyth Teg, Themselves in Ireland and on the Isle of Man. You leave milk out and you do not make a point of it. Nearly every rule is about managing an exchange with something that keeps score differently than you do.

The moon on the cover is the other half of the same idea. Fairy encounters in the folklore happen at the edges, at dusk, at midnight, at the turn of the year, in the places between one thing and another. So does most of what you will want to write in a book like this.

It makes a good dream journal for that reason. Dreams are the other territory with its own rules that does not survive contact with daylight unless you write it down in the first few minutes after waking.

Benjamin International source from artisans in Nepal, Indonesia and India, and every one of these is made by hand. That means the cover takes color unevenly and the tooling sits a little differently on each one, so the journal you get will not be the journal in the photograph. That is the trade you are making and it is the right one.

Good to Know

5 by 7 inches. Embossed leather cover. Handmade, so no two are identical.

Try It With

Fairy Lore for the tradition itself, Mugwort under the pillow for dream recall, and a Green Aventurine fairy for the shelf beside it. More in journals and journals and pens.