Handmade Leather Bound Vintage Journal

Oil-tanned genuine leather with 200 pages of handmade deckle-edge cotton paper at 200 gsm.

The paper is the reason to buy this one rather than the others. Copier paper is 80 gsm and a decent sketchbook is around 150. Watercolor stock proper starts near 190 and the standard is 300, so 200 gsm sits at the light end of watercolor rather than in the middle of it. In practice that means it takes an ink line that pools, a dip pen loaded too heavily and a light wash without bleeding through to the next sheet. A genuinely wet wash on an unstretched page will still cockle. Nothing at journal weight will not. If your practice involves painting the card you pulled, or sticking things in, or working in anything other than a ballpoint, this is still the one.

The ragged edge on the pages is a real deckle, not a printed imitation of one. A deckle is the wooden frame that sits on a papermaker's screen, and because it cannot seal perfectly at the edges, the pulp seeps underneath and dries feathered. For most of the history of books that was a flaw and the binder trimmed it off. Collectors were already prizing untrimmed edges as proof of an original binding by the seventeenth century, and once machine-made paper made clean edges the default, publishers started charging a premium for the ragged one. Most deckle edges you see on a shelf today are cut by a machine built to fake them. These are not.

Cotton paper is the other thing worth knowing. Wood-pulp paper carries lignin, which turns acidic and yellows and goes brittle, which is why a paperback from 1975 crumbles at the corner. Rag paper has none of it, and sheets from the centuries before wood pulp took over in the 1870s and 80s are still flexible and still pale. If you are writing something down because you want somebody to read it in forty years, the paper is the part that decides whether that happens.

Oil tanning rather than chrome tanning is why it smells like leather and why it will darken where your hands go. It also means it takes a scratch. A year of use will show on it, which is either the point or a reason to buy something else.

Good to Know

200 pages of 200 gsm virgin cotton deckle-edge paper, unlined. Naturally oil-tanned genuine leather. Handmade, so the color and the finish vary and the page edges are uneven by design.

Try It With

a quill pen and sealing wax. The Moon journal with a stone is the same price on lighter 125 gsm paper. The pocket miniature at thirteen dollars is the one to carry while this one stays home. More in journals and journals and pens.