Moon Leather Journal with Stone | Brown, 7 x 5 in

Brown full-grain water buffalo leather with a moon and a set stone on the cover, wrapped and tied. Seven by five inches, a hundred sheets of unlined deckle-edge cotton paper at 125 gsm.

Water buffalo hide is not cowhide under another name. The outer layer is noticeably thicker, the grain is more open and more obviously pebbled, and full-grain buffalo is among the toughest leather you can buy. What you feel in the hand is a cover with more body than a cowhide journal the same size, and a surface with visible character rather than a uniform finish.

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.

125 gsm is thick for a journal; copier paper is 80. Weight is not the whole story with a fountain pen, though. Bleed-through is mostly down to how the sheet is sized rather than how heavy it is, and handmade cotton varies from batch to batch, so test a back page before you commit a whole entry to a wet nib.

Good to Know

7 by 5 inches. 100 sheets, which is 200 sides, unlined. 125 gsm handmade recycled cotton paper with a deckle edge, tree-free and acid-free. Full-grain water buffalo leather with a stone set in the cover and a wrap tie. Handmade in India, so the leather tone, the stone and the paper edge all vary.

Try It With

a quill pen, and sealing wax if you want to seal a page. The Handmade Leather Bound Vintage Journal is the same price with heavier 200 gsm paper and no stone. More in journals and journals and pens.