Leather
Our hides come from the Badalassi Carlo tannery in San Miniato, in the hills between Pisa and Florence. The family-run tannery is a member of the Consorzio Vera Pelle Italiana Conciata al Vegetale, founded in 1994 to protect Tuscany’s tradition of vegetable tanning.
We use Minerva Smooth, the tannery’s classic vacchetta. The full-grain hides are tanned in wooden barrels with extracts of trunk and bark, greased with animal fats, then drum-dyed so the colour runs right through. The leather is supple from the first day and its natural wax finish draws in the oils from your hands so that it deepens with handling.
As a natural material, each hide varies in shade and surface and no two journals are quite alike.
Our bookmarks, bag charms and key chains are made from offcuts of the same Minerva hides, so every usable piece of leather is put to good use.
Paper
Marden journals are sized to hold Midori MD Notebooks in A5 and A6.
Midori was founded in Japan in 1950 and introduced MD Paper in the 1960s as a paper made for writing. It has been refined continually since. The paper is a soft cream, developed in-house and smooth under a nib, with good resistance to feathering and bleed-through. Each notebook holds 88 sheets of 80gsm paper, thread-bound so that it opens completely flat. Available lined or plain.
Each Marden journal is made by hand in Sussex with this paper in mind.
