Materials

Leather

The hides we use come from the Badalassi Carlo tannery in Tuscany, a family business that has been working leather for over fifty years in the hills between Pisa and Florence. The tannery is a certified member of the Consorzio Vera Pelle Italiana Conciata al Vegetale, a consortium founded in 1994 by a small group of Tuscan tanners committed to preserving the region's centuries-old tradition of vegetable tanning.

The leather we use is Minerva Smooth, their classical vacchetta. A full-grain hide infused with Italian fat waxes and finished using traditional Tuscan methods dating back centuries. Each hide is treated with extracts of trunk and bark inside wooden barrels, greased with a mixture of animal fats and then coloured in a drum. The result is dyed entirely through, supple from the start and built to deepen with handling rather than fade with it.

The natural wax finish absorbs rather than repels. It accepts the oils from your hands and improves for it. A cognac journal begins bright and amber and moves, over months, toward something richer and more settled.

Because this is a natural material, no two journals are identical. There will be variation in shade and surface.

The bookmarks we make use offcuts of the same Minerva hide. Nothing leaves the atelier that we would not keep ourselves and no piece of leather that can become something useful is wasted.

Paper

The leather journals are sized specifically to hold Midori MD paper pads, available in A5 and A6.

Midori was established in Japan in 1950, beginning with letter paper and envelopes. MD Paper has been designed for writing since its creation in the 1960s, refined continuously in the decades since.

Cream-coloured, developed in-house, smooth against the nib with no feathering or bleed-through. Eighty-eight sheets per pad, 80gsm, thread-stitched and bound so that they open entirely flat with no bump at the centre and no resistance at the spine. Available in lined and plain.

The Marden journal was made for this paper. The leather softens to the hand over years of carrying; the paper inside receives the words without interference. One from Tuscany, one from Japan, handmade in Sussex.