My Traveler’s Notebook

Posted on June 24, 2024 by Aywren

Since I’ve been swinging back towards a more analogue way of life, I often spend time poking through videos about journaling, stationary, pens and the like. I’m late to the party, probably, but last week, I ran across a video about what’s generally called a “Traveler’s Notebook.”

I do believe this is due to this style of notebook being sold by the Japanese brand, Traveler’s Company – I think this was once known as Midori. You can see the full story/history of this here, but that’s not really the focus of this post today.

Because while I was fascinated with the concept of a simple, travel notebook that allowed for inserts, after doing some shopping around, I did not decide to buy the name brand. There’s nothing wrong with paying good money for a well-trusted brand, mind you. But this was somewhat of an experiment as I haven’t owned anything like this before, and I didn’t want to spend too much money on something if I might discover I won’t use it much.

So, I ended up purchasing a notebook by the September Leather brand from the Newestore shop on Amazon. I chose this partially because the notebook comes with a lot of accessories, and the price was quite good (half that of the name brand).  I was a little worried that picking up a cheaper brand would lead to the picture in the store looking much better than the actual item (as sometimes happens), but in this case, I was pleased once I had the notebook in hand!

It came well wrapped and shipped.

The unboxing was a nice experience and the leather notebook itself was wrapped in a cloth, which surprised me.

It came with all the inserts, some pockets (both plastic and cardboard), a clip, a pen holder, an extra elastic strap and a decent ink pen. I pretty nice set overall, and easy to put together once I decided how I wanted it.

What I enjoy is that there’s a lot of flexibility to how you can organize and set it up. Also, having three different types of inserts – lined, dotted, and blank – allows for experimentation to see what works best for what you’d like to use it for.

I’ve decided the lined insert is my general-use notebook, while the dotted insert has become my project/blogging idea catch-all section. I haven’t decided on what to use the blank section for – it could be nice for sketching or just free-form layouts. I’m still learning!

In doing more research on traveler’s notebooks, I discovered that if you are a crafty individual, you can actually make your own. Here’s a video on what you need and how it works if you’re interested:

I did pick up a little charm (a horse, of course) for the front of my notebook, and swapped out the pen that came with it for my Conklin Abalone Nights fountain pen. This pleased me because until now, this fountain pen has been inked up but not really assigned to any of my journaling projects. I’m happy to put it to use, and it looks quite nice with the set!

So far, I’ve really enjoyed this notebook as the rustic feel just begs for attention and helps to inspire me to pick it up and jot in it. I use to keep what I called a Writer’s Notebook back when I was much younger – this was just a tiny pocket notebook I carried with me – but I’ve long since gotten out of the habit of doing this.

It’s my hope that having something like this by my side will encourage me to capture thoughts throughout the day, rather than letting them drift by and disappear as they’re apt to do.

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