Day 22: Today's Pick — A Hand-Stitched Leather Notebook From Maine

I went through a phase last year of trying to journal again. I had given up handwriting for so long that my hand cramped after a single page. I bought a $36 leather notebook cover with one insert from a maker in Bangor, Maine, and I have used it nearly every day since.

The cover will outlast me. The hand-cramping went away in two weeks.

What it is

A small leather cover (5 x 7 inches, fits a Field Notes-sized insert), hand-stitched, with two leather straps that hold one or two paper inserts in place. The system is refillable: when you fill an insert, you slip in a new one and the cover continues. The cover gets better over time.

What I love about it

The vegetable-tanned leather. This is the kind of leather that starts a stiff blank slate and develops, over years, a creased softness with darker spots where your hands touch it most. The $36 cover I bought looks meaningfully different from the $36 cover the maker is selling today, even though they are the same product. Mine is mine. It looks lived-in.

The constraint of the small page. 5 x 7 is small. This is good. It means a journal entry is a paragraph, not three pages. It means you actually finish the page. It means you fill an insert in three weeks and then ceremonially file it on a shelf.

The single maker. The cover is hand-stitched by one person, Sarah Lipscomb, in a workshop in Bangor. She makes about 20 a week. They sell out within a few hours of restock.

What I write in it

A daily one-paragraph entry. The constraint is what makes it work. Not "write your feelings;" just one paragraph about what I did and one observation. About 15 minutes a day. The cumulative effect after a year is a small completed shelf of inserts and a slightly clearer head.

I have tried Moleskines. I have tried bullet journals. I have tried Notion. The leather notebook is the only system that has actually stuck.

What it costs to maintain

The cover was $36 (one-time). New inserts are $4 for a three-pack. So a year of journaling costs me about $48 total: $36 cover plus $12 of inserts. Less than the cost of a Moleskine I'd abandon in March.

The brass closure

A brass button closure that I love but which has, three times, scratched my desk surface. I now keep the notebook on a felt pad. This is the only complaint I have.

How to actually buy

rusticodown dot com (yes, real). Restocks happen Mondays at 10am eastern. The maker is also on Etsy with a wider range of products.

A small philosophical note

There is a thing that small handmade objects do: they make you feel like a person who chose your life rather than a person who was assigned one. This is, I think, the actual reason "buy fewer better things" advice resonates. The notebook is a tiny daily reminder that I get to choose what kind of person I am.

That is a lot to load onto a leather notebook. But here we are.

Tomorrow: a kitchen tool that looks like a torture device and is, in fact, life-changing.