Gallery Leather: a little too much plus a little too little

I was excit­ed to see Gallery Leather’s entry into the journal/notebook realm for a cou­ple rea­sons. First, it’s a hand­some note­book of a rea­son­able size for car­ry­ing, and sec­ond, Gallery Leather does a lot of busi­ness cre­at­ing and cus­tomiz­ing hand­craft­ed prod­ucts direct­ly from Maine. In oth­er words, I was hop­ing to find some good old fash­ioned Amer­i­can craftsmanship.

The note­book’s cov­er is indeed well-craft­ed and the paper is of excel­lent qual­i­ty (more on this in a moment) but the inscrip­tion Print­ed in Korea appears in the end papers so there’s no way to know how much of the con­struc­tion is actu­al­ly domes­tic. The papers’ sig­na­tures are sewn in so tight­ly it appears at first glance to be bound with glue like a cheap paper­back rather than sewn, but indeed the whole pack­age save the cov­er is held togeth­er by thread rather than glue, and put togeth­er impres­sive­ly well.

The cov­er itself is overkill. It feels waste­ful to use leather on a non-reusable note­book cov­er. I have sev­er­al note­book cov­ers in leather that take refills, but the nubuck leather cov­er seems over­done for a knockaround dai­ly journal.

That said, it may be over­done but the cov­er has held up won­der­ful­ly over time. I used this jour­nal over the course of two and a half years and the note­book looks nei­ther worn-out nor show­room-new. It took the beat­ing of dai­ly use and acquired a charm­ing pati­na, as leather should, even with­out prop­er leather care such as pol­ish or oil­ing. Con­sid­er­ing that many of Gallery Leather’s paper goods come with gold-edged paper, I sup­pose I should be glad to have got­ten some­thing this pedestrian.

The paper in the Gallery Leather jour­nal is of excel­lent qual­i­ty, and once again per­haps of too good qual­i­ty. The paper is smooth and clean, per­haps a lit­tle too white but not harsh to look at. It took all my foun­tain pens and inks well with the excep­tion of my most expen­sive pens. With my smoothest writ­ers there was a ten­den­cy to skip. Between the pen and the paper, there should be some tex­ture or else the nib may just slide with­out deliv­er­ing ink. It’s an issue with some oth­er delight­ful­ly smooth papers like Rho­dia or Claire­fontaine paper so Gallery Leather is in good com­pa­ny, but it can be a prob­lem nevertheless.

There’s your too much, but what about the too lit­tle? As con­ve­nience fea­tures go, the Gallery Leather note­book is remark­ably spar­tan. There is no pock­et, no fold­er, no elas­tic enclo­sure to keep the cov­er closed, and no tabs. The two con­ve­niences added are a silk book­mark and a per­son­al infor­ma­tion page in case the note­book is lost. These are both nice, but it seems like too much has gone into appear­ance and too lit­tle thought put into the mechan­ics of what makes a note­book useful.

The rul­ing of the pages here is notable. The spac­ing of the lines is 6.5mm—not quite as nar­row­ly spaced as a Mole­sk­ine, but tight enough to be a sav­ing grace for a small­ish note­book. The lines have a mod­est mar­gin, which gives the writer per­mis­sion not to cram the writ­ing to the edge of the page. Addi­tion­al­ly, the top and bot­tom mar­gins are each marked with a heav­ier rule, enclos­ing the page visu­al­ly in a pleas­ant man­ner. In my own use, I placed the date of a jour­nal entry above the top mar­gin and some­times signed or ini­tialed the entry in or par­tial­ly in the bot­tom mar­gin, leav­ing the rest of the mar­gins free.

The miss­ing fea­tures guar­an­teed that I would not replace the Gallery Leather jour­nal with anoth­er. Frankly, fin­ish­ing the jour­nal was a bit of a relief that I looked for­ward to for some time. How­ev­er, the jour­nal does pro­vide a pleas­ing writ­ing expe­ri­ence in a durable and hand­some pack­age. That can’t be wrong. Some­one who does­n’t expect a way to keep their jour­nal closed or a pock­et for mis­cel­lany might do well with a jour­nal like this one.

It should be not­ed that I can not find any­thing exact­ly like this mod­el on the Gallery Leather web­site. The clos­est mod­el appears to be the Trav­el Jour­nal, though mine does not have the word «Jour­nal» embossed on the front as the Trav­el Jour­nal does. Cus­tom emboss­ing is avail­able through Gallery Leather’s web­site, but it’s not clear whether the note­book can be obtained with­out the «Jour­nal» embossed let­ters at all.