Moleskine NYC

As a massive fan of stationery in general and Moleskine in particular, you can imagine my delight when I discovered last autumn that the company had just brought out a range of Moleskine City Notebook — the guidebooks you write yourself. 

These are absolutely perfect for someone like me who loves to write travel diaries and to make notes of shops, restaurants and places to be revisited and who ends up buying a new guidebook every time she goes back to a city. The City Notebooks all have maps, notebook pages, removable sheets, tabbed pages and all sorts of other wonders. According to the Moleskine website, they are:

A special guidebook, ideal for those who travel, whether to see the sights or for work, as a way of a organising your trip and to preserve it for your memory and your records. Perfect for those who live there, as a way of organizing the things they know and need about the city they live in. Each notebook has an elastic closure, 228 pages, with up to 44 pages in colours and have a sewn binding. There is an inside accordion pocket and three ribbon placemarkers, each in a different colour.

You can, for example, use the included tracing paper to mark out cool walking routes you have taken. You can choose which categories to include in the tabbed sections (shopping, bars, museums, parks, etc.). And most importantly, you can add to it each time you go back without having to start a completely new holiday diary. This is something you can keep in your bag at all times and make a note of anything worth going back to.

Unfortunately, last year they only had European city ones and although I do like Paris a lot, I don't go there very often anymore. Deprived of the New York Notebook, I bought Paris anyway and of course, have not yet bothered to fill it in. However, yesterday, in an event worthy of being entered into my Google Cal, the Moleskine New York was released; admittedly, not to any of the bookshops out here in the Sticks but I intend to have a look the slightly more metropolitan Oxford at the weekend and if I still have no luck, I shall either go for Amazon or a London trip.

Now all Moleskine needs is to have electronic notebooks (oh, the irony!) and then they can have some nice Web 2.0 tagging and categorisation... Maybe next year, eh?