WRITE YOUR OWN STORY in a beautiful, one-off journal, handmade in Scotland with a unique combination of hand printed paper covers, letterpress printed vellum spines and antique vellum corners. 

Inside are 160 pages of pages of beautifully smooth Italian-made paper for most types of pens and pencil.

This is the perfect book for making notes, recording ideas, drawing, doodling, planning.

Drawing Journals offer about as much strength and flexibility as you will ever need thanks to the quality of materials used in creating these. Even with rigorous handling these should withstand day to day use for longer than it takes to fill them with your writing and drawing.

COVER PRINT - Small Flowers No.64

Made using a print from a short run of six, this has been made on handmade antique linen rag with French text.

This is a handmade, relief printed patterned paper made from a hand carved lino block.

SPINE & CORNERS - Hand written and hand printed antique vellum/parchment legal document, circa 1850.

Beginning its professional life as a legal document in the 1700 or 1800s, we used it as a surface on which to print our Ausberg pattern in silvery green on our early 1900s hand operated proofing press.

Vellum (aka parchment) is an ancient type of paper-like leather. The forerunner to paper, it was used in ancient times for writing religious texts and the most important books. Indeed, thanks to its properties of longevity and strength, it is still used today in the Houses of Parliament where new and updated laws are written and recorded on it. 

Outside of the Houses of Parliament, until the early part of the 20th century it was still used in Britain as a document material for important legal documents such as house deeds, wills and loans which is where this particular piece came from. 

Vellum boasts the type of a beautiful warm translucency only found in natural materials. It offers super strength and flexibility - the perfect material for a spine. Looked after properly, vellum/parchment has a shelf life of hundreds, if not thousands of years.

The vellum/parchment corners not only look great but they offer protection for the most vulnerable part of the book when it's being handled, put on a shelf or being transported around with you in your bag or backpack. 

FOREDGES - Hand painted metallic, flat silver.

Foredges are the part of the bookblock (the papery part inside the book) you can see when the book is closed. 

They tend to be plain but they can be decorated too. This book has decorated foredges, painted in silver grey drawing ink. 

WARNING! What you need to know about painted foredges!

Ink is sticky. This means that when you receive this book some pages are likely to be slightly stuck together and will need to be peeled apart carefully to access each new page so when you open a fresh page please be careful.  If you're in a hurry this could be inconvenient and frustrating, but we find it strangely satisfying. Also, it looks awesome! 

PAPER INSIDE - Made in Italy, this is a traditional style laid paper - when held up to to the light you can see the lines within the body of the paper.

It's creamy-white in colour with a smooth surface - perfect for inks and pencil and it's acid-free too so it'll stand the test of time. 

Every page is blank, perfect for those of us who don't like being dictated to by lines and for those of us who want to write AND draw. With 160 pages, there's plenty of plenty of papery real estate to express your inner artist.

SIZE - The perfect size for a jacket pocket and not taking up to too much room in a a bag or backpack.

When closed, this book measures 8½ x 5¾ inches, 217 x 148 mm, easy to hold in the hand, big enough to easily write in.

FINISHING - When we've finished putting the book together, there's one final process.

We varnish the paper covers and vellum/parchment spine and corners with a bookbinding juice called glair, not only once but twice!

Glair is a shellac based liquid often used in bookbinding as an adhesive for gold tooling and gilding but in this instance we use it as a varnish. It not only slightly ages the surface, calming down whiteness in new materials and adding a sheen all over but it also adds a little bit of protection to the covering materials during handling and transportation. 

• Blank paper pages
• Hand printed paper covers
• Painted foredges
• Vellum Parchment spine
• Vellum Parchment corners
• Varnished for protection
• Every book we make is a unique one-off

HANDMADE IN SCOTLAND