I own one of our covers. I hardly use it.
That is an odd thing to put on the front page of a shop, so let me finish the sentence. It is not that I do not write — I keep a bullet journal, and my diary itself has moved to a digital format. So the notebook I would put in a cover is not the one I carry.
People assume a maker uses what he makes, daily, and that his own use is where the design comes from. Mine does not work that way. What I have instead is the making, and I like it more than I expected to.
Why covers, then
Before this I made leather watch straps. Before that I sewed more or less anything that can be sewn.
Covers are what I make now for a reason I will say plainly: of everything I have tried, they are the easiest thing to make well. Not the easiest to make — the easiest to make properly, every time, without the result depending on luck. There is room in a cover to get everything right.
What a day is
Cut, assembled, personalised, edges shaped and polished, checked, packed.
Written out like that it sounds like a list of chores. It is not how it feels. The work is quiet and it repeats, and the repeating is the good part — it settles me the way some people are settled by a long walk. I can spend an hour on an edge and come away calmer than I started.
Polishing is where a cover is won or lost. It is the difference between an edge that feels finished and one that feels merely cut, and it is the step I would never hurry, because it is also the one I enjoy most.
There is not much waste. I try hard not to waste leather, which is its own small discipline — laying out cuts so a hide gives what it can give.
And then they go
Parcels packed, taken to the post office, handed to the courier, gone.
And then, sometimes, a customer writes a review. That is the thing that keeps the next batch moving. Not the compliment exactly — the evidence that the object arrived somewhere and became someone's.
If you have ever wondered whether small shops actually read those, the answer at this one is that they are most of the motivation.
What I will not pretend to know
I do not choose hides by hand. They are ordered online from Italy and I do not travel to feel them before buying. After enough orders you learn what a tannery sends you and you trust it. Anyone telling you they personally select every hide for a workshop this size is describing a different business.
I do not work with exotic leathers, and I do not want to. Ordinary Italian vegetable-tanned hides are more than enough to be getting on with.
So should you use a cover
I do not know. I make them, I think they are good, and I do not use one myself.
What I can tell you is what the cover is for, and it is not protection in any serious sense — a notebook in a bag survives fine without leather around it. It is that the notebook stops being disposable. You keep the outside, the inside gets replaced, and after the third or fourth refill the object has been with you longer than anything else on the desk.
Some people want that. Some people want a notebook they can abandon in March without guilt. Both are reasonable, and only one of them needs anything from me.
If it is the first one, the covers are here, and the leathers are worth more of your attention than my opinion is.