The Leather Does The Talking.
On the design decisions behind every Paperboy journal
There's a version of this post In our "about" where we walk you through every design decision and explain why our journals more thought out than most on the market.
What we really want to go in detail on is that these journals came from somewhere, and we think you deserve to know where. Not to sell you on it but just because we'd want to know if we were spending our hard earned money on something.
The short version is this: every decision we made in regards to setting the standard for our journals was an attempt to get "out of the way of the leather". The outside of your journal is yours. Our job is to just make sure it holds up for you.
The Edges
The edges of a leather good tell you a lot about how it was made.
Ours are beveled with an edge beveler. We use some of the "smallest" commercially available bevelers, just enough to take the sharpness off the cut. They are then hand burnished using Tokonole and pressure. Let me say this, Tokonole is a Holy grail to the leather community. It is a water based burnishing compound used by leather workers who care about the finish. It seals the edge and smooths it while keeping the natural color of the hide.
We burnish just enough to seal and protect.
You've probably seen heavily burnished edges on high end leather goods, that almost glassy, perfectly uniform polish that looks like it was done by a machine. That takes real skill to pull off by hand and we highly respect it. It's just not our style. We want a little of the natural underside to show.
The Corners
Corners take more abuse than any other part of a daily carry journal. Every time it goes in and out of a pocket, every time it hits the bottom of a bag, anytime it falls, the corners feel it first.
Ours are cut to a 7.5mm radius. We tried other sizes. This one feels right.
It's just enough of a round to keep the edges from curling or catching over years of carry, without going so far that it starts to change the overall look of the cover. It's a small call that most people will never consciously notice. If you do notice, thank you.
The Closure
Two options. Both a different way to close your journal.
The elastic band is the more traditional choice. It's a single motion to get in and out. It's Fast, quiet, no hardware. Only the leather and a band. There's a reason it's been the standard for journals for decades.
The snap closure is ours. Metal on leather. It closes with a click that feels nice, the kind of small satisfying mechanical action that's hard to explain but impossible to ignore once you've felt it. If your an analog nerd like us, you know what we are rambling about. We chose nickel hardware, it gets the job done.
We'll be honest: the snap is our personal favorite. But almost everyone here at the company started with an elastic closure journal. We've spent real time with both. We only sell what we know works.
The Branding
Our Paperboy mascot is stamped on the inside using archival grade ink.
Nothing on the outside.
This wasn't a difficult decision. We've never wanted our name to be the first thing someone sees when they look at the journal. The leather is doing the work. The leather should get the credit. Loud exterior branding would be us taking something away from the object, putting our mark on something that belongs to the person carrying it.
The outside of your journal is yours.
The Packaging
Every order ships in an envelope sealed with a metal stud.
The stud was a deliberate choice. We grew up opening those manila envelopes with the metal clasp, the ones that felt like they contained something important. So when it came time to figure out how our journals would arrive, the answer was obvious.
The envelope then gets wrapped in white paper and thats about it. The paper is 100% recyclable. We avoid plastic wherever we can , it lines up with how we think about materials in general. If we can do what we love and avoid adding plastic to the world while doing so? we do that.
The Philosophy
None of these decisions happened by accident. The 7.5mm corner radius, the edges, the inside stamp, the metal stud. Every one of them came from a specific thought about what this object should be and how it should behave in your hands over years of use.
The have the confidence to let the leather speak for itself. To finish the edges well and then know when to stop. To put the branding somewhere only you'll see it.
We make journals we'd want to carry ourselves. Everything else follows from that.
whatever you do in life, with or without a journal do it 100%.
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