Note-books with replaceable writing block – leather and book-cloth.

Our notebooks come from southern Germany and bear witness to a harmonious marriage between beauty of design and functionality seldom found these days. Our idea was to use 3-mm thick cowhide, seam-free and with reinforced edges, for binding a book-sized writing pad: seemingly a technical impossibility. A solution came to us in the form of an insert studded on to the inside of the leather cover; this gave us another idea, not to 'bind' the writing block on to the cover, but to put it in loose so it could be replaced when full. The final result is an opulent, elegant yet unpretentious notebook with a fantastic feel, whose price will be covered many times over by a lifetime of use.

A real find – book-binding material of flax and tow.

We've had the insert (originally of felt) made for us of a very unusual mixture: a tough, firm material made of flax and tow (a short-fibred flax derivate) that used once in pre-PVC days to be the rescue treatment of choice for heavily-used reference library books.