I’ve always been a fan of Moleskine’s City Notebooks. After noticing that they seemed to have scaled back their list of cities quite a bit (Moleskine Monday: Did the World Just Get Smaller?), I’ve been snapping up other cities wherever I can, often at good discounts off the original list price. Here’s my collection thus far, as well as some details about how they fit into my travel plans:

	Have Visited	Have Visited More Than Once	Used Moleskine City Book	Intend to Visit in Next 12 months
Amsterdam				x
Athens
Barcelona
Beijing
Berlin
Boston	x	x		x
Brussels
Chicago	x	x
Copenhagen
Dublin	x
Florence	x
Frankfurt	x	x
Hong Kong
Istanbul	x		x
Lisbon	x		x
London	x	x	x	x
Los Angeles	x	x
Madrid
Milan
Montreal	x	x
NYC (home)	x	x	 x
Paris	x		x	x
Philadelphia	x	x
Prague
Rome
San Francisco	x	x
Stockholm
Tokyo
Toronto	x	x
Vancouver
Venice	x
Vienna
Wash DC	x	x		x

As you can see, my desire for these notebooks is not entirely practical–I’d like to say I’m going to visit all of these cities in the next few years, but it’s not likely to happen. (There are a few cities on this list that I don’t have a strong desire to visit, but I love to travel and can’t think of too many places that I wouldn’t go to if I had the chance! Except maybe Russia, given recent events.) I’ll be lucky to hit maybe 3 or 4 more new cities beyond my plans to go to Paris and Amsterdam this fall.  I think the City Notebooks are most useful when you visit a place regularly and want to keep track of favorite shops, restaurants and destinations there. I used to visit London regularly for work, but was no longer doing so when I first bought my London notebook. Now I may be going there more often again, so I’m glad I’ll be able to use my notebook more to record everything I love about this wonderful city. Other than that, though I have family in the Boston and DC areas, I don’t use the notebooks when I visit there, mainly because I don’t spend much time in the city itself. Paris will be my next repeat visit with a City Notebook.

My strategy when using these is to keep them handy while planning the trip, and jot down ideas from newspaper and magazine articles, advice from friends, and top destinations from travel guides or websites. I have found myself planning itineraries and using the translucent sheets to map out where I plan to walk. I love being able to discreetly refer to a map in a little black book rather than being an obvious tourist flashing a guide book. I’ve found that the maps have most of the info I need, but they are a few years out of date– most old European cities probably don’t have too many changes in their street maps, but transit options may be slightly different.

I know City Notebooks also exist for Zurich, Moscow and St. Petersburg, but beyond that, I’m not sure if there are any others I’m missing in my collection. Does anyone know?