I’ve been using my Nolty diary regularly and loving it. It’s a great size, has nice fountain pen friendly paper, and the design is cool in a classic, retro, business-y kind of way. I don’t understand Japanese, so I’m missing some of the benefits of the maps and info in the back, but that doesn’t stop it from being a handy notebook to use as a daily log and list keeper.

At first I thought I’d use the blank page in each weekly spread for doing drawings and doodles, but I’ve decided to move my shopping list and to-do lists there instead of keeping them in my other catch-all notebook/journal. I’ve almost exclusively been using my fountain pens in the Nolty and I love the way all the colored inks look:

I’ve also fallen in love with the community that is out there posting photos of their Nolties. Almost all of the writing and commentary is in Japanese, so I have no idea how these people are using their diaries, but they look beautiful! See my Pinterest boards for more images.

There is also a book about the history of Nolty (in Japanese):

I was just dying of envy when I saw the images below on Nolty’s website, where in addition to a history of the diary, they feature a variety of Nolty users and fans (scroll down to the slider at the bottom of the page), including one who has been buying their diaries for 42 years:

I would happily accumulate a few decades’ worth of these diaries, especially if I could get that skinny wooden box to keep them in!!!

I bought my diary at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in NYC, which is a great source for many Japanese products. But for years I’ve been itching to go to Japan to look for notebooks that don’t get exported to the US (and to explore a fascinating country that has many other attractions, of course). Now I have another incentive: to try to buy Nolty’s “Gold” version that comes in a box and has a leather cover and gold page edges instead of black. The price is about 3 times higher, though!

Has anyone else tried a Nolty diary, and found other places to buy them in the US?