The Clark Art Institute is a lovely museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts, well worth a trip, especially in summertime. I visited there last summer when there happened to be an exhibit about women artists in Paris in the late 1800s. There were quite a few interesting paintings but one in particular was my favorite, and luckily it turned out to be available on the cover of this notebook!

I often find myself disappointed by the selection of notebooks and journals in museum stores. They often aren’t that special– just a very generic cheap notepad with an artwork slapped on the cover. Sometimes they just don’t have the kind of notebook I want, which is generally a pocket size plain, squared or dot-grid notebook. Other museums have fabulous stationery selections, but they are just general interest notebooks rather than exhibition tie-ins. (The Centre Pompidou in Paris has a quite extensive papeterie, and the Frick Museum shop, while small and limited in its selection, is where I found my beloved Bindewerk Linen Journal.) Sometimes museum stores have the same stuff you can find elsewhere, but they charge a lot more just because the museum name is stamped on it.

So with all this in mind, I was very happy to find this souvenir of the women artists exhibit. The painting looks lovely on the cover, and the notebook itself is a perfectly sized staple-bound pocket notebook with unlined pages. The paper is nothing special, not fountain pen friendly, but for my likely usage that doesn’t matter. The little belly band seemed almost like overkill since it’s just a single notebook, but I suppose it does keep it from getting shop-worn. At $4.50, this notebook didn’t break the bank.

Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make me happy!