Ireland is a fun place to visit. But I didn’t find it a wholly satisfying place for notebook shopping, which is always on my agenda when traveling. A few months ago, I was in Dublin and a few other towns, but most of the time, the pickings seemed slim. It was hard to even find places to look at notebooks: I wandered around looking for a stationery store I’d Googled, but it turned out to have moved or gone out of business. Despite all this I did end up buying a couple of notebooks from Ireland.

This Aisling notebook is not the sort of thing I would normally get all excited about, but I quite like it. It is a very basic school notebook from what seems to be a very common Irish brand that you see in basic office supply stores and bookstores. I bought this one in an Eason’s store, for €0.30. As a bonus, the bilingual cover teaches you a few words in Irish! I love finding notebooks like this that are very much a home grown product and not something you’d find elsewhere.

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Here’s some of the other notebooks Eason’s had on display:

The other notebook I purchased is a total tourist item, but I guess quite representative of Ireland in its own way.

I had almost given up on buying any other notebooks from Ireland but found this Guinness notebook in a highway rest stop store towards the end of my trip. It’s my favorite size and format, and it has cool retro Guinness advertising art on the cover and front endpapers! Inside, the pages are lined in red, with a somewhat too large Guinness logo on every page. I think it only cost about €6 or maybe €8, and surprisingly, the paper is pretty fountain pen friendly, at least with some pens.

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The only other notebooks that I remember noticing were in museum shops. Below are some leather notebooks with Celtic designs, spotted at the National Museum of Ireland– Archaeology in Dublin:

These were at the Hugh Lane Gallery:

And I think these were at the EPIC Irish Emigration Museum. They’re from Duffy Bookbinders, who claim to be the oldest bookbindery in Ireland:

Finally, I just had to throw in this shot of a really adorable little school supply shop. They did have some notebooks, though nothing particularly exciting or unusual enough to photograph. But it was the kind of little shop I would have been crazy about as a kid, with little bins of erasers and toys and things. It was fun to browse in, even though I didn’t end up buying anything there! I wish every town still had a little corner shop.