As noted recently, I’ve been revisiting some of my old Filofaxes, which feel like time capsules from the late 1990s. One of my favorites from that time was the Filofax Pocket Chelsea. I liked it so much, I bought two!

They are actually slightly different, though no distinction was made in the model name. Both say “Pocket Chelsea/Calf Leather/Made in England” inside. But one has large rings (inner diameter about 17mm), and one has small rings (11mm). I don’t remember which one I bought first, but I suspect it was the one with the larger rings. There is nothing inside it that gives any date reference, but it looks a bit more broken in, though that may have just been because I used it more.

I had this Filofax set up as a kind of general list-keeper, reference, and catchall notebook. I tucked some clippings and other odds and ends into plastic pockets in the front and back, and had some customized tabs to organize notes relating to several topics: Work, Books, Lists, To-Do, and Phone #s. (Most of my Filofax inserts were pre-punched to fit both 4- and 6-ring binders, or in some cases only 6-ring, but you can see that I had to re-punch the older 4-hole tabs myself to get them to fit 6 rings.) On a clear plastic page, I stuck the label that came with a padlock I used on my gym locker, in case I forgot the combination.

I jotted various notes and quotes from books– at some point there would have been more notes, but as pages filled up, I tended to move them into bundles of archived Filofax pages along with that year’s calendar when it was finished. I still have all those pages in one of my many notebook boxes.

I was particularly pleased to find the page below, a list of the Modern Library’s top 100 books, which I’d photocopied from the New York Times at a reduced size so I could keep it in my notebook. I had been using it as a checklist, ticking off all the books I had already read. I just re-copied the list and put it in a current (2023) notebook, brought up to date with the additional books I’ve read in the past 20+ years!

I had quite a few maps in this notebook, including a central London A-Z map with its extensive street index– an indispensable tool in the era when no one had smartphones with Google Maps! I also liked the pad of perforated post-it notes specially sized and punched for a pocket Filofax.

The leather cover is really nice– just the right balance of structure and flexibility, so it broke in nicely. This is one of the rare Filofax models that came without a snap closure, which made it perfect for me! And the shape was more like later Filofax models sold as “slim,” so I found it more appealing than the usual wider pocket Filofax shape. (See this post for an earlier Filofax that I’d had cut down to achieve this kind of shape!) And I really like the arrangement of the pockets, which made it very usable as a wallet. I’m pretty sure I did use it that way for a while, but I don’t remember exactly.

At some point, I must have loved my first pocket Chelsea enough that I wanted to have another! So I also bought this second one. But looking at it now makes me wonder if I realized before I bought it that it had different rings. The leather covers are pretty much identical, though this one may be a smidgen taller, and the texture of the leather may be slightly softer on the previous notebook. However, the change in ring size means that the closed cover ends up being wider in the small-ringed version. This obviously didn’t make me happy, as I made a set of cardboard spacers to widen the spine, making the closed notebook narrower and thicker. I colored the cardboard with black magic marker to make it blend in more. It’s a bit of a kludgy solution but the end result worked pretty well, and allowed room for keeping lots of cards in the pockets without making the cover bulge.

In this Filofax, I had a 1999 weekly calendar, some notes pages, and plastic pockets for miscellaneous clippings. I think 1999, or maybe even 1998 was the first year I owned a Palm Pilot, so this notebook was the last time I really used a Filofax calendar. I had notes in it all through 1999, but I may have been jotting things down just as a backup in case my Palm Pilot lost its data– a not uncommon occurrence back then if you let the battery die. If you hadn’t synced it to a computer recently enough, you were out of luck! Interestingly enough, one of the pieces of paper tucked into this notebook has a drawing I’d made for a Palm Pilot case… I was definitely moving on.

I still wonder why Filofax changed the ring size on the pocket Chelsea model. But I also wonder whether Filofax changed the ring size… or did I change the ring size? On all my old Filofaxes, the rings seemed to be held in only by a little tab of metal that clipped onto each end. I seem to recall playing with these metal tabs a little at times, if a set of rings was on a bit crooked, or perhaps for some other reason. On the Chelsea with the larger rings, one of the metal tabs looks a bit scratched. So I am kind of wondering if I somehow bent the tab out enough to remove a set of small rings and replace it with a set of larger rings from a different Filofax, in order to get the fatter/narrower shape I wanted? It does seem possible… and I remember worrying about whether that little tab could break (which according to Steve at Philofaxy, it could). But it’s all so long ago now that I have no memory of actually doing it, or what other Filofax I would have taken the rings from. Philofaxy’s archived Filofax catalogs from the late 1990s only show one pocket Chelsea model, and there’s no specification on the ring size.

I really enjoyed flipping through these old notebooks and feeling transported back to my 25-years-younger self! I love how well-used they were, with corners fraying on the tabs. And I love the mysterious little notes whose significance I no longer remember. The Filofax Pocket Chelsea seems like the end of a golden era of notebooking for me, when I was such a passionate fan of Filofaxes and similar refillable notebooks. I was then distracted by Palm Pilots for a while, before re-emerging into full-on notebook fandom when I fell in love with Moleskines. I haven’t been using a Filofax as part of my daily arsenal for quite a while, but the love is still strong!