My Growing Love for the Nolty Diary

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?

4 thoughts on “My Growing Love for the Nolty Diary”

  1. Interesting alternative to the Hobonochi Techo. Wish their marketing team understood the global scene enough to offer an English version of the site.

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