Color Block Striped Hardcover Journal — Chocolate, Clay & Moss Travel Notebook

The palette of chocolate, clay, and moss belongs to a particular register of French landscape — to the autumn villages of the Dordogne and the Périgord, to the stone walls of the Luberon at the end of October, to the oak forests of the Morvan going golden and then brown. These are not colours chosen for their novelty; they are colours chosen for their permanence, for the way they have always been there in the land and in the objects the land has produced. This journal carries them forward in their simplest and most direct form: three blocks, cleanly arranged, speaking to one another across a surface made for use.

The colour block as a design principle has deep roots in the decorative traditions of France — in the painted faïence of Quimper, in the striped textiles of the Basque country, in the layered pigments of the potters of Vallauris. There is something fundamentally honest about the block: it makes no pretense of complexity, asks for nothing but attention to the relationships between tones. These three — chocolate, clay, and moss — are worth attending to.

For the traveler who wants a journal that disappears into a coat pocket and reappears on a café table in some provincial square without drawing the wrong kind of notice, this cover strikes exactly the right tone: present without insisting on itself.