Review: Moleskine San Francisco City Notebook

My first impression overall is that this is a great little book with
stitched-in pages. The paper strip-wrapper says there's a total of 228
acid-free pages. "San Francisco" is on the spine. The dimensions are 5.5" L
x 3.5" W x slightly over 5/8" thick.

Unfortunately, the maps aren't as good as they could be. The street maps are
good, but the Muni routes should be overlaid onto the street maps instead of
being on separate pages where you can't tell where the streets are. The
street maps show the fewest Muni stops I've seen on a map for SF. Not good.

The other con is that the gray print used throughout the book is difficult
to see against the pale yellow paper. Because the print is also very small,
using black ink would be a great improvement.

The index map is good. I didn't know it was included. It saves from flipping
aimlessly through the map pages although each map is well-marked so it's
easy to tell where the map continues.

There are general pages for personal data, transportation, blank pages for
notes, travel planning, references (measurements, temperature, speed, sizes,
and other conversions), and a ruler in cm and inches printed along the long
edge of a page.

There are 15 double pages for maps. That is, the left and right pages of a
spread count as Map 1 and there are 15 maps followed by a street index
that's several pages long.

After that, there are 61 blank pages "For Notes and Thoughts" (The paper
strip-wrapper says 58 blank pages, but I counted each page on which I might
write.) followed by the City File with its tabbed pages and labels. There
are 12 tabbed sections. Each section has eight pages. The first six sections
are prelabeled with icons on the tabs and tiny gray words on the first page
as follows:

1. Icons: fork, knife, spoon. "Places, legends, recipes."

2. Icons: wine goblet, martini glass, coffee cup w/ saucer. "Bars, wineries,
stories."

3. Icons: bed, moon, heart. "Places, dreams, adventures."

4. Icons: smiley face, unhappy face, neutral face. "Names, faces,
encounters."

5. Icons: i, shopping bag, a right arrow. "Info, shopping, art."

6. Icons: open book, a music symbol frequently seen on sheet music (I don't
know what it's called - it's two sixteenth notes with twin bars on top
connecting them together.), a movie camera. "Books, music, movies."

The remaining tabbed sections are not labeled. There is a sheet with 15
preprinted and 20 blank labels so you may customize them yourself.

The four detachable pages are next; the wrapper says "32 detachable sheets."
Surprisingly, these are not whole sheets that are perforated for easy
removal of an entire page. Instead, each page is divided up into eight
sections like a perforated sheet of stamps meant to be torn apart one stamp
at a time. Each section has "San Francisco" printed on one side of the
sheet, on the bottom of the section, in the same, very small gray print. I
guess it's so the recipient remembers in what city you met.

Then, there's the expandable pocket with a folded insert with eight sticky
sheets of tracing paper, but not the old-fashioned type of tracing paper
that I've seen my parents use. These are supposed to be used on the map
pages to mark your route without permanently marking your map pages.

Finally, there are three ribbon bookmarks and an anchored elastic band to
place around the book to keep it closed and neat. Moleskine includes four
loose, nearly card-like, sheets of paper for the user to note mistakes and
suggested improvements to be emailed to Moleskine at the user's convenience.
The loose sheets also have the URL for www.moleskinecity.com so we may keep
in touch with the city's notebook community.

Since the ribbons easily fray, the first thing I did was try to melt them
with a lighter. After that didn't work, the ribbons only got shorter, I
dipped the ends into melted candle wax.

Then, I gathered the notes I have and recalled what I could for my last
eight trips to SF for inclusion into the notebook. The pages take Noodler's
bulletproof black ink from my Pilot Petit1 extremely well. Although the
pages are thin and the ink shows through, there's absolutely no
bleed-through.

With the exceptions of the Muni routes and the gray ink, I really like the
notebook and have already added places to go on my next trip to SF.

I want to get another, but there isn't a City Notebook for the cities I
visit the most. Decisions, decisions.


--
~~Bluesea~~
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