I have written about Charlestons before – see my post here
After I wrote the article above I bought several Charlestons for Philofaxers abroad. A purple A5 winged its way to Denmark, while a purple Compact headed for New York and a pocket purple flew to the UK.
Charlestons are each truly unique – the leather, the grain and the texture differs quite a bit between binders. So some are totally smooth, others are grainy, more have large dapples of texture. They are superb quality and the closure prevents overstuffing. For the price, the quality is superb. Yesterday Susanna bought a red A5 and I got a brown A5. Unfortunately the remaining Compact red and Compact purple both had gappy rings. They are so scarce and the launch has been postponed several times with no definite launch date being given. Here are some photos of different sizes and different leathers, showing the variation in grain patterns and the beautiful colours. The colours are more or less uniform across the binders though they can look different according to how the light catches the grain. The red is not very bright – more a muted browny red. The brown is dark with no tones of caramel. And the purple is the colour of a dusty purple grape.
And then……
I opened up the Charleston to take a photograph of the inside as the pocket constellation is very unusual. It was rather hard to photograph so I removed the inserts to better show the pockets. Sorry about the bad lighting
and then I saw it. The missing rivet. Which means that the rings are loose. !”#€%&// when are Filofax going to fix their ring problems!!!!! The best I can hope for if I take it back is that NK will send it to Filofax Sweden who will send it to Filofax UK to replace the rings. If they can’t do that the Charleston will go to the great Filofax graveyard of dodgy rings. And I will probably never find another one. Bwaaaaahaaaaa 🙁
UPDATE: Took the lovely Charleston back and was offered either a refund or a repair. I said as long as it did not have to be sent back to the UK I would be delighted for a repair. It should be back within a week. Yay! It seems that the Charlestons may be back after New Year though to be honest I wouldn’t get my hopes up as this has happened at least three times now. But if they do appear next year I would definitely recommend them!
These organizers are beautiful ! Thanks for sharing this.
Well, I had to send back two faulty Adelphis A5 (one with outside leather defect – another with noisy paper layers inside the back and pockets instead of the usual padding). Adding that to my many other quality issues among my Filofaxes – I can not other than think the manufacturer has no quality control in place. Very sad indeed.
O_________O