Vintage five-year Leathersmith diary from Etsy

The thing with collecting vintage and antique five-year diaries as I do, is that you never know when the next one will pop up. Sometimes they appear at regular intervals, other times there are either none for ages or many in a short time. If you see one you like, you have to pounce because you are never going to find the same thing again.

This one is my third Leathersmith and it is from Etsy. I have one brown one and one red one.Their leather is really nice – hardwearing and good quality – and their clasps are very practical and hardy. Many lockable diaries have cheap fiddly locks but Leathersmith really invests in them.

I use most of the ones I have but I keep the rarities unused. I have one as a journal, one to use as a daily record of what I did with each of my clients during their two-hour appointment with me.

I have also used them in the past for

• exercise/meal/weight trackers
• to keep passwords
• as recipe books
• travel journals
• birthday books
• notebooks

The way they generally work is that you have one page per day, divided into five sections, with each section being for a different year. But if you don’t want to use it that way you can use each section for something else

• different blocks of time
• different categories each day (how you develop and look after mind, body, brain, soul each day)
• meal and snack planners
• food diaries (for health and weight loss purposes)
• weight loss diaries (one section for diet, one for exercise, one for emotions, one for inspirational quotes etc)
• page a day journals

They tend to be small and very durable so you can easily throw them into a bag and carry them with you. Many of them sell for about $7 so you don’t have to be too precious about them. Older ones were definitely made extremely well, of quality leather and paper so they do last very very well.

Here are my other two Leathersmith five-year diaries

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