In the past few years the Moleskine notebook has become a ubiquitous part of New York City culture, from Williamsburg to Inwood it seems like everyone is carrying one of the things. I even use the sketchbook variation myself when I’m sketching on the subway. They’ve opened up the product line quite a bit in the last few years adding watercolor books, and the new City Notebooks.

The City Notebooks started in Europe, but this spring they released the first ones for American cities, Washington D.C., Boston, San Francisco and of course New York. Later this year they’ll be adding Chicago, LA, Seattle and Montreal. The city notebooks are basically travel books. Maps, sections on bars, restaurants, shops, hotels, galleries, etc., except it’s all blank. The idea is that you use it to create your own guide to the city, filled with your own favorite places and things.

So, at nearly $30 a book is it worth it?

The book itself is very well made, as I’d expect from the Moleskine brand. The first third of the book is taken up by conversion charts for clothing and shoe sizes, temperatures, and measurements, (which I suppose would be useful for a European traveler), a totally superfluous list of phone numbers for taxi and car services, pages to write out an itinerary, and then maps. The subway map is included, followed by a street map. The street map is obviously tourist geared. It includes about 98% of Manhattan (stopping at 203rd street), almost none of the Bronx, (only the small section that needed to be included to complete the Manhattan map, which is the southern area around Mott Haven), very little of Queens, (about 2 miles east of the river, and from the Midtown Tunnel, north to Ditmars), and surprisingly little of Brooklyn, (from Red Hook north to the Midtown Tunnel, then about 4 miles east).

Then come the blank pages. There’s about 40 pages for “Notes and Thoughts.” I’m frankly not sure what this portion is for. Is it just a “miscellaneous” section? Isn’t the whole book my “notes and thoughts?” After that are 12 tabbed sections. The first six comes pre-labeled: Places/Legends/Recipes, Bars/Wineries/Stories, Places/Dreams/Adventures, Names/Faces/Encounters, Info/Shopping/Art, and Books/Music/Movies followed by 6 that are left for you to label. Included is a sheet of labels, including some blanks, and some pre-printed (Kids, Gestures, Events, Musts, Theatre, To Avoid, etc.). Frankly the first thing I did was use the blank labels to cover up all of the pre-labeled sections except for the one for bars. None of the labels seemed like anything that I would need to keep track of myself. The last section is made up of perforated pages that can be torn out to use as notes, to give your number to people in bars and what-not (There’s a similar section in the Moleskine address book if you are familiar.) In the back is the familiar folder/pocket that appears in all Moleskines, and instead of the standard ribbon book mark they provide three. They also have a small block of Post-It style tracing paper that can be overlayed onto the maps for itineraries.

So… is it useful? I dunno. Working in theatre I am constantly trying to remember things like where the closest Salvation Army is, where I saw that store with the saris in the window, or where I bought those acrylic goblets for that show last year. I really think that this little book is going to be great for that. If I was a tourist planning to spend more than a week or two in a place I can see where it would be really useful. Distilling all the information from a dozen guidebooks into a single place, with only the information that I wanted, could be great. But as an average New Yorker? I’m not sold. I’d really like the book to be more… blank, and less about what Moleskine thinks my style of tourism should be. (I mean, a section labeled “Places/Dreams/Adventures?” Really?) I also think that some small dots, or arrow stickers or something would be more useful than the tracing paper they provide. In short, interesting idea… iffy execution. If you feel like you need a place to keep track of bars, comic shops, or vegetarian restaurants, this will be useful for you, with a little work and modification. If you know the city pretty well, then there’s not much here for you.