Maillot Vert - Notebook

Because inspiration doesn’t wait for you to be at your desk.

All The Handmade Cyclist’s designs start life as a sketch in a notebook. A shape, a line, a story. Pen, pencil, or whatever was to hand. Thoughts, ideas, plans. A great notebook is a companion, a colleague and a confidante.

Our beautiful notebooks feel as good as they look, with a luxurious and durable soft-touch cover (don’t be surprised if you can’t stop stroking them) and with 96 pages there’s month's worth of doodling to be done. The ideal size to fit in a jacket pocket or bag, with an elastic closure to keep things tidy. A great gift for the cycling fan if your life, or a perfect treat for you.

From the earliest days of the Tour de France the riders have been mere pawns in the enormity of the challenge of the Tour, set ever-tougher challenges by organisers set on furthering the legend of the race.

In 1924 a French journalist, Albert Londres, was assigned to follow the Tour for the first time. He was struck by the similarity of the mood and morale of the riders to the subjects of his previous report - the convicts subjected to hard labour in France’s brutal penal colonies. Overcome by sympathy for the riders and awed by their courage he wrote ‘truly these are the convicts of the road’.

We’ve created new, wide-screen versions of our Convicts of the Road collection exclusively for our notebooks, for a beautiful wraparound cover.

Sprinters are professional killers, paid to finish the peloton off with cool, dead-eyed precision.  Nothing can stand in their way.  Win at all costs.

Some say their race is only 300 metres long. If so, it must be the longest 300 metres in all of sport, a lung-busting chasm as elite athletes go deep into the depths of oxygen debt at 45mph.

How far away does the finish line look as the sprint is launched?  How enormous the boulevard?  How suffocating the pressure, an entire race defined by a split second?  To hit or to miss?