Filofax Westminster - Personal Size

It is a few years ago (2019) that I discovered the existence of the Filofax Westminster organisers. It only appears as far as I know in the 2001-2002 catalogue 

It came as two combinations of A5+Slimline and Personal+Slimline. 

Having discovered this unusual organiser I went on to try creating a modern day equivalent. I discovered that an A5 Holborn Zip would work with a Holborn Slimline.

It does give you a lot of possibilities and flexibility and as the catalogue suggests the main organiser can be used in the office, with the Slimline being perfect for carrying in your jacket pocket. The Personal + Slimline has the advantage of using the same paper size so you can easily swap pages between the two. 

As I mentioned back in 2019, the only Westminsters I had seen sold on Ebay and similar sites were the main zip organiser, no mention was made of the Slimline in the adverts. Others reported seeing just the Slimline. 

That was until last November when a Philofaxy reader advertised a Westminster Personal+Slimline, it was the first I had seen. As I was dedicated to using A5 this year I didn't immediately jump to buying it. But over six months passed and no one made an offer. After printing off my Personal size inserts for 2026 I thought hmm, I wonder!! 

No it hadn't sold, we agreed a price and it was mine! 

It is slightly taller than a normal Personal Zip, it needs to be to house the Slimline as well. 

Unzipping it reveals a fairly simple interior

There are two full height vertical pockets, therefore you can slide in the Slimline on either side. Two pen loops and a set of 30mm rings. 

By contrast the Slimline has small 11 mm rings, but it has a number of pockets to make up for the lack of pockets on the main organiser. 

With my inserts put into both organisers there is a similar result to a Filofax Duplex, but with unequal size rings. 

As I have been trying out different A5 organisers in my collection and then sharing a review/revisit post on the blog. I will no doubt be doing the same with Personal Size organisers, so no doubt the Westminster will see some action in future. 

I might use the Holborn A5 and Holborn Slimline combination as we get close to the end of 2025 to allow for forthcoming appointments/tasks in 2025. 

'Grace Scurr' 75th Anniversary Limited Edition - Daily Use.

After last weeks post I was contacted by Dirk in Germany:

Hi Steve,

I thought you might be interested in some pictures showing a very used Filofax 75th Anniversary Limited Edition Organiser.

You can see all those scratches, scars, ink stains it had to endure over the years. But the stitching is still intact and the leather is still going strong.

Owning some 20 organisers, I have used this one quite regularly since I bought it, but obviously the previous owner used it heavily without paying too much attention…

Best regards

Dirk

He was very kind to give me permission to share the photos he sent me. 

And for comparison, here is the outside of my own which I hadn't photographed! 

Dirk's example certainly reminds me of a well used gentleman's wallet that has seen a lot of use, the leather soft and supple, with a lovely shine, that can only develop given plenty of handling and time. 

Thank you Dirk for sharing your 'Grace Scurr' with us. I'm sure it will continue to have plenty of life in it for many years to come. 

What is the oldest organiser or leather item that you own? 

 

When is a Duplex not a Duplex?

Duplex organisers where available since the early times of Filofax, they feature two sets of rings in the one organiser. The actual organiser as you can imagine becomes quite a bulky item.

I was looking through the catalogue archive the other day looking for some thing for one of our readers. As I have all of the pages that have been scanned in stored on my Mac it is fairly easy to scroll through all of the years quite quickly.

However, it is quite easy to miss some small detail at the time of scanning in the pages. Hidden in the depths of the 2001-2002 catalogue is the Filofax Westminster. I don’t think this model had a very long life, unless you can tell me otherwise.

Looking at the pictures below it appears to be a normal zip organiser and a slimline organiser that was stored inside. Use one for business and the other for your private life?

It came in two varieties, Personal and Slimline, and A5 and Slimline.

The Filofax Westminsters I've found on line make no mention of the Slimline.

I wonder if this combination would work today? So I tried it out with a Holborn Zip A5 and a Holborn Slimline.

With no clasp to get in the way, the Slimline seems the perfect partner.

I was surprised when it slotted in perfectly, even the left hand pen loop is still usable.

And it zips up without any difficultly as well.

The Westminster Personal Zip must have been bigger than current ones, both taller and wider. I tried fitting the Holborn Slimline in to my Holborn Personal Zip (not tall enough) and my Cuban Personal Zip (tall enough but not wide enough).

Overall though, an interesting discovery/experiment.

Would you think to use two organisers like this?

Guest Post – Keyword Dual Ring Binder by gmax

Thank you to Max for this guest post. I have a certain fascination for duplex binders!

This is something Steve put me on to last year – a modern take on the duplex from Japan.

The way it works is the same as the Lefax Charterhouse that I’ve previously written about.

It’s effectively two binders, joined down the long edge, with a retaining flap that folds over to fasten.

There are magnets inside to hold it in the closed position.

Of course, when I saw this I had to give it a try. The process I used for ordering was via an intermediary site buyee.jp, where I needed to give continued PayPal authority to fund both the initial order to their depot and the subsequent international delivery. It did require a bit of faith that it was all going to work, but everything went very smoothly.

I got one in personal size with 8mm rings. If I’m reading the current web site correctly, it seems they also offer pocket size and (interestingly) personal size with 11mm rings on the left and 15mm on the right, which sounds like a good arrangement.

The material seems to be woven nylon – I’ve not used mine much yet, but I think it should be quite durable. And the 8mm rings make it fairly compact. If you want to carry it flat in a bag then you can half unfold it to make it flatter.

All in all, I think this is a very nice modern take on a classic format that’s practically disappeared nowadays.

Design Your Own Organiser.... How difficult can it be?

Late one night last week I came across a discussion on the Van der Spek Facebook group. One of the members was asking if 30mm rings existed for the Van der Spek Senior range. They are available with 20 or 25 mm rings at the moment.

People started talking about running polls to see what the demand would be etc. I checked the Krause catalogue on line and they show that the 25mm size is the largest they currently make in that ring spacing.  So that was the end of that discussion.... well not quite!

Petra Van der Spek and the team at Van der Spek do an exceptional job of satisfying most peoples requests for super custom designs. Almost nothing is impossible, the word 'No' is never used.

There are some ground rules though. Firstly you must accept that the rings for your special custom organiser must be available and they have to have them in stock. And secondly you have to realise that departing massively from the existing designs is going to cost more, how much more will depend on the design and the extent of the leather work involved.

So having told people the ground rules our discussion continued. If you wanted a larger capacity organiser than an A6 with 25mm rings, you could just use two of them? Simple solution.

I suggested going for a duplex design, something people aren't that familiar with because Filofax stopped making them many years ago. But is there any alternatives to the previous duplex design?

Essentially a duplex is an organiser with two ring mechanisms so say two 20mm giving you 40mm overall capacity, or may be a 25 mm and a 20 mm in the same organiser etc. Sticking to the sizes available. But how to arrange the two ring mechanisms?

So I grabbed a sheet of paper and a pencil and I started sketching some very rough outline designs of what various ideas might look like.

This is what I came up with:

I then looked at each design in detail.

So it looks fine closed, but when you open it as in the drawing below I straight away realised a flaw with this design. The pages look fine on 'each side' but when they overlap with each other, imagine trying to write on the page that is over the other set of rings.

So that design was put to one side...

So the next design is more or less the same as Filofax Duplex with an overlapping cover and the ring mechanisms at each side so that the pages don't overlap when closed.

Then when you open the duplex you can see four pages all at once. Within the cover you could have pen loops and credit card slots etc. The way in which the contents can be turned independently of each other it means you can have your diary viewable at the same time as say a set of note pages or task/project pages.

So continuing on to the next design.

This seemed an obvious solution of combining two organisers but....

Again they don't work when you try to open the organiser, nothing would lay flat and it would be a nightmare to use.

And finally this one... which actually already exists owned by Janet Carr made by Mulberry

I always think of this one as a 'Push me Pull You' type design!  It's effectively a back to back design.

But I wonder when you are using this design what happens when only one side is open, again we have a potential issue with being able to write on the open side as it would be unsupported. But it is a novel design and credit to who ever thought it up originally.

So out of the four ideas I came up with only one is a really practical solution, although I'm sure there are other ways of using two ring mechanisms in an organiser that I've not thought of yet.

[Update] I've got permission to include this picture as well from Julie J on the Facebook group, it extension on some of the ideas above and shows how to make a compact duplex that as far as I can see would work.

[Update 2] Thank you to Gmax for the photo of the Duplex he owns which is in line with the comment he made earlier. Notice the press studs in the covers to hold the two halves together when 'folded'

Have you ever thought about designing your own organiser, even one with just a single ring mechanism?

Duplex Filofax

The duplex Filofax is quite unique, it contains two sets of rings spaced about 17cm apart, the design has been around for many years, although sadly (some might say) not available in the current range of organisers.

This catalogue which I believe dates back to 1937 shows duplex models:

I think they were used a lot by Army officers and the Doctors for all the different inserts that were available back then.

Here is another one from more recent times, it was produced as a limited edition of 1921 examples and sold as part of the 85th anniversary of Filofax, I saw this one at Filofax in Burgess Hill when we visited them back in September last year.

I was looking back through some photos and some previous posts when the thought occurred to me that would a duplex organiser partially solve the desire for bigger rings in a personal size organiser? I have 30 mm size rings in a few of my own organisers, but nearly all in the current range these days are 23mm and there are the odd exceptions like the Gillio medium size which has 26 mm size rings.

But if you had two sets of 23 mm rings would they be the equivalent of a set of 46 mm rings? That's 1.8 inches in olde worlde measurements!

Then I spotted a link in the comments to some modern day duplex organisers... I had to investigate.

And this is what I found

Yes this is made out of a very thin flexible PVC, not exactly luxury, but for the purposes of this assessment of the idea of two sets of rings it is fine. I bought it from 'Kit Monster' and it's sold for holding Tactical Aide Memoirs (TAM)

I've done a video about it too.


Looking at it over a few days I've been trying to understand why they spaced the rings so that the pages over lapped, why not space them a bit further apart so they didn't overlap?

I might be tempted to make something similar to this out of a single piece of leather but make it a bit bigger and have a simple closure on it to hold it closed.

The one advantage I can see with a duplex is that you can have two sections of your organiser open at the same time and it is then easier to refer to both sections without having to flick from one to the other. But of course is does take up a lot more desk space in the process!

Are there any of you that have used a Filofax duplex organiser on a regular basis?

Duplex Binders - Guest Post

Continuing our 'historic' theme this week, we would like to thank GMax for their article on Duplex Binders. 

Rarely sighted, even while they were still being offered for sale twenty odd years ago, the Duplex models have acquired a special place in my Filofax affection. Essentially a double version of a conventional, personal Filofax, with two separate sets of rings, they offered some unique advantages in respect of capacity, and in the number of pages available to view at one time.

The Duplex was “particularly favoured by military personnel”, and “originally designed by the army to fit inside the large trouser side pocket”. I can remember these pockets from my short time in the Combined Cadet Force at school, and this is certainly plausible.

Duplex binders were made in two different widths, although, strangely, this fact seems to be something that Filofax themselves never publicised - maybe the marketing department just didn’t know? An illustration of the narrower form can be seen at the “Filofax Collection” website. Catalogues at the time explained that the leaves in the Duplex binders overlap slightly (citing the “trouser pocket” reason already mentioned), and that the open Duplex allows three pages to be viewed simultaneously. This is true for the narrower form, and the overlap does sadly rather compromise the design.

In the wider form of Duplex, four single leaves can be viewed at one time without overlap, which is a far more practical arrangement. When the binder is closed, however, the two stacks of leaves on each set of rings do still need to overlap, because the spines push the pages towards the centre as you close each side – obvious really, but not something I’d appreciated until I actually got hold of one.

Some months ago I was lucky enough to find a vinyl Duplex (DVF7/8) in good condition, and just recently I was even more fortunate to acquire a “new, old stock” calf leather Duplex (D2CLF7/8) on eBay.

As well as Calf Leather and Vinyl, Duplex binders were also offered in:

• Hide Leather
• Pigskin
• Morocco Grain Leather
• Canvas
• Leathercloth

Both of mine have 7/8 inch rings, but smaller, half inch rings were also available in all of these materials.

By 1988 the Duplex range had narrowed to Calf or Morocco Grain. The latter would have been a very sturdy beast. The Duplexes were discontinued early in the 1990s as part of the unfortunate, total revamp of the product range.

So how do Duplex binders work out in practice?

• A particular benefit is if you need to compare information side-by-side, or do work while making reference to other leaves.
• I would recommend the wider form, to avoid issues of overlapping pages.
• The use of side tab dividers in a wider form Duplex is not really viable, because they impinge on the opposite paper stack, so top-tab dividers are definitely better if you can find them (or make some yourself).
• The fact that the two stacks of paper must overlap when the binder is closed mean that it’s best to have something robust like a plastic flyleaf at the front and back of each stack of pages.
• The other main usage tip is to keep read-only leaves mainly on the side opposite to the handedness of the user. For example, being right-handed, I keep my set of maps on the left in my vinyl Duplex.

I did have some doubts beforehand about the practicality of the Duplex, but when experienced at first-hand they actually seem quite usable, and not that bulky compared to a normal personal model. Overall, I think they can be counted amongst the highlights of the Filofax.

GMax - April 2010