ROUTE Banknotes 170 pocket album

The notes you most want to keep are often the ones you acquire furthest from home.

The ROUTE is a slim banknote wallet — twenty sheets, room for up to 170 notes as large as 182 by 92mm, each in a transparent pocket you can read from both sides. The cover is padded and embossed in gold, the colour a deep navy blue, and the whole thing measures only 205 by 25 by 120mm: small enough for a jacket pocket or the corner of a bag, which is precisely the point. It is built to travel and to trade.

It is the portability that Jonah wishes he'd had sooner. He once came back from a trip with a handful of foreign notes he had no business buying and nowhere sensible to put them, and spent the journey home with the things folded into a guidebook, fretting at every customs queue that he was slowly creasing the best of them. A proper wallet would have turned an anxious pocketful into an orderly little exhibition he could have leafed through on the train. He bought one not long after, some years too late for those particular notes, which have a crease he still resents.

Carry it to a fair and it becomes a trading table you can hold in one hand.

A note worth crossing a border for is a note worth carrying properly home.