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August 3rd, 2007
Moleskine is the legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin. This trusty, pocket-size travel companion held sketches, notes, stories and ideas before they were turned into famous images or beloved books.
I was getting tired of reaching into my bag and feeling a plastic edge of a notebook ripping underneath my nails, so went searching for notebooks that were bound with something softer and found the Moleskine, which are bound with soft vinyl treated fabric and have smooth radial edges. I bought one because of these ergonomics and because they had acid-free paper, which smells nice and musty. I was pleased with the quality and would buy them on that alone, but I wanted to investigate their claims a little closer. I’m not sure about the artists, but their claim that Hemingway used them is based on the following excerpt from A Moveable Feast:
At the Closerie des Lilas I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in my notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème.
Unfortunately this is a rather generalised quotation; one that doesn’t immediately indicate it was a Moleskine, in fact there is not a single reference to the Moleskine brand in any of Hemingway’s books. It’s also interesting to consider that Hemingway never kept a journal himself, which flies in the face of the whole branding of using a Moleskine to record your ’stream of consciousness’.
From an article that quotes Francesco Franceschi, the head of Modo & Modo’s marketing department (the makers of Moleskine), it emerges that they are well aware of the exaggerations they made when alluding that their specific notebook was used by such greats.
What they have done is to take advantage over a lack of distinction between moleskine: a generic term for oil-clothed notebooks of the time, and the rebranded Moleskine (capital M), a trademark owned by Modo & Modo. Through the little history pamphlet distributed with the notebooks, they create a premise that they are continuing the manufacture of the ‘moleskine’ that Chatwin knew, after the last French manufacturers closed down production in 1986, issuing the statement: ‘Le vrai moleskine n’est plus’. ‘Moleskine’ as a brand has only existed since 1996, which obviously means that contrary to their claims, such writers and artists never used Moleskine, only notebooks that had similar features, such as the oil-cloth cover and binding elastic band.
Moleskines are a style preference, nothing more; they don’t connect you with a literary or artistic tradition and you definitely shouldn’t masturbate profusely over them. Who better to sum it up, than Chatwin himself in his book Songlines:
“Do you mind if I use my notebook?” I asked.
“Go ahead.”
I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band.
“Nice notebook,” he said.
“I used to get them in Paris,” I said. “But now they don’t make them anymore.”
“Paris?” he repeated, raising an eyebrow as if he’d never heard anything so pretentious.
August 6th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
I wish we had stuff like that in the states, but no… we have to have the stupid cardboard and plastic notebooks that never have enough paper… and that paper that IS in there, it falls out!
August 6th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
You should be able to get them in any big bookshop, or they’re probably cheaper on Amazon.com, or just from any Ebay reseller. They come with all sorts of different paper, including for water-colours etc., though they are a bit expensive.