The History of a Legendary Notebook
Moleskine is the heir of the legendary notebook used for the past two centuries by great artists and thinkers, including Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin. This trusty, pocket-sized travel companion held their sketches, notes, stories, and ideas before they became famous images or beloved books.
The little black notebook, with its typical rounded corners, elastic closure, and expandable inner pocket, was originally a nameless object. It was produced by a small French bookbinder, that supplied Parisian stationery shops frequented by the international literary and artistic avant-garde for more than a century. In the mid-1980s, however, it no longer became available.
In his book "Songlines", Bruce Chatwin tells us the whole story of his favourite notebook, which he nicknamed "Moleskine". In 1986, the original manufacturer - a family operating in Tours - closed down forever: "Le vrai moleskine n'est plus" are the lapidary words he puts into the mouth of the owner of the stationery shop in Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie - also a legendary spot where Chatwin stocked up on the notebooks. The English writer-traveller bought up all the "Moleskines" that he could find, but they were not enough.
In 1998, a small Milanese publisher brought the legendary notebook back to life under the name "Moleskine", thus restoring a solid tradition, renewing notebookism, and sensing that mobile technologies needed to be accompanied by essential self-standing analog tools.
As the reverent keeper of an extraordinary tradition, the legendary notebook once again began travelling the globe. Capturing reality on the move, preserving details, impressing the unique aspects of experience upon paper: Moleskine is a reservoir of ideas and feelings, a battery that stores discoveries and perceptions without depletion. With its various page styles, it accompanies the creative professions and has become an international symbol of contemporary nomadism. With this physical object, the art of taking notes has found new realms on the web and its communities.
Today, Moleskine is culture, travel, memory, imagination, and personal identity, both analog and digital. It is a brand identifying a family of notebooks, journals, planners, and guidebooks, with different functions, complying with a free mindstyle, both basic and emotional, and connected with the digital world through a huge network of websites, blogs, groups, virtual archives in the Internet.
The adventure of Moleskine continues to widen, and its still-blank pages will tell the rest.
For more information on Moleskine please visit:
www.moleskine.com
