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Mighty Moleskines
With an old-worldly elegance, Moleskines have reignited a digital generation’s love affair with paper, writes Toby Shapshak
Originally appeared in Business Day Weekender | 28 April 2007
In this increasingly digital age where everything is electronic and online, and all communication is via email or SMS, there is a not unsurprising movement towards the simple pleasures of paper notebooks.
Given how intangible our new millennium of Word documents and email is, the tactile nature of good quality paper and the scratch of a pen as you write on it seems to enhance, even sanctify, the act of writing.
No notebook typifies this more than the Moleskine, the enduringly old-worldly and elegant oilcloth-covered notebook which its makers quite rightly like to call legendary.
More than any other of its famous users - which include Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh and Ernest Hemingway - the Moleskine owes its current popularity to author Bruce Chatwin, who first mentioned his infatuation with them in his 1998 book Songlines.
Chatwin reintroduced the Moleskine in an interview with an Australian farmer: “I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band.”
After telling his interview subject he bought them in Paris, the farmer raised an eyebrow “as if he'd never heard anything so pretentious. Then he winked and went on talking.”
And so began the second golden age of the Moleskine, which is now something of a business legend after the Italian publisher Modo & Modo was sold last August to French investment fund Société Générale for 60 million euros.
"Nice notebook," Chatwin’s farmer said. Nice notebook indeed.
Moleskines are the recidivistic impulse of the moment, but there is a long line of other backward-looking objets – from hand-made shoes through the plethora of haute couture nostalgia that is sweeping everything from clothes to automobiles.
“It doesn’t make what you’re writing special. It makes THAT you are writing special,” says filmmaker Llewelyn Roderick who carries his Moleskine with him as religiously as his cellphone.
Despite being a gadget fiend, Roderick swears by his Moleskine for the age-old functions that a notebook has always fulfilled. He sketches ideas, diagrams, writes ideas down, draws maps, and ticks off his to-do lists in his well-thumbed notebook, with its distinctive elastic band. “They are tactile, unlike my computer.
“Writing in a Moleskine is different from on an ordinary piece of paper. There’s a certain respect and reverence for your thoughts and ideas. It’s not as transient as a scrap of paper, and there is nothing as disposable as a Word document.”
For the last few years, I have taken all my interview notes on my laptop, foregoing the faithful reporter’s shorthand notebook. But in spite of this, there are times when nothing replaces the ease and safety of a notepad. Nothing beats the surety of putting pen to paper, nor the convenience of taking notes. Moleskine’s smaller reporter’s notebook is compact enough to fit in a pocket and its stiff flip top is firm enough to write notes standing up. It never needs a battery charge and properly indexed holds notes for eternity.
Like Chatwin I discovered Moleskines by chance, when a colleague asked me to pick one up for her on a trip to London. I bought myself one too, and would pick up a couple on any overseas trip for a small group of us until they suddenly appeared in local bookstores a few years ago.
South Africans can thank local publishing legend Maggie Davey for them being available in the country, after she tipped off Helena Groeneweld, the managing director of Real Books, to acquire the agency for them.
“Maggie’s got an eye, and she was completely right,” Groeneweld told Weekender.
On average, she says, Moleskines have had such strong year-on-year growth that is “completely out of sync with the book trade”.
Apart from the obvious quality of the paper, she is impressed with how well Moleskine have branded themselves. Moleskine has evolved from being a notebook to being THE notebook.
They have also introduced a variety of notebooks (with either plain, ruled or squared pages), a music notebook, storyboard notebooks for graphic and ad agency designers, fold-out zig-zag pads, diaries and most recently travel guides.
“They have expanded their range for the everyman, be he or her a musician, architect, graphic designer or business person,” says John Fawcett-Peck, manager of Exclusive Books’ flagship store in Hyde Park. “They have taken that simple idea and created a must-have item for every person.
“Their simplicity makes them so attractive, the look and the feel,” says Fawcett-Peck.
“It’s also quite nostalgic, to put your pen to paper. It definitely has a retro feel about it, although retro is maybe the wrong word. It’s more classic, like Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway, the good old classic authors. It creates that sense of literature.”
But there was a time when Moleskines stopped being published, which Chatwin discovered to his horror in 1986 when the small French family business in Tours closed its doors. However in 1998, Milanese Modo & Modo publishers relaunched them, which they describe with quaint hyperbole: “As the self-effacing keeper of an extraordinary tradition, Moleskine once again began to travel the globe. To capture reality on the move, pin down details, impress upon paper unique aspects of experience: Moleskine is a reservoir of ideas and feelings, a battery that stores discoveries and perceptions, and whose energy can be tapped over time.”
Given the travel-writing Chatwin’s influence in their revival, its fitting that their most recent addition are travel journals, which Moleskine calls City Notebooks.
“They are devised is an interactive journal, for specific destinations, such as London, Berlin, Milan, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai,” Fawcett-Pecks says. “They have maps, emergency numbers, metric to imperial conversions, lists of important telephone numbers (airports, trains, boats, taxis bicycle rentals), basically everything you’ll need for travel in that destination.”
But what he particularly likes is that the pages are all blank and the traveller can fill them in.
Paging through his personal London guide, which he is using on a trip the London Book Fair, Fawcett-Peck muses over the advantages of such a travel guide-cum-notebook.
“Given that there are vast online resources for travelling, Moleskine allows you to make up your own travel guide.”
Along with blank pages for your own writing, shopping and to-do list or just thoughts, there is a thumb index section for restaurants, hotels, bars and the like – all of which blank for you to fill in.
There is a particularly nice features that corresponds with the maps in the front of the book: “10 transparent, self-adhesive sheets that you can scribble or draw on and just tear off afterwards.
“For the discerning businessman, who may run out of business cards, there are small squares on perforated pages that you can write your name, phone number and email address and pass it to whoever. It’s quite nice.”
And, like all Moleskines, on the inside back cover it has its trademark little pouch for tax invoices and other mementos.
But travellers and writers are not the only people who can’t live without their notebooks.
“For someone who doesn’t use a computer, a Moleskine is essential,” says artist Mark Erasmus. “I’m still a pen and paper boy. It’s tangible.”
Erasmus can carry as many as seven different sized Moleskines with him.
“One is for drawing, one is for my exhibition, one is my notebook. One of DIY paint notes and references. One is my address book, one is a diary. It’s my filing system,” he says, adding he files them when he finishes them.
“When you have notebooks on your bookcase, Moleskines are the ones you want to go back for their aesthetic.”
Chatwin puts even more importance in his notebooks, of which he has only lost two in his career: “To lose a passport was the least of one's worries: to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.”
This originally appeared in Business Day Weekender | 28 April 2007 | www.businessday.co.za
