0.1 Connection | Moleskine Notebook
As a child I would spend countless hours drawing. Carefully colouring in between the lines of picture books based on fairytales, of princesses of foreign lands and adventures unheard of or believed to be unimaginable. My colouring-in books were my treasures. They displayed my immaculate attention to detail and my impeccable illustrative skills. They journeyed with me on family holidays across Australia, lost under the back seats of our car only to be found, to my exhilaration, by the watchful eye of my parents. As I matured, these colouring in books were replaced by lined notebooks, in the colours of pink and purple, sometimes covered by a gel-like plastic cover or displaying cartoon illustrations of fashion forward, hip teenage girls. These ventured with me to South-East Asia. I was now old enough, in my parents understanding, to begin to travel overseas and take in the complexities of our diverse and remarkable world. My ‘travel diaries’ were pivotal in this development of understanding. Eventually filled with photographs and detailed descriptions of our daily schedules, these notebooks began to embody my desire for the unknown.
I believe it is my father who owes responsibility for my artistic documentation. To this day he has hundreds of notebooks. They are full of very small and hardly legible words. He writes of family holidays, of work adventures and of our family taxation returns. When my picture books were full or had long since seen better days, I would hunt through my father’s desk; going through notebook after notebook looking for one that was empty, but they were always full.
It was he who gave me my first Mokeskine notebook.
It was incased in clear plastic. It was a black, hard cover, A5 size notebook. It was ironic to think that this notebook my father had given me was now the talking point among architectural and design enthusiasts. Overnight, this
small, seemingly
plain
notebook
became
the
quintessential
accompaniment for an aspiring architect.
Now, it is only so often that I spend hours diligently going over the way in which I should begin the lifespan of a new Moleskine notebook. I begin with the inside cover. Meticulously, I write my initials, my email address and a carefully drawn black inked love heart as a reward for finding my beloved possession. The Moleskine notebook allows for this. On the first page of this unmarked book are the words, “In case of loss, please return to:…As a reward: $.” The standard Moleskine notebook has rounded edges, is 9 x 14 cm (3.5 x 5.5 “) in size, 13mm (0.5 inches) thick, and black in colour; (although now several more colours and shapes and sizes exist.) It includes a pocket on the inside of the back cover and an elastic band to hold the notebook together when closed.1 It is practical, simple and without decoration. The cover is made with oilcloth - a fabric treated with oil or a synthetic resin to make it waterproof.2 The pages are sewn together to enable them to lie flat when opened and a sturdy ribbon bookmark is permanently attached to the inside spine. When new, the ribbon is neatly pressed within an inside fold of a page, when used its frayed end dangles from a page signally an important sketch or passage of writing.
Through clever marketing ploys, the design of the Moleskine notebook is based upon the nameless notebooks of the 19th and early 20th century said to be used by scholars and artistic enthusiasts alike; such as, Monet, Picasso and Hemmingway. 3 The notebooks were not manufactured by a single company instead they were made by independent French syndicates who would sell their products in Parisian stationary shops. In the mid 1980s, these notebooks became considerably hard to find as the small manufacturers began to limit their production.
The brand Moleskine we know today was established in 1997 after an Italian teacher from Rome, Maria Sebregondi read Bruce Chatwin’s novel, ‘The Songlines’, almost a decade after the books publication. 4 The novel documents Chatwin, an English novelist and travel writer’s adventure to Australia where he was curious to unearth the songs of Indigenous Australia and his affiliation with
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“The Moleskine Notebook” www.skteching.cc/articles/moleskine.html, assessed 2012.09.17
2
“The Moleskine: Facts and Figures” http://itotd.com/articles/565/moleskine-notebooks/, assessed 2012.09.17
3
!“Moleskine Facts”!http://everythingishistory.com/5-random-things-about-moleskine-0174, assessed 2012.09.19!
4
!“The Moleskine Notebook”!http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/moleskine-a-page-out-of-
altered-history-7870099.html#, accessed 2012.09.17!
our nomadic past. 5 Within the novel, he describes his discontent after discovering his beloved notebooks were no longer freely accessible. ‘Le vrai moleskine n'est plus,’ were the words uttered to him in response to his request to order a hundred notebooks before his departure. It simply states, the moleskins are no longer true. Chatwin continues with the proclamation, "To lose a passport [when travelling] was the least of one's worries…to lose a notebook was a catastrophe".6
The significance of this text as well as Chatwin’s own nomadic travels are paramount to the Moleskine franchises philosophy and global identity. On the Moleskine official webpage, it states: through extensive research, Sebregondi found herself at the Picasso museum in Paris, eyeing down the artist’s sketchbooks and later Ernest Hemmingway’s journals that both bore a resemblance to the notebook Chatwin described. This was the beginning for the brand’s slogan. Within the Moleskine’s accompanying leaflet, the creative individual can fantasize and imagine the extent in which their writings and sketches can affect or percolate a culture of sophisticated, contemporary nomadic individuals.7 Thus, Sebregondi and the publishing company Modo & Modo are seen as, “heroes” allowing for their brand child to be accessible to ever creative individual who seeks an unselfish partner in order to document, “culture, travel, memory, imagination and personal identity.”8
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!“He studied the culture to express how the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an
Aboriginal man's personal story. He also related the travelling expressed in The Songlines to his own travels and the long nomadic past of humans.” Chatwin, Bruce (2010), Under the sun: the letters of Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Cape 6
Bruce Chatwin, The Songline, (United Kingdom: Franklin Press 1986)
7
Moleskine official website, assessed 2012.09.15
8
Moleskine official website, assessed 2012.09.15
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