published 9 months ago (29.01.2009 12:06)
Moleskine thoughts
The Moleskine notebook is a classic, as the leaflet that comes with it explains: »Moleskine is the legendary notebook, used by European artists and thinkers of the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin«.
I have a couple of them. I like them because they are simple, well made, beautiful, easy to carry around, and the inventors paid attention to detail (the back pocket for loose notes, for example. Mine is full).
In the last years, I bought and received a couple of variations of it: small and large, thick and thin, regular and travel version. Checking the Moleskine website and Amazon, today there are over 50 variations of the original. Moleskine sponsors city blogs to promote their City Notebook, have special editions for museums, you can have it branded with your logo as a business present, and there even is a Japanese Pocket Album version, whatever that may be. Next time we check, the notebook will be available in pink, designed by Philippe Starck and Karl Lagerfeld,
and pre-deep-fried.
Today, Moleskine is not the notebook of »artists and thinkers« they praise in their leaflet. It’s a brand. A brand with a company and heavy machinery behind it, living off the original idea. The notebook has become an arbitrary item, like the thousands of other consumer products around us. But it fits our times well. We like things that are “retro”, and have been around and used for a while. They offer us depth, and we trust, without us having to get engaged too much.
Today, it seems to be mandatory that things successful in the small have to be scaled to the large, although the original spirit may get lost on the way. Ordering the notebook by the thousand, a single one still costs €10. How many »artists and thinkers« will buy them today?
P.S.: I’d be happy to give away my unused travel version (in the picture on the right) to someone who will use it. It has a register that divides the notebook into travel-relevant sections, like “Bed”, “Food” and “People”. Like many things I have, it seemed a nice idea at the time, but I never used it.