Moleskine notebooks … the best of their kind? Photograph: Alamy
No, despite what you may have heard, Bruce Chatwin never used them but they are still the best notebooks money can buy.
By Emine Saner
It’s the promise held in that unbroken spine, the smooth oilskin cover, the comforting rounded corners. But most of all in the pristine ivory blankness, ready to be filled with the beginnings of your first bestseller and sketches so groundbreaking they will require new ways of thinking about art. This notebook, the Moleskine pocketone you just paid £8.99 for, will deliver it all.
Apparently Van Gogh used one, and Picasso, and Hemingway – this history now rests in your hands. So long as you can find a spot in Caffe Nero and get to work. “It’s a masterful bit of excavation of the human psyche,” says Stephen Bayley, the design critic and writer – and user of Moleskines. “The stuff you’re writing in it could be the most brainless trivia, but it makes you feel connected to Hemingway.”
Except there is no real connection to Hemingway. Moleskine was created in 1997, based on a description of the beautiful, bound notebooks the travel writer Bruce Chatwin bought from a French bookbinder before it closed down. An Italian company Modo & Modo recreated it, sold it at a premium price and describes it as a “legendary notebook”. “It’s an exaggeration,” Francesco Franceschi, co-owner of Modo & Modo told the New York Times in 2004. “It’s marketing, not science. It’s not the absolute truth.”
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