The Legendary Notebook

Moleskine® notebook is the heir and successor to the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries: among them Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin. A simple black rectangle with rounded corners, an elastic page-holder, and an internal expandable pocket: a nameless object with a spare perfection all its own, produced for over a century by a small French bookbinder that supplied the stationery shops of Paris, where the artistic and literary avant-gardes of the world browsed and bought them. A trusted and handy travel companion, the notebook held invaluable sketches, notes, stories, and ideas that would one day become famous paintings or the pages of beloved books.

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Chatwin's Story

The notebook was Bruce Chatwin's favorite, and it was he who called it "moleskine." In the mid-1980s, these notebooks became increasingly scarce, and then vanished entirely. In his book The Songlines Chatwin tells the story of the little black notebook: in 1986, the manufacturer, a small family-owned company in the French city of Tours, went out of business. "Le vrai moleskine n'est plus," are the lapidary words he puts into the mouth of the owner of the stationery shop in the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, where he usually purchased his notebooks. Chatwin set about buying up all the notebooks that he could find before his departure for Australia, but there were still not enough.

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The Moleskine® Notebook

In 1997, a small Milanese publisher brought the legendary notebook back to life, and selected this name with a literary pedigree to revive an extraordinary tradition. Following in Chatwin's footsteps, Moleskine® notebooks have resumed their travels, providing an indispensable complement to the new and portable technology of today. Capturing reality in movement, glimpsing and recording details, inscribing the unique nature of experience on paper: Moleskine notebook is a battery that stores ideas and feelings, releasing its energy over time.

Culture, travel, memory, imagination and personal identity

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Today

Today, Moleskine brand is synonymous with culture, travel, memory, imagination, and personal identity--in both the real world and the virtual world. It is a brand that identifies a family of notebooks, journals, and innovative city guides, adapted to various functions. With the diverse array of page formats, Moleskine notebooks are partners for the creative and imaginative professions of our time. They represent, around the world, a symbol of contemporary nomadism, in close connection with the digital world, through a network of websites, blogs, online groups, and virtual archives. With Moleskine, the age-old gesture of taking notes and doing sketches --typically analogue activities-- have found an unexpected forum on the web and in its communities.