* Classic, functional notebooks
* Durable and elegant, good for all note-taking purposes
* Comes in a pocketable and easy to carry size
Patterned after the traditional notebooks which Parisian booksellers were making by hand starting in the 1850s, the Italian-designed Moleskine is, like those originals which Picasso, Hemmingway and others used for journaling, sketching and travel writing materials, an aesthetic as well as functional triumph. Despite its long standing association with a certain glum, low-fi listening undergraduate type, the Moleskine probably belongs among the very few product designs of the last several decades that stands on its own as a genuine cultural artifact. The Moleskine is on an aesthetic level with the Eames chair, the “Ikea coffee table,” the first Apple computers and the Mini Cooper. Not only is it handsome and elegant, but it’s more durable and functional than the everyday “spiral-bound” notebook.
The built-in ribbon bookmark helps you keep your place, the elastic band keeps it closed, and the Moleskin classic includes a little pocket for loose paper notes and a quaint name-and-address page that reads “if found, please return to…” In the modern world, where, alas, no one for a moment entertains the thought that some stranger would ever return a lost notebook, this page rarely gets filled out. With high quality paper, classic good looks and the feel and ease of use that no creaky spiral notebook can match, these Moleskines are just right for travel sketches, classwork notes, of course writing poetry and even work meetings. Appropriate anywhere, they’re as good for shopping lists as they are for reflections on Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this way, the Moleskine is like those very earliest writing “notebooks,” the clay shards in ancient settlements among which archaeologists were amused to find, side by side, a grain merchant’s invoice and mystic’s epic poem.