Neat: a Moleskine notebook. Photograph: Graham Turner
I need your help with this one. Just what were the little notebooks that Van Gogh and Picasso sketched in and Hemingway made notes in sitting in Parisian cafes? When the Milanese publisher Modo & Modo began making its fine little black Moleskine notebooks in 1998, it gave the impression that these were the very same ones used by a number of famous artists and writers in the course of the 20th Century. But were they? Or, were they simply a generic design of notebook of which there might have been any number of variations?
By any standards, though, and whatever their provenance, the Moleskine notebooks are an everyday design classic. They are for me, anyway, as I really do use them pretty much every single day of the year for both writing and drawing in and have done so since they appeared a decade ago. I like the compact size, decent plain paper, the rounded edges, the elastic band that holds the books together, the cloth ribbon bookmark, the expandable pocket inside for storing train tickets, business cards, and scribbled phone numbers, and, of course, I like the "moleskin" covers, made, in reality, of oilcloth-covered cardboard. And, the fact that the books stack neatly, and discreetly, on a shelf when full.
Today, Moleskine (owned by Societe Generale since 2006; the French commercial giant paid 60m euros for the privilege) makes notebooks in an ever expanding variety of formats and colours, although their standard black books are still the best of a diverse range. These were directly inspired by the journalist and author Bruce Chatwin (1940-89) who had bought any number of similar notebooks from a shop in Paris supplied by a small bookbinding firm in Tours. Chatwin was understandably upset when the supply stopped in 1986; he had only recently ordered a hundred when he set off to Australia to write the book that became Songlines.
It was Chatwin who suggested that such notebooks should always contain a forwarding postal address in case of loss together with a notice of the reward payable for their return. The opening page of each Moleskine notebook has dedicated slots for owners to provide this same information. It's a neat trick, as it forces you to think just how valuable such a book is; to you, if to no one else.
I hope the supply of these classic, and slightly expensive, notebooks continues for a long time to come. And, I hope you can tell me whether these are really much the same design used to such obviously impressive effect by Picasso, Hemingway, Van Gogh and co.
· Read the whole series of Jonathan Glancey's classics of everyday design
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