Writers and artists have had a long love affair with Moleskine pocket journals. Van Gogh, Hemingway, Picasso, and Matisse used them. So did Bruce Chatwin, who stocked up at an old Parisian stationer before a voyage. The last moleskin producer, a small, family operation in Tours, stopped making them in 1986, but the Italian company Modo & Modo has brought them back in big way.
The latest innovation is the city guidebook that you write yourself. Along with the usual threadbound Moleskine notebook quality, the City Notebooks have maps (including subways), tabbed category pages (e.g. restaurants, shops) and blank pages for you to customize the city your way. There are about a dozen European city notebooks available with several American cities arriving in April and more in fall. A blog accompanies four (so far) of the cities: London, Paris, Milan and Rome.
Also of note, Moleskine asked 70 international artists (from filmmaker Mike Figgis to photographer Mary Ellen Mark) to put their own stamp on a City Notebook for the Detour Exhibition. See photos and video of each book here.
You can buy Moleskines here.
written on Tuesday Mar 13, 2007
sketches,
drafts,
notebooks.
