Design: Moleskine notebooks on the web

Note- and Sketchbooks from the manufacturer Moleskine have for two centuries been a daily companion of artists, writers and designers.

The legendary notebooks were originally produced by French bookbinders who mainly supplied Parisian stationery shops until 1986 when the last of these family run businesses shut down in France. In 1998, a Milanese publisher brought the Moleskine brand and revived the tradition. Since then the Moleskine books have again found many friends around the globe.

“My sketch-book shows that I try to catch things in the act.”
Vincent Van Gogh

“At the Closerie des Lilas I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in my notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème.”
Ernest Hemingway

Click on the image below to enlarge

On the I-Net users of the note- and sketchbooks are a very active community. There are web sites and tutorials on how to “mod” your Moleskine, travel notebooks and sites dedicated to the legendary notebooks.

Two of them are Moleskinerie and the Moleskine Project. Both provide continuous info and news around Moleskines plus galleries of the best drawings available on the web (see some of the thumbnails from the image above in original size on the Moleskine Project site).

Moleskinerie also manages a very active Flickr group on the topic with more than 6,000 members and currently about 18,000 images.

More information and images of Moleskines used by Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Bataille, Jean Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso and others on the Moleskine web site.