Original article by sumno.com.

«Moleskine» being translated from French means tarry, or gummed fabric. Such material has been used as imitation leather since several centuries ago till nowadays. It used to be implied as well for making the covers of the notebooks which several small French manufactures used to produce 150-200 years ago.

Those ones weren’t just ordinary notebooks. If you look in at the Museum of van Gogh, you can observe the collection of notebooks with great master’s sketches. In those notebooks he used to outline all his drafts which were destined to become masterpieces of the world art. There is also a great master wielding a skillful pen whose notebooks have remained intact, Ernest Hemingway. Without any collusion, Henri Matisse and Jean-Paul Sartre, Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein, Andre Breton and Louis-Ferdinand Celine set their choice on those notebooks.

Quite decent and unremarkable in outward appearance, moleskine won European creative elite’s favour due to its ease of handling and usability. Small-scale format, durable cover of waterproof material, practical rounded corners, handy elastic band preventing the notebook to open accidentally, and ribbon bookmark to help you find a necessary page, all the features make sure: if you once have held moleskine in your hands, you will know it again in a flash.

In the ninetieth, when the last moleskine manufacture had been closed a long time long before, the Italian company named «Modo&Modo» carried on with the concept of the legendary notebook and registered trademark «Moleskine». This gave the second birth to the beautiful story about a tiny world of dreaming and creation and speaking to yourself which you can always carry in your pocket. At the same time, the variety of notebooks can satisfy any taste, even the most fanciful one. Watercolour albums, worksheets for musical notations, storyboards for producers and script writers, usual squared and ruled notebooks, weekly and daily organizers, guide-notebooks for the travels to European capitals, address books… Whatever you like.

Moleskine is retro, so no wonder that it has suited modern Europeans’ taste, according to their piety for antique, for cult movies of Roman Polanski and the music of the seventies. Certain circles of European and, with the lapse of time, of world society welcomed the benefice of moleskine as something known and long-expected, as a straw to deliver them from necessity to implement their thoughts into the soulless binary code of smart machines.

It is true that many people got tired with computers. Computers at home, computers at work, mobile phones, smartphones, palmtops… We feel uncomfortable among all those smart machines. Handwriting is a natural way to escape from computer bondage. You can ask a psychologist – all of them contend that binary code serves well for data storage but it doesn’t give us any feedback. Your thoughts and feelings get lifeless as soon as you confide them to a computer; they don’t bring you any associations any more, neither to your mood at the moment of writing, nor to the surrounding. And your handwriting – that is more like it! The point is of your hand microvibration while you are writing.

Looking through our notes, we recollect the information of the volume much more than the written words seam to hold: our mood and emotions at the moment of writing, the surrounding, even smells and sounds of that distant moment. The notebook is something like a time machine that takes the author back to the past. It would seem that digital recording, due to its convenience and security, will replace the old-fashioned pen and ink. No way! The number of moleskine-lovers goes up all over the world, and this means we like handwriting, and we like to order our thoughts with the help of a diary.

Moleskine is successful in the films, such as “Amelie”, “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, “Dance with Me”, “National treasure”, “The Da Vinci Code”, “Indiana Jones”, and the notebook always appears in the hands of uncommon, creative people.

The unwritten law admitted among moleskine-lovers all over the world runs as follows: moleskine is not just for writing, but for creation. And you can’t oppose, ‘cause writing in moleskine is a creative process, the atmosphere this notebook spreads around inspires for creation.

There are a lot of web-pages where moleskine-lovers publish their drawings, sketches, verses, comics created in the favourite notebook. Moleskine becomes the decoration of creative and uncommon people.
The legendary notebooks are now in Kiev, and it’s obvious that progressive young people tend to choose, instead of electronic organizers, small dark-grey notebooks with yellowish pages, ‘cause it’s so pleasant to write with a pen in the age of globalization and life speedup.