The Moleskine® Cult

At a recent lunch and tasting sponsored by an ambitious and well-heeled winery, the 20 or so writers in attendance were all presented with a personalized gift, a small, hardbound blank notebook, about 3-1/2” by 5-1/2”, embossed on the cover with the winery logo.  It didn’t register much with me, but all around me, people were giving off sounds of delight—“Oh, cool, a mole skin.”

“A what?” I asked. “A mole skin, you know, one of those great little notebooks—I use them all the time,” came several responses almost in unison. ”Uh, okay,” I said.

I knew immediately I had stumbled across a cult.

Further explanations followed, along with several demonstrations of the various nifty features—the built-in cord loop that lets you mark your place securely, the foldout pocket in the back for business cards or receipts; there was even an entire history of the cult object, written in 1-point type and tucked in the pocket. (Since Blind Muscat does not read 1-point type without the aid of an electron microscope, he saved that part for later.) Much was made of how lovely the little things felt in your hand. To prove their fealty, several of the folks near me pulled out and brandished their existing mole skins, ones they were already using for notes at this event, larger ones tucked into their bags, etc.

Since all those around me were women, I decided this must be a chick thing. And so when one of my male writer friends strolled by, I asked him if he knew about all this—and he whipped out his very own version, which he had been employing all day.

I really started to worry: either this cult is about to take over the world, or I have been out of touch too long.

When I got home and applied a huge magnifying glass to the history page, I discovered, first of all, that the critters is called Moleskine—and preferably a Moleskine®, just so you don’t forget it’s a proprietary object. I also discovered that the history lesson is delivered in Italian, French, German, Spanish and English. Visiting a downtown Berkeley stationery store that afternoon, I discovered they’re all the rage.

The history begins thus: “Moleskine is the  legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin.” Bruce who? I could se Hemingway, aster of short, punchy sentences, writing a whole book on these little pages. Van Gogh and Picasso, last time I looked, were art guys, but maybe they sketched out a few ears and cubes in their notebooks. Bruce Chatwin turns out to be a British-born travel writer and novelist (I am out of touch) who, among other things, wrote glowingly about these little notebooks.

Or, rather, the predecessors of these little notebooks. Wikipedia has a nice piece on the Moleskine, a little less effusive than the company website. he short of it is that an Italian company started issuing a new version of an old idea in 1996—not only long after Van Gogh, Hemingway and Picasso, but seven years after Chatwin died in 1989.

And we also learn that the suckers aren’t made of moleskin. I was terrified that dozens of innocent little moles had dies just for the gift notebooks at my tasting; I wanted to query the devotes on whether  they thought the moles were treated humanely, but I was afraid to ask. Well, it turns out the covers aren’t made from mole skins, nor from moleskin, a type of cotton fabric, but from oilcloth-covered cardboard. But they do sell for ten or twelve bucks, unlike your regular cardboard-covered spiral notebook at $2.25

Dave Eggers uses them, and even published a collection of stories packaged to look like it was inside a Moleskine.

My initial suspicion was right on both counts: I am out of touch, and this is a cult.