Moleskine: The New Form
Those who don’t write down their thoughts are condemned to rethink them.
Jay Misra
Last week I travelled to London to attend the London Book Fair with the main intention of seeing my friend Drew Anderson’s sketchbook that he’s been laboring over for almost a year. I’ve been watching Drew fill the book on the Buy My Sketchbook website where I’ve also been known to show a few pages off.
Moleskine’s celebrity endorsements are from the greats: Van Gogh, Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse and Céline all apparently used the books at some time in their life. The attraction to the Moleskine is not that it is the new cool (though it very much is) but that it is well crafted and at the right alchemical proportions for people to catch their creative spirit within.
If you search the internet you will see thousands of artists catching their ideas and creations, scanning and photographing and sharing them with their clustered groups of other users for commentry, feedback, praise, promotion and a little friendly competition.
With their popular exhibit at the London Book Fair Moleskine quite accidently stumbled on a new way of opening up this new form to the masses, each book tethered by a thin wire of indestructible adamantium thread to a central spire and an etched chrome name tag adorned the books so the creator could be identified. Visitors had to wear white cloth gloves to handle the books otherwise a guard from the stand would hit you with 9000 volt a cattle prod.
I loitered around the exhibit for almost an hour pouring over the books and taking the odd photo of a favourite page. Like the effect of a street hawkers mate, what started as a quiet stall magnetised almost 15 people who all relished the awesome work on display.
In addition the the multitude of flickr groups and satellite websites I can see a new path to expose these wonderous books off in full-on human dpi to the world. Moleskine themselves are shining the light in the direction we need to take.