The Molskinerie & Moleskine Fans

Sometimes the web amazes me.

Yesterday I received an nice invite from fellow blogger Armand Frasco, about the new blog he's begun, called Moleskinerie, dedicated to Moleskine notebooks. Oddly enough, I'd already visited the Moleskinerie just last week, via Witold Riedel's blog (another Moleskine fan) and thought it was an interesting idea... a blog dedicated to the love of a little $10 book.

So, I replied to Armand about this and offered my recent WorkPod sketch for his site, which he posted mere minutes later at Moleskinerie! Apparently the blog is just a week old but already has been getting nice traffic. Even better, the Moleskinerie has fans like Witold Riedel, Howard Rheingold (SmartMobs author), Danny Gregory, Fazal Majid, Mike Shea and others. Pretty amazing for a week's work Armand! :-)

Some other Moleskine serendipitous moments occurred yesterday. I had a short, friendly chat with Rael Dornfest of Mobile Whack and Raelity Bytes -- turns out Rael carries his Moleskine everywhere. I also remembered that Michael Ashby started carrying a Moleskine as an idea book after a discussion we had weeks ago... seems he too carries his everywhere and loves how well it's working for him. Ausgezeichnet! :-)

After all of this Molskinery lately, I'm starting to wonder if there's something too these little books. Seeing respected people using them one way or another, I feel like they might be a small but potent catalyst for creativity. A book shouldn't make a difference that way... but somehow it does.

Mike Shea sums this up wonderfully, in his Moleskinerie post The Moleskine Obsession:

Part of me rebels against these words. Its just a notebook. Its paper. Words matter. Stories matter. The little faux-leather covered overpriced notebook does not matter. It's stuff. Its degradable material that will be dead in probably one or two hundred years max. It doesn't promote thought. It wont make you a better writer. It doesn't create life changing experiences.

But it does. Somehow, when you pick up one of these, you want to fill it. You want to travel and write about it. You want to record your thoughts so that perhaps in two to five hundred years someone else will read them and know what you were thinking. They are useful to the point of artistic beauty. I feel like Winston Smith in 1984, risking his life to record his thoughts in a world that steals them from your head with doublethink and thoughtcrime.

I love my Moleskines and you can have them when you pry them from my cold dead hands.

So well said. Something about these little books is just perfect -- not too large or thick, but endowed with deliciously smooth paper that beckons that you fill them up. Very hard to describe, but once you have the Moleskine bug, you'll know it.

Maybe I'm indulging in the love of a funny little book a little too much... but it seems a positive obsession if it encourages me to express myself. Hopefully all this attention on Moleskines will encourage creative people (and those who wish to be creative) the nudge they need to express themselves. If that happens through all of this blogging and so on, I'd be pretty happy to have been a part of it.