Maud Newton, who just doesn’t understand, points to the death of the Moleskine. GASP!
Moleskine notebooks (properly pronounced Mole-uh-skine-uh, but which I prefer to pronounce as if they are indeed made of supple little subterranean rodents) are more than just the marketing hype-tripe and lies on the card that comes in them — they’re actually very good. Solid, sleek, with great acid-free paper — they’re the PVC fetish objects of the notebook world.

Now, the fact that a wide range of geeks like me fetishize them has less to do (one hopes) with their “storied” (as in fictional) history and more to do with the fact that they last forever and look great. There’s a sense of respect when you write in one, or respectability. I’m never sure which, but I like the illusion. I couldn’t give a fuck what Hemingway wrote in, much less Bruce (Um, Who?) Chatwin.

That all said, the quality of the books I’ve bought has been uneven the last few years as the company has tried to ramp up to global demand. Now the Italian owners of the business that employs 13 is calling quits, citing an inability to keep up with demand, and putting the company up for sale.

You can pretty much rest assured the product will completely tank when it’s bought by some cost-cutting corporation. And you can bet I won’t continue to pay $20 a pop if I find even a single corner folded down, much less a mushy spine, loose binding or scratched cover. I don’t know about all the other fetishist nerds, but I gots my principles, yo.

(Plus, I just bought about 20 of them in anticipation of my move to The Rock where they don’t sell Moleskines, preferring, in fact, to write on clubbed baby Sealskines. That ought to last me a couple years. By then I plan to have debilitating arthritis and be in the process of uploading my consciousness into a battle robot.)