## History of the Moleskine notebook The name predates the company by a century. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, small Parisian bookbinders produced compact black notebooks bound in oil-cloth, colloquially called *carnets moleskines* (though "moleskine" itself was never a brand — just a generic term for the oilcloth cover). They were reportedly used by artists and writers including Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway. Travel writer Bruce Chatwin popularized the English word: in his 1987 book *The Songlines*, he describes buying stacks of them from a stationer in Paris and then, on a later visit, learning that the last manufacturer — a family workshop in Tours — had closed for good in 1986 ("*Le vrai moleskine n'est plus*," the shopkeeper tells him). Chatwin's lament effectively wrote the epitaph for the original object. The modern company traces to a conversation at sea. In the summer of 1995, Maria Sebregondi was sailing off the Tunisian coast with Francesco Franceschi, whose company Modo & Modo was a Milan-based designer-gift retailer looking for a better-margin product. Sebregondi pitched reviving Chatwin's notebook. Modo & Modo spent about two years on the redesign, registered the Moleskine trademark in 1996, and released the first run — around 3,000 notebooks — in 1997, which reportedly sold out within days at their Milan bookshop. By 1998 they were producing 30,000 a year and distributing across Europe. Crucially, Modo & Modo was not the Tours workshop or any continuation of it — they had no supply chain, tooling, or personnel connection to the vanished French bookbinders. What they trademarked was a *name* Chatwin had made famous for a generic, already-defunct object, then attached it to a newly designed product (rounded corners, elastic closure, ribbon marker, expandable rear pocket, acid-free paper) manufactured in China. This gap between the marketing story — unbroken lineage to Hemingway and Chatwin — and the actual facts is well-trodden ground for critics; McSweeney's ran a well-known satirical "history" mocking the mythologizing, and multiple retrospectives (The Walrus, Unsharpen) have made the same point more soberly: the romance is real marketing, the artisanal continuity is not. The company scaled fast regardless. Sales reached roughly €20M by 2000. Syntegra Capital bought a stake in 2006, and Société Générale Capital acquired Modo & Modo outright the same year, renaming it Moleskine Srl. Export to Japan began in 2004 and the brand spread through Asia from there. Moleskine went public on the Borsa Italiana in 2013, becoming Moleskine SpA. In 2016 the Belgian investment group D'Ieteren acquired a controlling stake and eventually crossed 95% ownership, leading to Moleskine's delisting. Along the way Moleskine diversified well beyond the plain notebook: device covers, a 2012 partnership with Evernote for a scannable "smart" notebook, Moleskine Photo Books via a collaboration with MILK Books, the $200 Smart Writing Set with Evernote and Livescribe (2016), the Timepage calendar app, and even Moleskine cafés (starting in Milan in 2018, with plans for Beijing, London, New York, and Hamburg). Notebooks bound in cardboard with a sewn spine, cream paper, and that black elastic band remain the core of the brand — recognizable enough now to function as a kind of visual shorthand for "notebook" itself, regardless of how thin the connection to the original Parisian *carnets* actually is. See [[Tomoe River paper]] for notes on paper stock elsewhere in the collection, and [[Analogue/Analogue|Analogue]] for the rest. Sources: [Moleskine — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moleskine), [Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era — The Walrus](https://thewalrus.ca/moleskine/), [What's The Deal with Moleskine Notebooks? — Unsharpen](https://unsharpen.com/whats-the-deal-with-moleskine/), [The History of the Legend of the Myth of the Moleskine — McSweeney's Internet Tendency](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-history-of-the-legend-of-the-myth-of-the-moleskine), [Resurrecting Moleskine Notebooks — Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/resurrecting-moleskine-notebooks-67817)