Moleskine, the right sense of measure

We attempted to track down the inventor of the note-book, the great designer. He wasn’t in his office and no amount of browsing was able to turn him up in the yellow pages, nor were history books any more revealing.

We finally turned up Modo & Modo, a small 12-person strong firm, which actually whittled down to two, Francesco Franceschi and Maria Sebregondi, who had done their bit to polish up the “understated” design of the famous note-books and pads that Chatwin was so eager to jot down his impressions and comments in during his travels, turning them into a series-produced commodity and a world-renowned label. Seeking out the inventor of the pencil, of the four-legged table, of the chair, of the egg-carton, and of all those objects of every-day use that we take for granted as if they were natural elements making up the world we live in would have been equally futile.

“Let’s be honest, we’re talking about a notepad, a few pages glued and stitched together, a black cover, two rounded corners, and an elastic for securing the whole affair, which couldn’t be more simply made, bearing in mind the dimensions of the hand that would have to hold it and the jacket pocket that would have to carry it”. A clearer statement than this from the man who co-owns the Moleskine brand, Francesco Franceschi, is more than any interviewer could hope for. There’s a desire in the man to down-play the fame and success of a product that has been gripped by the hands and carried in the pockets of millions of individuals throughout the world, or perhaps he simply doesn’t want to be called to account for it. But this he does when he goes ahead and clarifies that “a strong and intimate tie gets to be set up with this fetish and an anthropological relationship is established with the act of “scribbled-down” writing as opposed to “typed-out” writing”, which is what the special affective relationship between object and owner is ultimately based on. Writing in the form of markings, be they words or sketches, on a sheet of paper witness to a process and indeed is the process through which thoughts and ideas get jostled around and rearranged, rubbed out or glossed. And in any case they’re held fast between the lines, bringing forth texts that are always one-off because the upshot of a spontaneous gesture, with nothing in between. So materially imbued with a sense of time and place, of an event, that they sometimes convey the emotion captured as writing tool equipped hand was set to paper.

But how does all this apply in the Age of the Digital in which we are all so deeply immersed? An Age, that is, that has done away with the act of writing as such. It is an Age where whole blocks of text can be cancelled at the finger-tip touch of a key, an Age of scissorless and glueless cutting and pasting, of e-mails without any postal delivery, of .doc, of wordless Word, of infinite, neverchanging, forever–the-same textual replicability.

Billions of users churn out tons upon tons of printouts, the contents of which rarely leave any trace of their passing in the mind of the reader, and indeed, what’s worse, in that of the writer as well.

“In our present day and age always keeping up to date has become the imperative. Instruments are especially liable to obsolescence. New generations of increasingly powerful and sophisticated computers are constantly being thrown up by other computers dedicated to their design. It’s a glutinclined market, well geared though to the needs of the manufacturers, but definitely not to those of the consumer. Except perhaps for those hung up on the system, addicted consumers whose jobs or private lives are such as to require ongoing hard- and software updating, a requirement that the market itself has coerced them into”. As most of us have found out for ourselves by now, the latest, “breakingnews” software – of which most of us use only ten percent of its potential, anyway – simply brings the whole system to a grinding halt if it’s not run on the last-generation processor. “The “shelf-life” of any digital product, or rather its “best-before” date, is yet another environment-unfriendly factor. Every couple of years of desk working life makes for centuries of “dump-life”. So that’s yet another advantage of our note-book – it doesn’t have to be thrown away because there’s no built-in obsolescence. Indeed, it gets loaded with affection, and that’s why it’s purposefully designed to be treasured and preserved. It’s an object to which one grows attached because in the end it’s made up of the user’s very thoughts and emotions”.

The reader may presume that what has been said so far points to a corporate sense of social responsibility, but matters are far more complex.

“The primary objective”, we are told, “of any entrepreneur is and remains that of bringing in the sheaves of profit. Then again, it’s a goal that may be achieved and above all consolidated over time by pursuing another objective, an aesthetic one where beauty and quality become intrinsic to what is produced. In this case, the Utopian ideal is for ethics to be achieved through aesthetics.

A businessperson cannot confront the issue of ethics in abstract terms. Whatever there may be of ethical in a product depends on what it is and how it’s made. The ethical content of our own product, for instance, stems from the very use for which it is intended and conceived.

If Moleskine had played its business game by the rules of the market, it would have gone ahead and developed a whole range of distinctive knickknackery as spin-off from the lead product. But “we shun the incumbent idea that sheer quantities are what makes a business enterprise tick and that most businesses end up giving in to. On the contrary, we’re convinced that our small size and that moderation as a general rule go to make up the ideal hotbed in which quality may thrive and our product grows to aesthetic perfection.

We’ve had a lot of brand-stretching proposals submitted to us, enticing us to affix our labels on such gadgets as pens or “cool” address books, and even for setting up a fully-fledged brand flag store. We’ve decided we’d rather not. But that’s because we primarily reckoned it wasn’t in our interest, and only secondarily that it mightn’t have been all that ethical”.

The straight-forward simplicity, no-fuss functionality, and sheer quality of this cognitive artefact have made it the note-pad preferred by artists and writers such as Picasso and Hemingway, who, quite naturally, have become its most formidable testimonials. “But it’s not only testimonials of the past we’re talking of.

Today there are characters big on the contemporary web-culture scene who wouldn’t be found dead without their Moleskine, a companion they can’t do without and that helps them to intelligently bridge the digital-analogical divide. Joichi Ito’s thoughts on the subject are very stimulating, for instance, and his comments at [ http://joi.ito.com ], search moleskine, well worth a browse”.

By the end of this interview two consumer options clearly emerge: one is to purchase complex objects especially designed to capture the market that are ultimately quite commonplace, the other is to go for very simple objects that pack in a lot of complex thought. The decision and choice is on the buyer.

It’s on us.