I have a new obsession… Moleskine. They’re cleverly marketed stationary- ‘infobooks’ (tabbed notebooks), ruled, squared, and plain notebooks, sketchbooks, LBB’s and DIY city guides. The story behind this line can be found here. Basically, the grandfather of the modern moleskine was produced by a french stationary boutique and was utilized by Hemingway, Picasso, and Chatwin. The french boutique was bought out a few times, and here we are today.
I’m typically not one for fancy, schmancy sketchbooks, and I usually favor loose-leaf paper and 5-for-a-dollar college-ruled notebooks to hard back and spiral bound sketchbooks, but I immediately gravitated to not just the moleskine, but the art culture that seems to have developed around it. I didn’t really understand why my generation’s artists, who are usually against anything mass-produced and sort of gimmicky because of the principal of the matter itself, are flocking to them, but after I began feeling myself gravitate towards them I decided that it was worth a try.
Yesterday morning, I was sent out of the office on an errand almost as soon as I walked into the door, and I decided that yesterday was the day I would finally buy one. After I ran my errand, I swung a few doors down into the Books a Million parking lot, and managed to scrape in within 10 minutes of their being open. The whole place was empty, save for a few old ladies knitting and sipping coffee in the cafe and a college kid towards the back in a blue apron tidying a waterfall holding various Twilight paraphenalia (*gag*, btw). Over the past week, I had done a lot of research on moleskine, where the best prices were (you can find them as cheap as $9.60 here), et cetera, so I knew that I could bee line it to the journal section problem-free.
That posed my next problem! Which one to buy? There was a whole section of shelving devoted to the beautiful leather bound books, clearly differentiated by their brightly colored dust jacket… thing. I could have a 3×5 ruled, plain, or squared notebook, a sketchbook, a cashier’s book, a diary, or a ‘japanese’ accordion-style book (favored by the moly exchange peeps); or in 5.5×8 I could have all of the same as well as a DIY City Guide -which would be pretty sweet except for the fact that the somewhat-small concrete jungle that I call home hasn’t earned its own City Guide yet. After hem-hawing for about an hour, flipping through the pages, smelling the paper, testing the flexibility of the covers, I finally settled with a 5.5×8 sketchbook.
From the moment I took my moly into my hands, I felt an instant chemistry. I felt the need to fill the pages with something beautiful. I finally understood what the artists-turned-bloggers have been buzzing about really for the past three years. It’s more than a loose leaf sheet of computer paper or a page out of a spiral bound college ruled notebook, it commands the best of me. I couldn’t or wouldn’t dare pollute its pages with half-arsed sketches! I’ve committed to drawing hopefully every day whatever it is in the world that piques my curiosity and inspiration. I’m not inspired every day, but even if I do it 3 times a week, hopefully the more often I do it, the more things will catch my interest.
So, without further adieu, here is my first moley entry, taken with my camera on my cell:
- Yep, Joe Plumber himself.
As I said in my description, we all know that I’m not psychic. When I completed this, around 4:45pm yesterday, the debate hadn’t even begun yet so I had no way of knowing that Joe Plumber would become a political tool for our dear presidential hopefuls that night. In all actuality, it’s a picture of the slack-jawed yoke that hit my mom last month. For legal reasons I can’t go into the details, but you can imagine that it all happened from stupidity on his part. I took a few pictures with my camera at home later that evening, I shall post ASAP.
- Un-finished Joseph H. Plumber, MD
