Juiced On Writing

New Years greetings to all out there.

This is being written at 7pm on the New Years Eve, with another five hours to go until the next year. My home country of New Zealand clocked over into 2009 eight hours ago. As I’m tired, I wish a little that I had. But we’ll see if I can make it through to midnight.

As a final wish from this year into the next, I will tell you a little sad story. Being the silly season, my family has spent quite a few days doing “stuff” – family stuff. Yesterday it was post-Christmas sales shopping, and we watched a pantomine. Today we went to the movies. We are also playing a lot of electronic games which arrived under the tree for all family members.

In shopping, I went looking for what I thought should be a simple writing pleasure – my first moleskine journal. In our county capital city, I never found one. How sad is that? I had the good intentions to start a proper writing journal for the New Year, and even developed some thoughts towards decorating it, and organising it, and had finally persuaded myself to try out that holy grail of many writers – a moleskine. And no shops sold them. Not even the proper stationery shelves of “proper” reader’s havens like the two good bookstores in the city. I’ve seen them previously there, but no longer. Not when I really had set my heart on one, anyway.

So, I am bereft a moleskin, and therefore a writing journal for the first of January – tomorrow. But my search will perservere, and I will not be scuppered in my desire for the moleskin.

But before I go – I started pondering why they are called moleskins, and worrying about the plight of actual moles – there are plenty of mole hills scattered across the roadside verges in my surrounding countryside, and I actually like the little creatures.

How Did Moleskine Notebooks get their Name?

Answer 1 : Edmund80 :

There’s an ordinary English word, moleskin, which, as you might guess, originally referred to the skin of a mole. About a century ago, the term was extended to apply to a type of cotton fabric that looked and felt a bit like natural moleskin. Strictly speaking, the oilcloth that’s used for covering notebooks is not moleskin—it isn’t fuzzy—but for whatever reason, that’s what it’s called.

See further at http://itotd.com/articles/565/moleskine-notebooks/

Answer 2 : zbeckabee :

Moleskine is the heir of the legendary notebook used for the past two centuries by great artists and thinkers, including Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin.

It was produced by a small French bookbinder, that supplied Parisian stationery shops frequented by the international literary and artistic avant-garde for more than a century.

In the mid-1980s, however, it no longer became available. In his book “Songlines”, Bruce Chatwin tells us the whole story of his favourite notebook, which he nicknamed “Moleskine.”

See further : http://www.moleskine.com/eng/_interni/storia/default.htm

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