July 24th, 2009
Don't take my Moleskine notebook and Rotring pen
What’s the technology I’d least like to lose, the thing you’d have to pry from my cold dead fingers? Well, you will have to pry a Moleskine notebook and pen from my hands when I am dead.
The Moleskine, a venerable notebook made by Moda & Moda of Itally, and a Rotring fountain pen (either the classic Rotring 600 or the more recent Initial) make the best system for collecting ideas and notes anywhere I travel. Compared to the many PCs I’ve owned over the years, the Moleskine notebooks have never crashed and I have every single note I’ve ever made stored on a shelf in my office. Moleskines can be labeled and shelved for easy reference. If I need notes on a particular topic, such as e-books, which I am working on these days, I keep a notebook about just that topic. I also have general notebooks stored by date, so that with a little idea of when I had a discussion, I can quickly find the notes.
I keep two to five Moleskines, each dedicated to various topics or the current date, on my desk at all times. I pick which notebook to take to a meeting based on the topic to be covered. While I haven’t tried it, the Moleskine can now be pre-printed with your own templates, making the book completely personal from unwrapping.
Email archives, which I have dating back to 1998 (the previous mail accounts, back to 1988, were lost along the way), are a distant second in personal record-keeping. The fountain pen, which works reliably and never wears out—Rotring’s steel nibs could be used as a lethal weapon, then to write a graceful couplet—is always ready to record a thought. The Moleskine’s archival-quality paper ensures that, even after I am dead, someone will be able to excavate my thoughts. I’ll be writing in one of these notebooks until the very end.
Mitch Ratcliffe is a veteran journalist, media executive and entrepreneur. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 07/24/09
