Rational rants

Don't take my Moleskine notebook and Rotring pen

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Business & Technology

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.

posted by Mitch Ratcliffe
July 24, 2009 @ 3:23 pm

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