The Songlines

Improved Essays
When you start your search for the perfect notebook, all the options can be quite overwhelming. Barnes and Noble alone has over one hundred different options. Amazon.com has over seven thousand. Starting out, most people are concerned with the outside cover, the size, or how it will look sitting on a table. Your notebook tells a story.
Composition books make us think of classes, flowery bright ring bound notebooks conger up memories of hearts with names inside passed to our childhood friends in secret, and thick brown leather shows professionalism in the adult world. Any writer will tell you that when you’ve made it halfway through it becomes an extension of yourself. A well-loved notebook that’s filled with hopes and dreams, ideas and plans,
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In 1986 esteemed travel writer Bruce Chatwin released his final book entitled The Songlines. The Songlines is combination fiction and non-fiction book about Bruce’s travels through Australia to research Aboriginal song and its connections to nomadic travel. In this book, Bruce describes one of his beloved notebooks as a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band (Chatwin, 1986). These notebooks are known as carnets moleskines, or Moleskines had become harder to come by as the last maker, a small family in tours, had retired. In 1995 Maria Sebregondi was reading The Songlines and became inspired by Chatwin’s love for these small black notebooks. When she began to research the Moleskines, she discovered that Chatwin was only one of many influential artists who swore by the notebooks. Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Breton and more all had Moleskines. Inspirited by the rich history of the product, she took the idea of resurrecting the books to Modo & Modo, a small Milanese stationery company with great success. Modo & Modo trademarked the name Moleskine and started production on a small run of 5000 for a 1997 release. By 1998 they ramped up production to 30,000 and had expanded into the European market. Today, while Moleskine spends very little on traditional advertising, they sell over 10 million of these books a year. Their best form of advertising is the customers who swear by the books like Chatwin did in 1986 (Harkin 2001). These historical notebooks had taken the artistic community by storm due to their history and unmatched

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