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| New refillable Moleskine® cover jackets by Parvum Opus. |
Well, perhaps it's not quite spring yet, but here in Michigan, a 40+ degree sunny day like today can certainly bring on a case of spring fever! And just in time, we've introduced a new series of colorful jackets for everyone's favorite notebooks from Moleskine®. Even though I make books here in the bindery, I adore filling my Moleskine cahier journals with notes, sketches, doodles.. They've been my favored sketchbooks for many years. The Moleskine covers
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An interior view of the jacket, lined in
Italian book cloth. The pockets along
the edges accept the front and back
covers of the Moleskine® cahier.
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| It takes many tiny cuts to form the beautifully rounded corners on our Moleskine® jackets. |
It's such fun to design a new range for the bindery, especially as we find we've tapped into the shared obsession surrounding the Moleskine® cahiers. Keeping journals or commonplace books is nothing new, of course, and stunning historical examples exist. If Pinterest search results are any indication, note-taking, sketching and pleine air painting are alive and well, despite the ease of 'electronic options'.
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| An incredible example from the past: A page from Carl Linnaeus' commonplace book, 1726-1727. You can see and read the entire archive thanks to The Linnean Society of London. |
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| And a beautiful example from the present: Architectural sketches by Chema Pastrana, via Pinterest. |
Are you familiar with commonplace books? According to Wikipedia:
"Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books were essentiallyscrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.
"Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means "a theme or argument of general application", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's commonplace book. Scholars have expanded this usage to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual.
Commonplace books are not diaries nor travelogues, with which they can be contrasted: English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote the 1706 book A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, "in which techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches were formulated. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion. Commonplace books, it must be stressed, are not journals, which are chronological and introspective." [1] By the early eighteenth century they had become an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations and definitions. They were even used by influential scientists. Carl Linnaeus, for instance, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae (which is the basis for the system used by scientists today)."
Whether you keep commonplace books, journals, diaries, vade mecums or doodle pads, we're delighted to share in the long-running and very human enthusiasm for putting pen to paper. Enjoy!
