Moleskine notebooks are the successors to the legendary notebook famously used by artists and writers including Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway.
The original was a simple black rectangle with rounded corners, an elastic page-holder and an internal expandable pocket, produced for over a century by a small French bookbinder that supplied the stationery shops of Paris.
Becoming increasingly rare, in the1980s it vanished entirely, until a small Italian publisher brought it back to life in 1997, since when Moleskine has become synonymous with culture, travel and personal identity.