"My sketch-book shows that I try to catch things in the act."
Vincent Van Gogh
"I never travel without my notebook. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."
Oscar Wilde
"To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe."
Bruce Chatwin
"Sitting on a wine barrel, facing the sea, in the far south, I make notes in an authentic moleskine, a museum piece which Bruce gave me especially for this trip..."
Luis Sepulveda
"At the Closerie des Lilas I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in my notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème."
Ernest Hemingway
The picture that Snowdon took in 1982 would be quite enough: boots slung around his neck, rucksack on his shoulder, that troubled gaze... This picture of Chatwin is the very emblem of the traveler... In any airport where a flight for Patagonia is due to take off, a number of people pass their time by leafing through his book translated into various languages, which is read and devoured as though it were a tourist guide. And yet the last thing Chatwin would have wanted would be to "instigate" other travelers to follow his footsteps. As Hemingway and Céline before him, he always carried with him a notebook, bound in black imitation leather, with a piece of elastic that held the content safe. They were manufactured by an aged craftsman in Tours, and Chatwin had purchased the entire shop stock, he left some fifty notebooks packed full of his spontaneous impressions.
Now "Moleskines" are produced on an industrial level, an additional fetish for exploiting the myth and can now be found on bookshop counters, like empty novels to pack full of adventures. If he had ever imagined this, you can bet that he would've taken notes in a spiral bound notebook instead.
Despite himself, Chatwin became a myth and even came to be considered a kind of protective deity for traveler-writers.
Pino Cacucci
LA STAMPA, 14th January 1999