[From Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (dir. Griffin Dunne, 2017). Click for a larger view.]
Joan Didion’s penchant for notebook-keeping is well known: see her essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” From Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (2023):
After her death in 2021, Didion’s executors discovered brand new Moleskines in quantities that suggested that Didion had been one of those Barnes & Noble customers who bought one on every visit. They bundled them into three lots and sold them at auction with the rest of the contents of her Upper East Side apartment. Every lot went for over $9,000: an average of over $800 for each unused notebook, still in its shrink-wrap. Those that had actually been written in were not for sale.You can see the three lots here: 1, 2, 3.
As I have confessed in these pages, I am a prisoner of Moleskine.
Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts (Pinboard)
comments: 4
Yes but how do YOU pronounce it?
LOL! I say mohl-uh-SKEE-nuh, but MOHL-skin is also common.
I’ve heard mohl-uh-SKEE-nay
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that, but it sounds more Italian (appropriately more) to me. By the way, the company says there’s no official pronunciation — everything’s okay by them. The CEO in this video sounds like he’s saying MOH-lay-skin:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-09-18/moleskine-ceo-on-future-of-paper-in-a-digital-world-video
For some reason, Blogger isn’t letting me embed a link in a comment on my own comment.
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