The Best Travel Notebook: Moleskine City Guides

Monday, April 28th, 2008

The Best Travel Notebook: Moleskine City Guides

I’ve become enamored with Moleskine’s city guides. These marvelous slip-in-your-pocket-sized notebooks include detailed street and transportation maps, oddles of blank (and acid-free) pages, handy tabbed sections, expandable pockets, and city-specific resources–the Milan version (as those who used them at the furniture fair know) includes contact info for the local helicopter rental plus a chart helpfully translating US shirt and shoe sizes into Italian.

The only bummer is that they are so pristinely chic–with crisp, beautifully blank pages suggesting all the thrilling adventures you’re about to have–that I never want to put a mark in them! I feel like my pedestrian thoughts and faltering penmanship are not worthy of their artful design! I need a fountain pen and Deep Thoughts!

But this is totally missing the point. They are meant to be defiled with your notations, observations, and most superficial thoughts. You needn’t be Hemingway, Van Gogh, or one of scores of the fancy designers who use them as sketchbooks. Just be your messy-handwriting-ed self and doodle/scribble away. Use them to plan a vacation or to take notes during a business trip.

I am especially delighted to put the new Chicago guide to use when I go to the Windy City next month. (My better half is exhibiting at The Museum of Science and Industry’s Green & Wired eco home show.) Especially now that I’ve come up with a solution to my mucking-them-up phobia: buy two of each! One to use, and one to keep on my bookshelf.

Buy ‘em here. –Jen Renzi

PS: And, as if I didn’t already adore Moleskine enough: they just made my day by announcing that a guide to my hometown–Philly!–is in the works for fall.

PPS: If you really need a fancy pen, try Pilot’s new eco-friendly version of its classic rolling ball–made from post-industrial recycled plastic.