I’ve been meaning to do this for a while: a deep dive into the evolution of Moleskine notebook packaging over the 20 or so years they’ve been around.

I went through my collection of unused notebooks and found several distinct examples of different stages of their packaging design. I can’t 100% align these to when they were produced because I haven’t tracked exactly when I bought them all, and even if I had, I wouldn’t be able to tell exactly when they were manufactured. But I think I have a fairly accurate chronology here, based on my own memory and collection, increasing retail price stickers on some of the notebooks, and from the changing listing of products on the pamphlet included inside each notebook.

Here are the front covers of all the notebooks, followed by all the back covers. (You can see larger versions of all these images on Flickr here. I don’t link directly to the Flickr images because it seems to really slow down my website.)

You can see some pretty major transitions in the design, but there are subtle differences too. I laid these out in what I thought was chronological order, but after looking closely at everything, I realized that I probably should have put the sketchbook labeled S2 before S1, as I think the mention of watercolor on the front and the horizontal barcode on the back are indications that it is older. S2 also has a different ISBN number ending in -9414. I’m not sure why they would have changed it, but all the later examples have the ISBN ending in -1054.

G1 (for “graph”) is probably the oldest one I have. It is the only notebook that has two booklets inside– a simple one with the Moleskine story, and a separate one all in Italian listing various Moleskine products.

It is interesting to note that the 9×14 cm format is called “standard” and many of the page formats are only available in that size. Then there are various thick and thin softcover notebooks some of which also come in small (6.5 x 10.5 cm) and large (13 x 21 cm)– I guess these went on to be called Volants and Cahiers, but there is also mention of a 200 page “grande zibaldone” in the large size. The outside of the notebook has no barcode and doesn’t even mention Hemingway and Matisse. The booklet inside states “Moleskine is the legendary notebook that the European artists and intellectuals who made twentieth-century culture used…” and goes on to mention Matisse, Céline, Hemingway and Chatwin.

The ISBN number of the pocket squared notebook also seems to have changed along the way– G1 isn’t labeled with an ISBN, but the older G2 example ends in -9406. G3 ends in -102X, or -1023 in the 13-digit version– this ISBN is still in use. ISBN numbers usually don’t change when a product (typically a book) is substantially the same, so I’m not sure why they would have done this, other than wanting to have a distinction between newer and older stock for some reason. As you can see from the labels, it happened while they were still distributed by Kikkerland, before they switched to working with Chronicle.

G2 has the mention of Van Gogh, Matisse, Hemingway and Chatwin on the front. The pamphlet has a more familiar product line-up with two-page icons. The history begins “It is two centuries now that moleskine [note that it’s lower case] has been the legendary notebook of European artists and intellectuals…” and goes on to mention Matisse, Van Gogh, Hemingway and Chatwin. (I guess they decided Céline was too obscure.) S1 and S2 have this same booklet.

The spines of S1, S2, G1 and G2 have the European orientation where they are upside down while the notebook is face up. This then changes in later versions. In the earliest notebooks, the spine was the only way to tell the difference between ruled, squared or plain page formats.

G3 and S3 show the first major design change to the bellyband. The open notebook icon now appears, and they’ve simplified the tagline to just “The legendary notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, Chatwin.” Despite the similar exteriors, G3 still says Modo e Modo inside, while S3 has changed to just “Moleskine.” G3 has the same booklet inside as S1 and S2, but S3 has an expanded booklet featuring color printing, since at this stage, they’ve moved to color-coding the belly bands by page type. Sketchbooks remain blue, but now instead of all other page formats being orange, they only use orange for ruled. Squared are yellow and plain are green, etc. The history begins “Moleskine is the legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin.” The word Moleskine is now capitalized throughout, so they are really pouring it on thick with the claim of a longer history.

S4 marks where Moleskine starts to go downhill, in my opinion. They’ve changed the front tagline to just “Legendary notebooks” after getting a lot of backlash because Hemingway and Matisse didn’t really use the Moleskine brand. The history in the pamphlet has now been toned way down: “Today the Moleskine® brand identifies a series of objects that accompany the creativity and imagination of our world… The Moleskine notebook is the heir and successor to the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries…” You can see that at this stage, the cover overhang gets much bigger.

The later notebooks have booklets that just give the brand message and history and mention quality control. They have so many products at this point that they don’t even try to list them.

Anything that looks like S4 and beyond, I mostly bought by accident or just to test out the quality and compare current models. You can see the change where the sketchbooks are broken out under the “Art Plus” branding, which then shifted to the current “Art Collection” logo (I only had a watercolor notebook handy to show that branding). The only recently manufactured non-Art Collection Moleskine I own is the dotted red notebook, D1. This is current as of 2019. The belly bands now have stuff printed on the flip side so you can label your notebook with notes about its contents– on this one, the assumption is that you’ve used it for travel as it has a space to note countries visited, etc. (On the sketchbooks, there are some art-related tools to help you measure angles or draw circles.) The overhang bugs me but the construction otherwise seems ok compared to similar brands. The paper looks much lighter, less creamy in color than the older notebooks. At some point, I will get around to doing a full round of pen tests on this notebook to compare it to older ones. The sketchbook paper in recent models also seems lighter, but I’ve found that it has had variation over the years– sometimes lighter, sometimes creamier. Sometimes smoother, sometimes a little toothier. The current paper seems maybe a wee bit lighter, smoother and thinner than the older ones in my collection.

If I see older stock on eBay, I only consider notebooks that have the look of the earlier models up to and including S3/G3. (And I have to see photos of the actual item, not an icon or generic image of the older design.) I prefer the ones that look like S1, S2, G1 and G2, though occasionally these are so old they have loose elastics, and I think somewhere between there and the S3/G3 era, they ramped up production so much that quality started to be a little less reliable. I’m still willing to take a chance on them, especially the sketchbooks, since Moleskine appears to be discontinuing them in the pocket size.

I’ve noticed a few other minor variations on the front and back taglines in other older Moleskines that I’ve used– after about 2013 or so, I started saving the bellybands in the back pocket for future reference. It is interesting to see how Moleskine has refined and changed the way they present their brand to the world– for better or worse, they’ve changed the way notebooks are marketed and created a whole new mystique around the tools of creativity.