I’ve been paying a fair amount of attention to Moleskine notebooks for many years, so I sometimes think I can’t possibly discover anything new and interesting to say about them. Yet once in a while I discover some limited edition or series that I had never noticed. The Moleskine Zoom collection was one, and I recently came across another: a Moleskine Touch notebook.

This was an eBay find– I wasn’t even quite sure what I was going to get, as the item description had some incorrect info, but I could see in the listing photos that this Moleskine notebook seemed to have a grey flannel-like cover. The band mentioned a limited edition of “four pleasant textures.”

The design of the packaging indicated that this would probably have been from the late 1990s or early aughts. It’s definitely from before 2006, as it says Modo e Modo inside, and the back cover shows Kikkerland as their distributor, a relationship I believe ended in 2008. The booklet inside is also consistent with other examples that date to the very early 2000s, probably pre-2002. (See my previous post with more details on The Evolution of Moleskine Notebook Packaging.)

The notebook came in a translucent plastic slipcover. It’s an interesting choice– if it was for protection, they could have just shrinkwrapped it like other Moleskines. But I guess they wanted people to be able to touch all the Touch notebooks! The texture is indeed pleasant– it’s actually felt, a bit rougher than flannel. The fabric adds some bulk to the covers, making it quite a lot thicker than other Moleskine notebooks with the same page count. The insides are exactly the same as any other Moleskine of the time.

The only other trace of this collection that I could find was this page on Lovenotebooks.com: Moleskine Special Edition Touch Address Books . You can see all four textures that were originally offered– in addition to felt, there was Crocodile (faux, obviously), Dots (not sure what it’s actually made of but it seems to be fabric of some sort), and Woven (seems to actually be woven strips of faux-leather).

This collection isn’t as interesting to me as the Zoom Moleskines, but I like that it’s a relatively understated variation on the classic black Moleskine theme. And it’s always fun to find something old and yet new, at least to me– a relic from the early days of the Moleskine brand.