The Tunes of Two Sketchbooks

I now have way more paper than I need. I stopped by Arch Sup­plies and picked up the last of the Mole­sk­ine blank books that was not marked «Made in Chi­na». There’s no way for me to run a dou­ble-blind study on myself, so I’m left just with plain ol’ observation.

Prompt­ed by a dis­cus­sion at moleskinerie.com the first thing I did was smell them. A bit odd, but they are reput­ed to have a «musty old book» smell prized by those that real­ly love their Mole­sk­ines. The old­er vari­ety does have an odor a bit dif­fer­ent from the rest; the old­er vari­ety smells like a paper­back tak­en from my grand­moth­er’s shelf. It is admit­ted­ly a pleas­ant, nos­tal­gia-induc­ing odor. Since scent is the most sub­tly and pow­er­ful­ly evoca­tive of all the sens­es, I can see how this would be an amaz­ing brand-rein­force­ment. Like the new car smell (that’s sprayed on to new cars nowa­days), open­ing a Mole­sk­ine could evoke sense mem­o­ries of libraries or the redis­cov­ery of a long-for­got­ten book.

The new Mole­sk­ines have an odor more like print­er’s ink or paint. If I were inspect­ing a ruled or squared note­book, I’d think it could be a change in the ink, but these are blanks I’m com­par­ing. Right away here’s evi­dence that some­thing in the paper for­mu­la changed when Mole­sk­ine shipped the man­u­fac­ture off to China.

Well, this was nev­er to be an exhaus­tive bat­tery of tests, so I hope you weren’t expect­ing too much. What I did was write in both note­books. That’s it.

Park­er ‘51’ with Pri­vate Reserve Vel­vet Black was fine in the old book and the new. I saw some occa­sion­al hair­line spreads, but nei­ther not­i­ca­ble enough nor often enough to be con­cerned about.

The old­er-style note­book took the ink from my Kure­take brush-pen sur­pris­ing­ly well. There’s def­i­nite­ly show-through on the back side of the page, but a brush is about as wet as it’s pos­si­ble to lay down ink with­out pour­ing it on the page straight from the bottle.

Noodler’s Hunter Green laid down with my Rotring Ini­tial shows some feath­er­ing, but not so bad­ly as with the new­er paper. It does show through pret­ty dramatically.

The dif­fer­ence between the papers in these two books is not dra­mat­ic, but cer­tain­ly enough to sug­gest that send­ing the work off to Chi­na has erod­ed the qual­i­ty of the paper which frankly is the weak point of the Mole­sk­ine to begin with. No mat­ter what else, a note­book needs be judged on the qual­i­ty of the paper. Mole­sk­ine paper is a step above Mead­’s com­po­si­tion books (back when they were made in the USA; two steps if com­par­ing to today’s Chi­na-made Mead paper), but only a step.

There’s a great sto­ry in Ger­ald Wein­berg’s The Secrets of Con­sult­ing about a restau­rant with great chow­der that dis­cov­ers that it can save a few cents on every bowl if it uses a less expen­sive ingre­di­ent. They test it on blind­fold­ed cus­tomers who can’t tell the dif­fer­ence an make the change. They do this with many of the ingre­di­ents and at the end, nobody is show­ing up at the restau­rant because the chow­der is lousy.

The moral of the sto­ry: no dif­fer­ence plus no dif­fer­ence makes a big difference.

Moda & Moda is claim­ing that ship­ping the print­ing and bind­ing to Chi­na makes no dif­fer­ence. Hope­ful­ly they will learn that no dif­fer­ence plus no dif­fer­ence makes a big difference.

So here’s my fan­ta­sy of the moment: Miquel­rius or Claire­fontaine buys Moda & Moda and changes noth­ing about the Mole­sk­ine except for the paper stock. I use a Miquel­rius note­book to test out my pens or new inks and every time I open it up I’m struck by the qual­i­ty of the paper. If Miquel­rius made a note­book with 6mm rul­ing instead of 8mm, a stiff cov­er, durable bind­ing and maybe an enve­lope in the back, it would be a home run.

Claire­fontaine may make a hard­back note­book, but I can’t tell. Their web­site joins the Hall of Shame for idi­ot­i­cal­ly lis­ten­ing to the moron who thinks that web­sites should be built in Flash. The HTML ver­sion of their web­site is in both French and Eng­lish, but if you want infor­ma­tion about any of their prod­ucts, it’s only Flash and only in French. Claire­fontaine, fire your Web developers.