Livescribe Notebooks by Moleskine

In the first few pages of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, he describes his time at a Parisian café, noting his surroundings: “I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.” Perhaps it was a Moleskine notebook, which the famed writer was known to carry.

Today, nearly a century after Hemingway’s time in Paris, the stationery brand continues to encourage aspiring writers to record these standout moments, albeit with more technological evolution. Thanks to a recent partnership with Oakland-based “smartpen” company Livescribe, Moleskine paper notebooks are getting a digital upgrade. Ink and paper fanatics can now write and transfer handwritten scribbles from paper to a digital device in real time via Bluetooth technology. The Livescribe instrument works by recognizing a non-repeating dot pattern that fills Moleskine’s signature cream-coloured pages. Little icons in the lower corners of the notebook can be used to start, pause, or stop recording a “pencast”, an additional feature of the pen that signals the iOS device it’s synced with to capture audio as well while writing—a handy administrative assistant for important meetings and notes.

Keeping with the classics, the journals feature familiar rounded corners, an elastic closure, an expandable inner pocket, and two new bookmarks printed with Livescribe buttons and controls. Simplicity for tomorrow’s Hemingway, to pen and submit the next great novel.