During his travels, the author Bruce Chatwin famously scribbled in small black notebooks with covers made of oilcloth, a tightly woven cotton coated in linseed oil; each was wrapped in an elastic band. He stocked up on them at a Parisian paper store and took them on trips to Brazil, Afghanistan and Australia and to a dinner meeting in New York with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Chatwin wrote about the notebooks themselves in his 1987 book “The Songlines,” invoking the French name for them, “carnets moleskins.” He also lamented that the moleskines were no longer being manufactured. When an Italian designer named Maria Sebregondi read Chatwin’s book nearly a decade later and discovered that the moleskine style of notebook had also been used by Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh and Ernest Hemingway, she decided to trademark the moleskine name and revive the notebooks.

Since then, Moleskine notebooks have become an extra appendage for would-be Chatwins and van Goghs. But now they are competing with tablets and smartphones, and apps that allow people to explore their creativity.

The story of Moleskine reveals the challenges of keeping a traditional product relevant in an era of quickly evolving digital technology.