I recently read the book Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman. It’s not exactly a biography of Satie, a composer who is best known for some lovely pieces he called Gymnopédies. It’s more of an offbeat appreciation of Satie and music in general–a quirky book with a non-traditional structure, parts of which are almost like a dictionary or index of alphabetical references. Here’s a couple of pages from the section covering the word “note”:

I was was of course excited to hear that Satie was a habitual note-taker, and wanted to know more about the “miniscule music -paper notebooks he always carried in his pocket.”

Unfortunately, it’s hard to find much information! There is an archive of Satie’s papers at Harvard which is described as mostly consisting of “autograph notes, drafts, and fragments of musical compositions such as piano works, ballets, incidental music, entr’actes, songs, and a mass. They are notated in 29 small composition books as well as on loose sheets.” But while the archive is catalogued in detail online, there are no photos.

I couldn’t find any other images of Satie’s notebooks, but he’s known to have done a few sketches on letters, and perhaps also in notebooks. (You can see one of them at this link, and some of his beautiful handwriting here.) I’ve even been to the Erik Satie Museum in Honfleur (which is odd and delightful) but if I saw any of his notebooks there, I don’t remember and didn’t take a photo.

The mention of the small notebooks with music-paper of course made me think of Moleskine’s music notebooks. I also thought I remembered having an older Moleskine whose paper band mentioned Satie as one of the supposed historic users, amongst the other usual call-outs of Hemingway, Chatwin, VanGogh, Picasso and/or Matisse. I searched through my stash of spares but couldn’t find anything mentioning Satie, so I’m not sure if it’s a figment of my imagination. If anyone else remembers seeing Satie’s name on a Moleskine, please let me know!