Read Mr Bruce Chatwin’s Australian Aboriginal odyssey The Songlines in this new travel-journal-inspired Moleskine form .

Who’d have thought we’d ever feel nostalgic for the days of the personal travel blog? Yes, even those relentlessly updated, furiously ignored Wordpress monstrosities (circa 2006) are probably better than the kind of thing we’re stuck looking at now, in 2017. Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook or some other megalithic social-media oppressor, we’re bombarded with endless streams of carefully curated sunsets, tans, cocktails and exotic breakfasts 24 hours a day, January to December. Is there ever an era in which we’ve been more fatigued by our fellow-humans’ relentless urge to travel – and brag about it?

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s easy to forget, while scrolling through awful friends’ #poolvibes and @sohohouse shoutouts, that travel, at its best, is not just about growing organic reach, but about broadening the mind. This July, a neat reminder of this fact comes in the form of a new, limited edition of pioneering travel writer Mr Bruce Chatwin’s classic Australian odyssey The Songlines, published by Vintage Classics in association with artsy notebook brand Moleskine. The edition, limited to 1,000 copies, includes a leather-bound copy of the book, as well as a blank Moleskine notebook in which, via a motto emblazoned on the cover, the owner is encouraged to “Enjoy your own travel writing”.

The pairing of the two names – Chatwin and Moleskine – is more than a marketing gimmick (though it is also, admittedly, a good one). In fact, Mr Chatwin was a great admirer of the original “Moleskine” notebooks – the oilcloth-bound “carnets moleskins” that he would pick up every time he went to Paris. In the late 1980s, when he was writing The Songlines, these were no longer in production, which is the reason for Mr Chatwin’s oft-quoted exclamation: “To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries: to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.”

Notebooks, too, are integral to the book’s structure. Although The Songlines is ostensibly about the religious customs of Aboriginal Australian communities, in particular, the titular songlines – invisible paths representing ancestral myths, which stretch across and map out the continent and are remembered via songs – it’s also populated with disconnected notes from Mr Chatwin’s travels among nomadic communities, as well as quotations from great thinkers past and present. As we follow the amusing and often ill-fated attempts of Mr Chatwin to discover what he can about the songlines, we are also encouraged to think more about the nature of travel itself. Why is it we travel? What does it do to us? What does it mean? The experimental structure, which becomes looser and looser as the book continues, suggests that all such experiences are a stepping-stone to serious thought, a conduit for greater understanding of both humanity and the world it inhabits.

The word “inspiring” gets thrown around a lot in 2017, but if anything deserves such an epithet, it is a book like this. Packaged with an empty notebook, it’s almost a reprimand to the reader –  a reminder that, like Mr Chatwin, we have the ability to do, and think, more interesting things. Perhaps there’s hope for travel yet.

The Songlines: Moleskine Special Edition (Vintage Classics) by Mr Bruce Chatwin is out now

Keep up to date with The Daily by signing up to our weekly email roundup. Click here to update your email preferences