This is the penultimate read in my Book Booty post from January, and although I’ve enjoyed the other four books read-and-reported on to date, so far this is my favourite.

The Notebook: A History Of Thinking On Paper (hereafter The Notebook), written by Roland Allen and published by Profile Books, is non-fiction. In terms of secondary categories, it is clearly history, but it also charts social, cultural, and technological change over (circa) the past eight hundred years.

So-o, onto what The Notebook is really all about — which a friend considers to be “heartland Helen.” 😀

In terms of the first part, I can’t summarise better than the material on the inside cover of the book, paraphrased as follows:

“The notebook has shaped our thoughts for eight hundred years. … In this highly original history, Roland Allen reveals the notebook’s surprising and profound influence. … In medieval Italy, the blank ledger revolutionised international trade … At sea, the logbook expanded horizons. Artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Frida Kahlo, scientists* from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, writers from Chaucer to the modern era: all created works forged in their notebooks. …

We hear how Bruce Chatwin inspired Maria Sebregondi to create** the Moleskine … (drawing on an anecdote in The Songlines [1987] ) … how Agatha Christie plotted a hundred murders and Bob Dylan drafted Blood On The Tracks. He describes how bullet-journaling can be used to combat ADHD and, movingly, how diaries kept by nurses can ease the trauma of reawakening from a coma.”

On its own, this summary probably makes clear why I described the book as charting social, cultural, and technological change. In many ways, the making and increasingly widespread use of paper, then binding it into notebook form, is the major technological change that drives the rest, starting with the blank ledger and double-entry bookkeeping, and the earliest form of travel diaries and ship’s logs.

But the accompanying change was not only cultural, with artists and mathematicians seizing on the new technology, but also hugely social, starting with the Florentine ricorda — “part account book, part memoir, part family record-keeping” — and zibaldone or personal miscellany, on any topic of personal interest. The notebook soon became European, though, with usages as diverse as “friendship books” and the “commonplace book”, credited to Erasmus, which collated information organised on themes.

Portrait by John Hayls, 1666

The commonplace book, in its turn, shaped the diary (with Samuel Pepys among the more famous exponents), journal, and sketchbook. Over successive centuries, as literacy and education expanded in unison with notebook technology, the use of such books also saw profound social shifts: from the upper to the middle, and then working classes, and from being the sole preserve of men to becoming widely used by women.

I’m sure readers here won’t be surprised to learn that I found the chapter on authors’ use of notebooks profoundly interesting. I was also struck by the similarities between zibaldone and “friendship books” comparative to the “dibby books” kept by many fellow students during my early high school years.

In terms of scientific knowledge, the importance of Newton and Darwin’s notebooks can’t be overstated, and I found these sections fascinating. I was equally absorbed by the account of the development and effectiveness of journals to combat trauma, as well as the (mis)use of the police notebook in order to pervert the course of justice in several famous (or more correctly, infamous) instances in the UK.

The account I found most most moving and heartwarming, however, was that of the so-called “patient diaries” used from 1952 to the present time to help ICU patients make sense of their experiences, particularly when they have been in an induced coma. These notebooks are not kept by, but rather for the patient, with entries made by medical staff but also visitors, both family and friends, relating what has occurred during that lost time.

UK poet and children’s author, Michael Rosen, spent 48 days in an induced coma during the worst of the Covid pandemic. He described the diary kept for him as:

“…‘every word a gem, a jewel’ … With no memories of his own, he was overwhelmed by what the diary revealed, its simple assertion of individual humanity amid institutional chaos, of a future despite the present, of life in the face of death.”

Yet all of this dear readers, is only a very small part of the wonderful material contained in The Notebook. So you need not fear that by reading this post you now know all that is contained therein — there is a great deal more and all of it equally compelling.

As the “compelling” suggests, I found The Notebook fascinating. It’s also accessible, engagingly written, and very, very readable. (Although I love historical non-fiction, it does not always, sadly, embody these three criteria.) I’m fairly confident, too, that anyone who not only loves history, but also the history of knowledge and advances in human thinking, will love it as much as I do.

Needless to say, having rung that paean, I’m thoroughly recommending it.

I read the hardcover edition, 416 pages, first published in 2023. As noted in the Book Booty (aka “to-be-read”) post, although I bought this particular book as a gift for a family member, I have subsequently borrowed it to read myself. Since I like it so much, though, I may have to get my own copy. I only hope I manage to find another hardback, because it’s a beautiful edition.

Handwritten beginnings for “Thornspell” — in, yes, a notebook

* Of course, Leonardo da Vinci was also a scientist, although as The Notebook explains, this 
aspect of his life was not appreciated until his notebooks were effectively rediscovered and 
transcribed in the late 19th century.

** In fact, she "re-created" or revived le vrai moleskine, which was beloved of Bruce Chatwin 
but the last firm making them had gone out of business.