The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

You don’t need me to tell you what a Moleskine looks like, but you may not have considered how insistently its design sends messages to the ‘Contemporary Nomad’. The minimal black cover looks, at first glance, like it might be leather: robust, but also luxurious. The non-standard dimensions, a couple of centimetres narrower than the familiar A5, let you slip the notebook into a jacket pocket, and the rounded corners – which add considerably to the production cost – help with this. They also stop your pages from getting dog-eared and, together with the elastic strap and unusually heavy cover boards, confirm that the notebook is ready for travel. The edges of the board sit flush with the page block, ensuring that your Moleskine can never be mistaken for a printed book. In use, it lies obediently open and flat, and the pocket glued into the back cover board invites you to hide souvenirs – photos, tickets stubs, the phone numbers of beautiful strangers. Two hundred pages suggest that you have plenty to write about; the paper itself, tinted to a classy ivory shade and unusually smooth to the touch, implies that your ideas deserve nothing but the best, and the ribbon marker helps you navigate your musings. Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled Nike, Mercedes or Apple – and like the best cues, the messaging works on a subconscious level.

the journalist David Sax wrote a book, The Revenge of Analog, which depicted paper notebooks (along with vinyl LPs, board games and film cameras) mounting a spirited resistance against digital replacement.

Authors all kept notebooks, as did journalists, critics and other creative types – and the more assiduously they used those notebooks, the better their work seemed to be.

What could someone’s notebook tell us about them?

Why did keeping a diary bring happiness, or at least contentment?

Before paper, if you wanted to draw in western Europe, it helped to be born male and then take a vow of chastity, for parchment and ink were most often the preserve of clerics whose duty was to glorify the Word of God, not to waste expensive materials on merely personal impulses.

Paper, by comparison, could be used without preparation, and held the line of a stylus, a pen, chalk or charcoal, equally well. You could create shade or the illusion of depth with hatched parallel strokes, and Cennini supplied instructions for dying paper green, pink, grey, blue or purple. A ledger’s portability made any scene a viable subject; ‘nature,’ wrote Cennini, ‘is the best of all possible examples’. And, at a tenth of the price of parchment, cheap paper allowed artists to ‘always and without fail draw something every day’. All of these material advantages would have naturally led to the sketchbook’s next great benefit: a step change in the quality of preparation that an artist could put into a work. With the space afforded by a ledger with hundreds of leaves, an artist could not only privately draw from life, but also plan and revise a painting before committing to a final subject, design, composition or execution. Detailed preparation – repeated studies, leading to a final plan or cartoon – would have given Giotto a significant edge over his precursors, one visible in his complex, sophisticated compositions, and in his facility in the unforgiving medium of fresco. The sketchbook also allowed an artist to develop their own style and repertoire, an additional memory bank that collected a body of material to refer to at a later date.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote, a century after Cennini: And take a note… with slight strokes in a little book that you should always carry with you… preserved with great care; for the forms, and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, wherefore keep these sketches as your guides and masters.

Hundreds of years later, David Hockney would stress, with his characteristic directness, the importance of this process of reception and transmission: In one gallery they actually had a notice which said, ‘No Sketching.’ How obnoxious! I said, ‘How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?’

By ensuring that transactions were accountable and legally recognised, notebooks protected the poor from the rich, and became instruments of economic improvement and social empowerment.

No-one knows exactly when the gloriously sonorous noun zibaldone appeared, or what it originally meant. The earliest record of the word, in the mid-fourteenth century, refers to it as Florentine slang, without further definition, and we can only infer from context that it means something like ‘mess’ or ‘jumble’.The fifteenth-century merchant and art patron Giovanni Rucellai referred to his own zibaldone as ‘una insalata di più herbe’, a salad of many herbs, which gives an impression of something variegated and wholesome. But by then it had also become firmly attached to the notebook in one of its most enduring applications. For this informal culinary term came to signify a personal anthology, or miscellany. The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook. You could copy out as much or as little as you wanted, neatly or not, and refer to it a little, or as much, as you wanted. The collection could be poetry or prose, fictional or factual, thematic or random, religious or profane, in Latin or Tuscan, or any mixture of any of these components; you could even draw pictures in it. The notebook itself could be large or small, luxurious or utilitarian. Some better-off writers, such as the author Boccaccio (the son of a Bardi banker), had zibaldoni made of expensive parchment, and paid professional scribes to do the writing for them. Many users illustrated them, or commissioned elabora...

We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts’. You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.

In the late 1300s, Dutch and German adherents of the devotio moderna – ‘modern devotion’ – movement were encouraged to keep rapiaria. The name for these notebooks derives from the Latin rapere, meaning to seize; we might call them ‘grab-bags’. In these devotional notebooks, the pious collected phrases or ideas from their scriptural reading, and added their own spiritual insights; the act of writing led to further rumination, helping the writer benefit from the wise words they copied. The Imitation of Christ – a hugely popular book – started life as the rapiarium of its author, Thomas à Kempis, a monk from Zwolle. Most rapiaria remained private, though, and were often buried with their owners, and the practice died out within a century.

Indeed, for nearly all of Europe’s low-born, the very concept of ‘career’ would have seemed laughable; born to the land, or to a trade, you remained tied to it for life.

Before the invention of the sextant and chronometer allowed sailors to locate their positions out of sight of land, the portolan (or a rutter, in English) was Europe’s most important navigational tool. A handbook of tides and directions that used waypoints on land to direct sailors out at sea, and usually used in conjunction with a compass, it allowed a navigator to avoid reefs and rocks and steer a course along the coast or across open water.

Leonardo knew that the best way to look at something analytically is to draw it.

In its heyday, common-placing changed the way people navigated the modern era: ‘They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns’, writes the cultural historian Robert Darnton, of seventeenth-century readers. ‘They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it.’ As Europeans explored further, published more books, traded more goods, generated more paperwork, and in general made life more complicated for themselves, sorting information into manageable chunks enabled them to understand their world.

It is a strange thing, that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen, but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land-travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered, than observation. Let diaries, therefore, be brought in use.

But William’s 126-page record of the city makes him one of the first urban topographers, and illustrates a common paradox – that historians often learn more about a place from notes made by visitors than from records left by residents. Outsiders tend to be more acute observers than natives.

Far more commerically successful than Melville, Mark Twain carried notebooks everywhere too, having got into the habit while training to become the ‘cub’ pilot of a Mississippi steamboat. One stressful night, his chief, one Horace Bixby, tested young Samuel Clemens – Twain’s real name – on the stopping points above New Orleans. When the boy failed to recall any, Bixby offered the advice which Clemens subsequently lived by. ‘My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.’ Soon Clemens ‘had a note-book that fairly bristled with the names of towns, “points”, bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc’, and was well on his way to qualifying as a pilot himself. As Mark Twain, he stayed in the habit, keeping notes of everything, including, as they occurred to him, the pithy asides which made him one of the era’s most popular authors. He experimented with different formats, including a custom-made model whose pages had small protrusions: on completing the page, he would rip the tab off, making it easy to find his place again next time.

By framing his theories in a novel, Chatwin freed himself from the fact-checking responsibilities of the academic, and by employing the novelist’s techniques, he could sell those theories more convincingly to his reader. This sleight-of-hand makes The Songlines one of the most ambitious combinations of fiction and non-fiction since Moby-Dick. But where most reviewers of Melville’s novel had been irritated by this juxtaposition, Chatwin’s readers mostly responded with praise, acknowledging the gaps in his argument but admiring the artistry with which he presented it. Rave reviews led to the book hitting the bestseller charts around the world on publication in 1987, sparking as it did a global interest in Aboriginal culture and beliefs.

More associated with notebooks than any other English-language writer, Chatwin used them in the same ways that authors had for centuries. Like Boccaccio, he had kept zibaldoni of his wide-ranging reading, laying down seams of knowledge that could be mined years later. Like Petrarch, he had developed a practice of revision and redrafting that enabled him to hone his work. Like William Worcester, he had connected a landscape’s physical reality with the stories that the locals told of it. Like Defoe, he had used notebook entries to add interest to a first-person narrative. Like Melville and Twain and Leigh Fermor and a host of others, he had used notebooks to capture encounters, record impressions and train himself to pick the right words on the spot. But by giving his notebooks so prominent a role in the finished work he had done something new: he made them totems of the free-spirited creative. Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin’s biographer, rightly points to his becoming, posthumously, ‘an icon of the back-packer’, ‘the promotable ideal of the literate traveller’, someone who ‘set free other writers and encouraged them not to be tamed by conventional boundaries’. Playing each of these roles, he carries the notebook as an essential prop. And, knowingly or not, when he went to Alice Springs he had followed Francis Bacon’s advice, four centuries old, to the letter: Then he must have such a servant, or tutor, as knoweth the country.... Let him carry with him also, some card or book...

At sixteen or seventeen, he paid two pence for a tiny blank notebook which is now one of the most prized possessions of New York’s Morgan Library and Museum. Only five inches by three, and containing a hundred and sixteen pages within soft covers, this is as cheap and utilitarian as any notebook could be. And Newton, unlike Smith, wasted no space: ink fills the pages. This notebook was heavily used, and reading it gives us a priceless insight into the young Newton’s mind. He started writing into it from both ends at once, flipping it as he did so, so the second half of the book appears upside down. A common practice of the time, Newton uses it to separate practical ideas from a collection of linguistic titbits.

The apple story, in other words, was a deliberate myth-building exercise; and it was one of many. Close study of the Waste Book gives the lie to several of the myths of Newton’s solitary genius, myths that Newton himself propagated when he had become internationally famous.

While still a teenager, Newton had learned that even the smallest, cheapest notebook – costing only as much as a loaf of bread – could serve as the repository for all kinds of ideas, juxtaposing them so that connections became apparent, holding data until such time as they might become relevant, preserving calculations and observations without degradation. Always there, and infinitely versatile, it would equip him for investigations into colour, optics, medicine, navigation, phonetics, language, the laws of physics and the torments of his soul.

But Linnaeus’s most significant achievement was the Systema Naturae, a book which he steadily reworked until, with 1758’s tenth edition, it had reached a sophistication and consistency that today’s taxonomists still admire. Over the years the Systema grew from eleven oversized pages to over six thousand; when revising each edition, Linnaeus used special interleaved copies in which blank and printed pages alternated – practical hybrids of book and notebook. In it, Linnaeus organised mammals according to the number and type of their teeth; birds according to their bills and feet; fish according to the position of their fins; and so on, in a glorious summation of known life on earth.

Meanwhile, zoological, geological or ornithological observations became formal entries on loose foolscap sheets, where Darwin also described thousands of specimens and connected his observations, where possible, to the published literature. Between FitzRoy’s books and Darwin’s, the Beagle carried an up-to-date reference library, and in the field notebooks Darwin refers to the work of at least nineteen authors. As he worked his way through a field notebook, Darwin struck through its entries just as merchants struck through journaled transactions when copying them to a ledger. And if he hadn’t transferred a field notebook’s contents in full before he had to go ashore again, he would take a different one, so as not to risk losing what he already had. So the notebooks overlap, and the reader has to jump from one to another and back again to read the entries chronologically.

The transmutation notebooks are some of the most famous in the history of science, and there can’t be a clearer example of the notebook’s intellectual potential than Darwin’s story. Scratching quick, incoherent notes onto their tiny pages, he had used his field notebooks to prompt observation, interrogation and judgement of what he saw. Back on board the Beagle, Darwin turned these raw materials – just one hundred thousand telegraphic words – into nearly two thousand pages of systematic scientific notes, and an evocatively detailed diary. Then, in the ‘Red Notebook’ and its successors, he processed the arguments and ideas which would, in the six books he published in the decade after his voyage, make him one of the era’s most respected scientists – and then, in On the Origin of Species, change the way we think of life. All germinating from a pile of field notebooks that fit comfortably into a shoebox.

rising civil servant, Samuel Pepys, who in December 1659 bought the notebook which would become the first volume of his unsurpassed diary, a masterpiece that combined the self-examination of the ancient Greeks, the daily confession of medieval monks, the financial accounting of the Florentines, the public affairs of Marin Sanudo, the travel observations that Francis Bacon recommended, the trivial detail that Jonson had lampooned, and, like Eyre, the discord of an unhappy marriage.

The prolific Anglo-American novelist Henry James had a habit of collecting names for characters as yet unwritten. In the winter of 1894–95 he listed more than fifty in his notebook, each evoking, by association or pronunciation, attributes which might later be useful in his dense, morally nuanced stories.

By this point in his career, James was a conscientious note-taker, but he had not always been: he rued the fact that, in his twenties, he had ‘lost too much by losing, or rather by not having acquired, the note-taking habit’.

They had novel spiral, or coil, bindings, which had been invented in New Jersey in 1932 and rapidly caught on in schools and workplaces.

In 1976’s The Story-Teller, Highsmith’s protagonist Sydney accidentally leaves a horribly incriminating notebook – in which he speculates, innocently as it happens, about what it would feel like to commit a murder – in the village shop.

Pulling back, we can see that, despite the wide variety of ways that writers used their notebooks, they broadly fall into three modes. Firstly, nearly all authors habitually use notebooks for immediate observation: capturing words, lines, scenes, ideas, transient moments, for later use. Secondly, some – but far from all – use them for drafting and redrafting. Austen, Mary Shelley and Woolf all did so; James Joyce’s notebooks gained blocks of vivid colour, as he used red, blue and green crayons to highlight successive passes through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The distinction between these two modes recalls – yet again – the two-stage process of the Italian bookkeepers, who had used their memoriale to record transactions in the moment, then copied them over to the double-entry giornale or quaderne for analysis and reconciliation. Artists, essayists, scientists had all adopted similar practices: Agatha Christie’s striking-through of ideas that had been employed in a book echoes the bookkeeping practice of striking through matching credits and debits. But writers like James, Highsmith and Christie also used notebooks in a third way, to write about their own writing even as they wrote. With the ever-present blank pages as sounding boards, they could enter into dialogue with their own work, come to considered judgement about it, refine it, and improve the end product. If your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium – and your mirror.

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Expressive writing should be free from constraint, and it’s up to the writer to decide what topics count as emotionally traumatic: researchers have found that the more specific their instructions are, or the more they constrain the topics that participants can write about, the less effective the exercise is. Any structure in the writing needs to come from the participant, not the researcher.

If you experience fresh trauma, when should you start to write about it? The research suggests that you shouldn’t rush to put pen to paper: one to two months after the event is probably best, but no sooner. And there’s no difference between writing completed in one day, or over several days or weeks.

As we verbally process trauma, we have to name and label our emotions: and this practice, in turn, is known to improve life satisfaction. It’s known as the A-to-D emotion theory, in which ‘analogue’ emotions (non-verbal, woolly, hard to organise, imprecise) are turned into ‘digital’ (verbal, cognitive, easy-to-organise) chunks. ‘Your

Pennebaker also stresses the importance of working memory, the sort of short-term remembering we do when multiplying two numbers in our head, taking notes in a lecture, or getting the right round of drinks at the bar. ‘People who are under stress, who are worried about stuff – that’s taking up their working memory,’ he tells me. ‘They’re not paying attention to what they’re doing, where they are going, so they’re more likely to have injuries, or do poorly on tests, and so forth.’ Any kind of memory that still causes you everyday stress, even at a level that you can’t consciously perceive, eats into that working memory. Several studies have shown that expressive writing counters that interference by organising the events or experiences that we are obsessed with. ‘What this would mean is,’ Pennebaker concludes, ‘if I have more working memory, I should do better on exams: and people do. If I have better working memory, I should interact more with my friends, and listen to you when you’re telling me about your problems, and be more present. In a sense, my mind is clearer, I should sleep better – and people do.’

‘Writing is really beneficial when things are unknown, they’re complicated.’ So when you find yourself in a war zone, or a divorce, or you lose your job – then, keeping an everyday diary will have benefits. The same applies ‘when you’re suffering from hormone poisoning’, he continues, referring to our teenage years.

There have been unambiguously positive results for the practice of ‘gratitude journaling’, as popularised by Oprah Winfrey in the 1990s. As simple as writing down three positive things about a day, this exercise is widely prescribed by therapists and educational psychologists working with adults or children in difficult circumstances.

Graham didn’t stop noting, even in extreme peril: one entry from a 1986 flight to Brazil reads: 2:39 P.M. – Pilot announces hydraulic failure. Must make emergency landing. Happily, the plane made it, and Graham was soon able to record: 3:20 P.M – Take bus to hotel. What he had not noted, however, was his inability to hold his terrified wife’s hand during the pilot’s announcement. He had been writing, of course.

His middle-school classmates would end each lesson with a more-or-less faithful record of their learning, but he was left only with educationally useless broken-off sentences in a scrawled hand, and the drawings that he couldn’t stop himself from making. And while his schoolwork suffered, Ryder was bullied by schoolmates too: it was clear that something was going badly wrong for the boy. So when the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder arrived it came as no surprise. The condition’s symptoms can include a short attention span, being easily distracted, making careless mistakes, forgetfulness, inability to concentrate on tasks, difficulty following instructions, constantly changing activity, difficulty with organisation, being unable to sit still, impatience, impulsiveness… small wonder that Ryder’s teachers were frustrated – as was he. And yet, he would find a way round the obstacles that the condition posed. Faced by a desperate need to make school bearable, the young Ryder came up with his own solution: he would make lists – not just lesson notes, but lists of everything. As he stopped trying to record everything the teachers said, the scrawled half-notes gave way to list after list. Bullet points filled his pages, and in the process he discovered that, by rephrasing ideas as economically as possible, he could train his mind to stay on topic, and follow lessons through to their conclusion. To make the notes intelligible, he trained himself to write in cap...

‘I realised that doodling in my notebook actually helped me pay attention,’

‘Over time I focused much more on the design of the page, the text layouts rather than the design of the lettering.’ This was clearly some kind of breakthrough. ‘It kept me engaged, and I realised I was able to focus more, take better notes, and process the information.’

Ryder draws a distinction between the daily notes that he was making and a conventional journal or diary. ‘One of my English teachers made it a point for us all to keep a long-form journal every day,’ he recalls, ‘but I quickly grew to resent it, because I didn’t have anything to write about unless it was being bullied, and I didn’t want to write about what I had for lunch, so journaling quickly became useless.’ Instead, he found that shorter, less reflective entries, laid out with visual appeal, were easy to maintain and refer to. He listed every day, and gradually developed ways to managing the listed items, using four categories, each with their own bullet symbol. The first one was the simplest: ● for a task to do; then ✘ as Ryder completed it. Nothing more complicated than anyone would do with a shopping list. Ryder had always found it difficult to think ahead, so he introduced a couple of other icons to help him do so: › showed when an incomplete task was moved to the next day’s list, while ‹ tagged a task that had been deferred and placed on another future list for attention the following month. Again, nothing too surprising, but this private system of icons56 ensured that nothing was forgotten, and allowed Ryder to break down complicated tasks or substantial long-term goals into small, manageable chunks. It also let him change his priorities as circumstances demanded.

But there is something substantial at the base of the bullet journal method, a solid core of practices that psychologists and time-management experts alike recognise as beneficial. For years, my own diaries shared many features with Ryder’s journals, and I can testify that combining the prospective (future plans) and retrospective (diary entries) works for me. The combination of emotional organisation, practical task management and intentionality – even the fun of doodling or indulging more advanced artistic impulses – makes keeping a notebook not just useful, but fun.

In the 1970s, nurses there had realised that patients needed to recover from intensive care, as well as in it, and it was they who started keeping patient diaries as a way of helping their patients make sense of their experiences. They came up with a beautifully simple practice: each day, a nurse writes an informal diary entry telling the patient what they have done, what has been done to them, and how they are. ‘We try to put ourselves into the patient’s place and describe what is happening, and how we think the patient is experiencing it,’ as one nurse puts it. The diary contains no medical information. Instead, the keynote is empathy,

An accomplished poet, performer and broadcaster, Rosen unfurls long, copious sentences that answer not only the question you ask but two or three other, more interesting ones that you didn’t.

Pieve San Stefano, a small town near Florence, declared itself the ‘Città del diario’ in 1984, opening a museum – the charmingly named Piccolo Museo del Diario – to which any diary may be donated. France’s Association pour l’autobiographie followed in 1992, Germany’s Tagebucharchiv in 1998, London’s Great Diary Project in 2007, and the Nederlands Dagboekarchief in 2009. All of these collections offer to preserve and catalogue any personal diaries they are sent, giving historians a new kind of resource, less systematic than a traditional library yet wonderfully idiosyncratic, and presenting – as the Piccolo Museo puts it – ‘history told from below’. Like the Old Weather Project, the archives use volunteer readers to decipher, describe and catalogue the diaries and journals in their possession. At some point, no doubt, some of this work will be assigned to AI, allowing millions of handwritten pages to be transcribed and indexed for digital search. Who knows what stories that process will unearth?