The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

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.