The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

Cai Lun, a Han dynasty eunuch, is said to have been responsible for the invention of paper,

Invention of paper

This all sounds oddly paper-oriented for a modern accountancy course. She’s training for a profession that lives in software – Excel, QuickBooks, Sage, SAP, Stripe – yet its technical vocabulary is a lexicon of papery metaphors. The bought ledger, cash book, general ledger and journal are a company’s everyday records, while the bookkeeper is one of its key professions. We judge a company’s health from its balance sheet; we write down – or, worse, write off – assets to calculate book value; and when we sell a company we open the books to potential buyers. In particular they will want to see the order book, which, hopefully, shows that we operate at a good margin and don’t cook

Accounting has its terms based on an incredible paper-oriented vocabulary

Historian Jacob Soll makes a powerful claim: ‘Without double-entry accounting, neither modern capitalism nor the modern state could exist.’

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.

Today, just as every corporation works out its balance sheet and profit and loss according to rules devised in Florence in the thirteenth century, every capitalist country is, in theory at least, run along similar rational, well-organised lines. Pacioli’s Summa proved to be one of the most consequential books of all time.

But common-placing is never an end in itself. It’s always about producing something afterwards, or preparing you for public life.’

The physical labour of copying by hand also fixed the quotation more firmly in the mind. As yet another scholarly excerpter, the Jesuit Jeremias Drexel, put it, Notae propriae, notae optimae: ‘your own notes are the best notes’.

Copying, he says, ‘can calm and steady your state, not to mention improve it, for while the transcribing may appear to be a form of close and exclusive concentration, it has an equally important element of peaceable meditative mindlessness as well, like playing with a paper clip’.

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 mathematicians remained hopeless in the face of movement: they could not calculate, or describe, the flight of a ball, the orbit of a moon, or the acceleration of a falling object, in objective numerical terms. This was the challenge that Newton set himself: the mathematics of fluxions, which we today know as calculus.

For hundreds of years since, that story has been used to introduce the subject to classrooms around the world. There is just one problem. ‘The manuscripts do not support this story,’ says Niccolò Guicciardini, from the University of Milan. ‘Because the conception of gravity that Newton had – and also his mathematics – was very different from the mature theory of universal gravitation that Newton developed in the Principia – much later.’ The apple story, in other words, was a deliberate myth-building exercise; and it was one of many.

he retreated to a private room, propped his sword against a door, and ran himself through with it three times. In the meantime, the lobsters had arrived, but the kitchen servants found him too late. Before their eyes Vatel bled to death. The festivities continued, uninterrupted.

Wow

researchers ‘ought to remember Bacon’s aphorism, that Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man’.

I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.

‘Keep a diary, and someday it’ll keep you,’ advised Mae West in the 1937 movie Every Day’s a Holiday,

If your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium – and your mirror.

The results were dramatic: Pennebaker’s study revealed that those people he’d asked to write about trauma went to the doctor at about half the rate of people in the control group, who’d written about routine matters. They used less aspirin, too. The correlation, he would later write, was ‘exceptionally powerful’, and unambiguous: ‘when people write about upsetting experiences it has a positive health effect upon them.’

Result of people who expressed their traumas vs those who didn't

what do we know about expressive writing and how it works? For one thing, it defies our preconceptions about men finding it difficult to process emotions, or women dwelling on them overmuch: multiple meta-analyses of these experiments show no consistent differences between the sexes. The same applies to ethnicity, mother tongue, education, social status and age: children, maximum-security prisoners, pensioners, students, professionals – everyone enjoys similar benefits.

Ryder’s website offered introductions to ‘BuJo’, as it came to be known, in twenty languages. Suddenly, by around 2018, bullet journaling was everywhere. It was a thing.

This is the story of Bullet Journal that I had no idea. Created by a person who suffered with ADHD Incredible

Simply by picking up a pen you could regain some sense of agency, and think at a better pace – with the added benefit that, as you complete a notebook, you make something unique and personal.

Intensive care was invented in Copenhagen in 1952, in reaction to a devastating outbreak of polio.

Intensive care invention

One last observation. The patient diary’s origins among the needles and tubes of Danish wards had nothing to do with laboratories, Big Pharma or international conferences. It was not an invention of consultants, surgeons or doctors. Nurses came up with it, repurposing an everyday item, making it the epitome of a front-line, grass-root, hands-on solution: pragmatic, compassionate, effective – and cheap. They invented a new genre of notebook writing, the therapeutic diary which the beneficiary has no part in composing; turning a plain page into a place of hope, empathy and compassion. It must be the most powerful recent application for this centuries-old

invention. Yet the names of those Danish nurses, unlike those of Dr Bjørn Ibsen and Professor Henry Lassen, are nowhere to be found in the literature.

Nurses invented the cheapest and perhaps best way to help patients traumatized after an ICU stay to recover: a diary

The MRI revealed that the control subject drew portraits using the right posterior parietal area, the brain’s facial-recognition module, with which we recognise people and judge their mood. Ocean was also drawing faces but, that part of his brain was quiet. Instead, the blood rushed to the right middle frontal area, associated with spatial awareness: the part of the brain whose usual purpose is to stop us from bumping into things as we walk. Ocean’s working mind, the scan revealed, didn’t consider the face as a face, but a collection of shapes. This let him create a recognisable likeness, while the amateur hardly used the front of his brain, and couldn’t. The difference in quality between the two sets of drawings was striking.

The difference in the brain of a painter and a no-painter

‘Not quite as such, but the fact is that when you start drawing a nose, if you look at the light and the... blush, it’ll have a shape, and that shape is essentially abstract. Ian Dury,59 my art teacher, told me, “When you’re drawing a nose, for Christ’s sake don’t draw a nose. Just draw what you see. And after half an hour, you step away, and there will be a nose.” If you try and draw a nose you’ll fall flat on your face.’ It’s hard to look at the figures in Byzantine art without thinking of Dury’s advice: those paintings are full of body parts that don’t express patterns of shape and light, but rather the idea of what they ought to look like.

Multiple studies have found that students who take lecture notes on laptops don’t learn as well as those who write with pen and paper. This is partly due to the distracting temptations offered by the internet, and partly because typing encourages verbatim note-taking, rather than paraphrasing, summarising and concept mapping, which are much more effective ways at encoding new information in the memory.

This study also used MRI scanning to discover that the hippocampi, precunei, visual cortices, and language-related frontal regions of the brain were all much more active in the notebook users.

Use it enough, and a notebook will change your brain.

This is because you can type faster than you can handwrite. When it’s possible to keep up with a speaker and type verbatim notes, that’s what students do: but when using a ponderous pen or pencil, they have to develop alternative strategies to prioritise, organise, abbreviate and structure what they hear. This in turn leads to much better learning.

Why writing with pen and paper is better than typing

In reading my diary, you read my mind, and in my hypothetical dash to the diary boxes through the smoke, I’m not protecting my property, but rescuing a part of my self.

Maria Sebregondi asserts that the Moleskine’s material simplicity – compared to its digital competitors – is a constraint which prompts creativity. But to the early adopters, those blank pages represented unconstrained horizons. They had no finer cognitive technology. It challenges us to create, to explore, to record, to analyse, to think. It lets us draw, compose, organise and remember – even to care for the sick. With it, we can come to know ourselves better, appreciate the good, put the bad in perspective, and live fuller lives.

And we should all be grateful to their customers, who realised the notebook’s affordances, and who understood implicitly that by taking the time and effort to externalise their thoughts, to draw a line, to work out a sum or manipulate an equation, they were expanding their minds. To do so, to open up to the blank page and interact with it, takes energy and sometimes a little courage. But the rewards may surprise.