THE NOTEBOOK

A celebration of the joys of putting pen to paper.

British publisher and diarist Allen brings his love of notebooks to a lively, wide-ranging history of bound blank pages. Notebooks, he writes, “interest me as a technology that has had tangible effects on the world around us.” The author started keeping a journal in 2002: “Writing a diary made me happier; keeping things-to-do lists made me more reliable (which in turn made those around me happier), and I learned never to go to a doctor’s appointment, or a meeting of any kind, without taking notes of what I heard.” Wondering how and when notebooks were invented and why their use spread, he decided to fill a historical gap with the results of his own sleuthing. After an overview of record-keeping in the ancient world—diptychs, papyrus, and parchment—Allen begins in 13th-century Florence, where ledgers, first on parchment and later on paper, a superior product imported from Provence, became indispensable for business. Books of paper became indispensable for many artists, as well, who developed their techniques in sketchbooks. Notebooks grew in popularity, finding uses in the home to keep track of accounts or compile personal anthologies of entries such as prayers, medical recipes, riddles, and poems. Those anthologies evolved into commonplace books, favored by Erasmus and W.H. Auden, among others. Ships’ logs, travelogues, recipe books, and naturalists’ findings are just a few of the many uses for notebooks across the centuries. Isaac Newton, Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner, and Charles Darwin recorded their discoveries in notebooks; Leonardo da Vinci worked out inventions. In treating chronic pain or PTSD, physicians have found that for patients, keeping a diary has “proven therapeutic value.” As an intimate repository for thought, notebooks, Allen amply shows, are essential.

An enthusiastic, informative cultural history.