Once upon a time, in a bygone era almost past recall, there were no cellphones, laptops or desk computers. In their stead people of all ages relied on various forms of bound paper to organize their lives. Back then, young children would agonize over just the right color for the cover of their school notebook. Older students might tote around three-ring binders and argue over the merits of wide-ruled vs. college-ruled pages. Teenage girls kept diaries, as did adolescent boys, who often called them “journals” – it sounded less froufrou. Yet the contents of each would be precisely the same – scribbled paragraphs of melancholy introspection alternating with soppy effusions over that unattainable heartthrob in English class. I speak from experience.
In the adult world there were planners, datebooks, ledgers, scratch pads, order forms, police and reporter’s notebooks, even the occasional autograph album. Secretaries took dictation on steno pads, characterized by a faint line down the middle of each sheet; surly waitresses delivered the bill for your eggs and hash browns by tearing off the perforated top sheet of an order pad; writers drafted novels on yellow legal pads. Everywhere, urban hipsters scribbled in their Moleskines in emulation of the nomadic traveler Bruce Chatwin.
As it happens, in the opening chapter of “The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper,” Roland Allen describes the creation and marketing of those fashion-forward, overpriced Moleskines. He then embarks on a leisurely, historical survey of how writing on paper has shaped Western civilization. “I see the story of Europe’s adventure with the notebook,” he tells us, “as one of enlargements – intellectual, economic, creative, emotional – as curious minds expanded to interact with, and fill, the blank pages that notebooks presented.”
Like similar authors of popular scholarship, such as Christopher de Hamel, in his “Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts,” Allen – whose previous books focused on bread and bicycles – avoids the dry-as-dust by adopting a biographical approach in most chapters, while emphasizing plenty of anecdotes and striking factoids. His prose, moreover, reveals a wryly witty personality: W.H. Auden’s “A Certain World” – a collection of the poet’s favorite passages from his wide reading – he tells us, is the rare commonplace book “that you can read from start to finish while retaining the will to live.” After briefly alluding to Marie Curie’s work on radioactivity, he slyly labels an accompanying photograph: “Marie Curie’s lab notes – handle with care for the next 1,500 years.”
Allen begins “The Notebook” with a brief account of antiquity’s use of clay tablets and papyrus scrolls, pausing briefly to discuss that eerily modern fresco from Pompeii – long thought to represent the poet Sappho – showing a thoughtful woman holding a stylus to her lips as she meditates on what to write in a handheld tablet. When papermaking was finally introduced into late medieval Europe from the East, merchants and traders quickly recognized that parchment – made from animal skins – was now an outmoded technology, because it could be “scraped clear and written on again … opening the door to fraud.” Ink, on the other hand, “soaks into a paper sheet,” making it permanent.
“Accounts were always bound into ledgers for a similar reason,” Allen explains. “Loose-leaf entries could easily be fabricated, but a ledger with numbered pages became tamper proof. This in turn meant that merchants could delegate subordinates or branch offices without fear of embezzlement, allowing traders to widen the circle of their businesses. Purchases, sales, loans and terms of business were no longer recorded inconsistently on a scrap of easily rewritten parchment: they were carefully entered into a permanent record that, in the event of dispute, was accepted as evidence in a court of law.”
By the 14th century, the art world also changed because paper, now plentiful and relatively cheap, encouraged the neophyte to practice drawing. As Allen writes, “Light and shade, form, mass, the observation of drapery, proportion, perspective, pose, and the capture of likeness and personality – can only be developed in one way: drawing and lots of it.” Sketchbooks allowed artists “to develop their own style and repertoire” while also serving as a portfolio of what they’d seen. This is particularly important since a single encounter with a painting or landscape isn’t enough: “If an artist wants to learn from it, they need to make their own record of it, and in doing so, come to fathom it better. This is how art lives and grows.” Describing the notebooks of that polymath Leonardo da Vinci, he goes even further, arguing that “Leonardo was externalizing, putting his thoughts down on paper the better to manipulate them.”
As these pages march toward the present, Allen explains various iterations and uses of the early notebook. In Renaissance Italy, a zibaldone was a personal anthology into which you would copy favorite passages from, say, Dante or Petrarch, so you could reread them at home and share them with friends. In 17th-century Netherlands, “friendship books” functioned like high school yearbooks: “Entries normally occupied a page, with an autograph, the date, a moral motto or epigram, and a personal expression of friendship or admiration.” In the 1660s, when he was in his early 20s, Isaac Newton repurposed his late stepfather’s beautifully bound but largely unused notebooks for his own nontheological thinking. Such a “waste book,” as they were called, “was the place you made your first notes, on the fly. Later you would extract what you needed and copy it into the formal ledger.” Newton’s waste book functioned as an extension of the mathematician’s mind: “It would equip him for investigations into color, optics, medicine, navigation, phonetics, language, the laws of physics and the torments of his soul.”
Among diarists, none is more famous – or notorious – than Samuel Pepys, who used to carry what he called a “table-book.” This wasn’t a list of his favorite restaurants or recipes, but rather a small volume of specially treated paper that could be written on and then erased with a wet sponge. Knowing this, Allen adds, helps us understand more precisely what Hamlet is referring to when he soliloquizes after seeing his father’s ghost, “Yea, from the table of my memory/ I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records.”
In one particularly dramatic chapter – “A tale of two notebooks” – we learn that Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of finances for Louis XIV, kept what he called cassettes – that is, secret record books containing letters and accounts of the corruption, fraud and blackmail he used to maintain his power and increase his wealth. When his enemy, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of war, discovered these “cassettes,” they destroyed Fouquet’s career and nearly cost him his life. Colbert, in his turn, soon modernized France through his adoption of account books, careful tax records and elaborate filing systems.
Again and again, Allen reminds us of how essential notebooks were to the achievements of widely diverse thinkers, including the humanist Erasmus, the scientist Charles Darwin and that ingenious detective novelist, Agatha Christie. He discusses ship’s logs, musical composition books, double-entry bookkeeping (the achievement of Luca Pacioli, a close friend of Leonardo’s), naturalist’s notebooks, journaling, expressive writing, Sen. Bob Graham’s obsessive note-taking and the academic study of “egodocuments,” an umbrella term for journals, memoirs and other forms of autobiographical writing. He tells us that Virginia Woolf read at least 66 published diaries and recalls Mae West’s cynical but still useful advice: “Keep a diary, and someday it’ll keep you.”
Like the many examples it covers, Allen’s history of the notebook both instructs and entertains. Most chapters draw on interviews with contemporary researchers, and there is a simple but useful bibliography. What’s more, in his final pages Allen emphasizes that the allure of the blank page continues even in our digital age: Only by writing or sketching on paper can one establish that almost mystical connection of what the Arts and Crafts movement called “head, heart and hand.” One might wish that Allen had paid some attention to developments in Asia and Africa, even if this would have made a long book even longer. That said, he does leave us with a wise Arabic maxim, which translated into English reads, “Whoever has no notebook in their sleeve will not establish wisdom in their heart.”
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and author of the memoir “An Open Book,” the Edgar Award-winning critical study “On Conan Doyle,” and five collections of essays.
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