The Notebook

The Notebook by Roland Allen
(US publication: September, 2024)

In his introduction to The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, author Roland Allen describes the founding of the small company that currently manufactures Moleskine brand notebooks. An inspiration for this company came from the author Bruce Chatwin, who described how he made special efforts to obtain the earlier versions of these very special notebooks — but then, to his disappointment, the maker went out of business (creating an opportunity for the new business described by Allen). I remember reading this same passage in Chatwin’s book The Songlines.

The continuation of this iconic brand of notebooks still has an enormous following. You can buy a number of versions of the Moleskine notebook as well as many imitations on amazon, if you want one. If I wanted a notebook, I would want a Molskine!

The Notebook presents a fascinating history of all sorts of people using paper notebooks, beginning with artists at the start of the Renaissance, such as Giotto, who were figuring out how to make lifelike portraits. 

A key technology enabled this new habit: the invention of paper and the development of manufacturing processes that made it very affordable compared to parchment, which was the previously available medium for written material. Paper had many advantages, which are explained in the book. The author continues the narrative about notebook keepers to the present. In the final few chapters he talks about the popularity of Bullet Journals. He describes the way that  nurses wrote journals of people in intensive care during the covid pandemic — documents that helped the patients to understand the ordeal that they had been through. There’s a lot of really great material in this book!

The author studied the notebooks (or in most cases, photocopies of the original notebooks) that were created and used by many famous people throughout history. He didn’t neglect the notebooks, journals, diaries, commonplace books, ledgers and other personal records created by perfectly ordinary people. He consulted with the experts on each of the subjects of his chapters, with very readable and informative results. Finally he briefly returns to the topic of the iconic Moleskines.

If this intrigues you I very much recommend the book, but rather than summarize the chapters and list the many wonderful people whose notebooks were used to reveal all kinds of interesting things about them, I’m going to be an egotist and tell you about me and my notebook history.

I used to be a Notebook Person.

These are some of my notebooks from the 1990s, including notes on reading, phone numbers, etc.
The next photo shows notebooks I used (or in some cases did not use) in the early 2000s.

Sketches that I copied into a notebook from a Medieval manuscript I was looking at somewhere.
All photos © 2024 mae sander.

As you can see from the photos, back then I used notebooks all the time. I kept a small one in my purse and made notes when I had to wait somewhere — whether I was waiting for a train, a plane, a dentist, or a movie. I took notes when I interviewed people for articles that I wrote at that time. If someone recommended a good book, I wrote down the name and author. Often I did follow up, looked up the library call number and wrote it in the notebook, and then would get a copy of the book and read it. Of course, throughout the years I've used other types of notebooks -- kids' autograph books, class notebooks in college, recipe notebooks, desk calendars, checkbooks, etc. But these carry-everywhere notebooks were my mainstay.

You can probably guess what happened next: in 2006, I decided to start a blog to record my thoughts when I traveled to Israel for a month. I had been there previously, and had sent many emails to friends and relatives describing my impressions, and several people had asked to be included in my list of recipients. So I decided that a blog would make it easier to share what I was writing down. Eventually, most of the note taking that I had done in notebooks became instead posts on my blog, including notes on books. And I continually found new subjects to write about.

Even while writing the blog, I continued to keep a little notebook in my purse to keep track of phone numbers, addresses, shopping lists, people’s recommendations of books to read or places to go, and simple things like that. A few years earlier, I had also begun carrying a small digital camera, which took the place of my crude sketching and often enabled me to get a quick record of an address or book title. So my little notebooks from those years aren’t as interesting as the earlier ones.

During the past decade, my iPhone has replaced everything: notebooks, address & phone lists, camera, photo archive (in the iCloud), shopping lists, and more. As they say — there’s an app for that! My handwriting isn’t even very legible any more. When I need to send a formal, handwritten note these days, I compose it on my iPad and then copy it onto a nice card with care and caution. When I want to remember an image, I take a photo with the iPhone. And when I want to remember an event or a book, I write them up as a blog post. The End.

Doris Lessing’s famous work from 1962 is my favorite novel about notebooks.
It’s not mentioned in Roland Allen’s book.