The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

The Notebook

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

I carry a small (A6) notebook in my purse that I use to write down anything I need to – quotes I like, shopping lists, travel planning notes, quilt block sketches. It’s designed to be disposable. Anything important will eventually get moved to a more permanent home. I also have a notebook where I’m trying to do a cross between journalling and morning pages. That’s mostly an excuse to use my new fountain pens.

Having a system of notebooks is a pretty common thing for humans to do. But where did it start and how has this simple invention revolutionized the world?

Each chapter of this fascinating book looks at one hobby or profession and examines how it was changed by notebooks. It starts with art. When paper became readily available artists were able to practice sketching and composition. Paintings became more realistic leading to the changes seen in European art between the medieval and Renaissance periods.

At the same time, merchants in Florence and Venice started to use notebooks to develop a system of accounting that made them formidable. They could make a permanent record of transactions. It forms the basis of our modern accounting systems.

People started collecting quotes from books that they liked. Buying a whole book was expensive before printing presses but you could copy a passage and keep it. That wasn’t a new idea but it became common for a family to have a notebook (called a zibaldone) where they kept interesting things.

“The collection of quotations was not Erasmus’s invention: Pliny the Younger, fourteen hundred years earlier, had written that his uncle, Pliny the Elder, ‘never read without taking extracts, and used to say that there never was a book so bad that it was not good in some passage or another’.”

Some people today call zibaldones “commonplace books” but commonplace books were traditionally much more formal. They were school exercise books with extensive headings and structures.

“For them, the work of selection and copying was the very point, as it taught discrimination and trained the mind.”

They were supposed to be used for only collecting quotes on topics that they had preselected.

“Humanist common-place books reflected this, the headwords serving to limit the writer’s scope in a way that a zibaldone never had.”

Notebooks help us think in multiple ways. We can organize our thoughts, make lists for later, do math on the pages, take notes, etc.

“Certain kinds of thought – writing a novel, multiplying ten-digit numbers together, calculating a planet’s orbit – only became possible with these external tools and, that being the case, surely those indispensable things should share the credit with the brain?”

“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.”

I loved this book. It was a five star read for me. Each chapter was about a completely different subject all tied together by the notebooks that are used.

If you like the history of common objects this is a great book. If you don’t want to commit to reading the whole book right now, I found out about it through this interview with the author. It covers a lot of the topics in the book to give you an overview.

I’m definitely going to be getting a fancy notebook to start a formal zibaldone with the quotes that I want to keep.