THE NOTEBOOK, Roland Allen

A long and fast tour of the history of the notebook. Very friendly and smooth writing, taking you from the Roman wax tablets called “handhelds” all the way through to today’s bullet journals and morning pages.

So fast, in fact, that I wish it’d lingered on a few more things. But I can’t begrudge him the time spent on Florentine accountancy, because it turns out it’s the key to everything in the notebook world.

Over six thousand leaves (which is to say, thirteen thousand pages) survive, and experts estimate that this represents about a quarter of the original total. This implies that Leonardo da Vinci filled his notebooks at the rate of about a thousand pages a year.

Leonardo, like a Florentine bookkeeper, kept different formats of notebook for different purposes. They vary enormously, from big, formal folios to the little pocket books which he kept on his belt, ready for whatever thought or observation sprang to mind.

Leonardo was externalising, putting his thoughts down on paper the better to manipulate them.

Shakespeare, Frida Kahlo, Johnathan Swift, Brian Eno, Bartok and a thousand others are all in here. Parchments, wax, codexes, table-books (almanac tables printed in the front, then a dozen pages coated in gesso and glue so you could wipe them clean), holster books, Moleskines, radioactive diaries:

Physicists and mathematicians pore through Newton’s and Einstein’s notebooks, identifying moments of crucial insight. They would love to browse Marie Curie’s lab notebooks too, but proximity to her experiments left them irradiated.

It’s a huge and fascinating book, and it’s given me a lot to think about despite its necessarily shallow passes on things I’d like more details on. which just spurs me to discover and read deeper on those things, which isn’t bad, right? I can see why everyone was raving about this book. It’s a great achievement and a great tool for thought.

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.

The physical labour seems to play a part, as we encode memories better when muscular effort is involved. So do the tactile, sensory qualities of the paper itself, and the fact that a note on a page has a fixed location, while a note on a screen scrolls away or vanishes altogether.

THE NOTEBOOK, Roland Allen (UK) (US+)