Recently a group of us in the Well-Appointed Desk Patreon decided to read The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen (available on Amazon or in the Well-Appointed Desk Bookshop.org store).
While the book starts with a fun store about how the modern-day Moleskin notebooks came to be, it delves into the history of writing going back to clay and wax tablets, all the way through today’s notebooks. While I realized I was going to be reading a dense history of all the ways paper and notebooks came to be used, it didn’t occur to me in a broader sense that we’d be watching the time periods where we transitioned from purely oral stories and traditions into creating written histories for centuries to come.
The book is a bit dense, with lots of information and so many names and places to remember. But the chapters are short, and I found it was best digested a bit at a time. Some chapters focused on how knowledge was transferred place to place geographically through travelers journals, recording everything from flora and fauna to mechanical structures. Some chapters focused on how sea voyages were one of the original things to be forever altered by the possibility of keeping log books, maps, navigational charts and the like as records of months or years-long voyages. Still others focused on how the act of physically being able to draw on paper (as opposed to canvas or painting) could allow artistic masters to hone their craft so much better, or writers to research and assemble their works.
In short, the book was absolutely fascinating, and even spent a bit of time on modern icons and notebooks (bullet journaling gets a chapter!). If you’re a lover of analog tools and notebooks/journals, this one is a great read for you!
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