I am probably one of a small subset of people who think a book like Allen's interesting--I found it fascinating. I've carried a notebook for decades, and could not now do without one. I wrote an essay on the subject of notebooks about fifteen years ago; it's in the collection of my essays called A Place to Read (2014). Here are some notes from my reading of The Notebook. I should affirm right away that I agree completely with Allen's assertion that notebooks allow the sort of writing, figuring, drawing, mapping, graphing, etc. that really does constitute thinking on paper.
The Romans and earlier Mediterranean traders going back to a 1300BCE shipwreck used wax set in shallow indentations in hinged wooden boards to inscribe on, but real notebooks had to await the availability of paper. A papyrus codex survives from first-century Rome, and a parchment codex from the fourth, but papyrus was not readily available and parchment was expensive and time-consuming to make. The Persians and Arabs put together the western idea of the codex and the Chinese invention of paper about 800CE, but the idea didn’t catch on until King Jaume of Aragon took over the town of Xátiva and its paper-making factory from the Muslims in 1244.
Amatino Manucci, bookkeeper for Giovanni Farolfi, kept at least seven ledgers and notebooks for the business. His ledger is “the first surviving) example of double-entry bookkeeping” and dates from ˜ 1300. The paper codex notebook enables the process of double-entry bookkeeping: ink on paper is permanent and can’t be scraped off as on parchment. The bound ledger means a page cannot be removed without being obvious. These features make the ledger tamper-proof.
“Cimabue invented the sketchbook” asserts Allen. As Italian art became less Byzantine icon-like and more realistic in the work of Cimabue, his pupil Giotto (c.1267-1337), Duccio, and others, portable sketchbooks enabled constant practice in drawing from life as well as compendia of body parts, poses, architectural features and so on, and space to try out compositions for larger works.
Ricordanzi were home account books, libri di ricordi (memoirs) and libri di famiglia kept track of family history and individual accomplishments. All of these show up in greater numbers in Florence than elsewhere, and here the zibaldone seems to have been invented. The word means mess, jumble, salad, and the books included everything: extracts from favorite authors, prayers, notes about planting, drawings, diary entries, and anything that struck the writer as worth recording. Allen devotes a chapter to a notable example, the notebook of Michael of Rhodes from the 1430s. Michael was a seaman who rose through the ranks and his book is full of mathematical problems, details of his career, illustrations of ropework, diagrams, details about shipbuilding and navigation, the last two less authoritative than they look. Michael may have used his notebook as a resume when he sought promotion and employment.
Allen contrasts the notebooks of two friends: Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli, a peripatetic Franciscan friar, published his six-hundred-page notebook in vernacular Tuscan as Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita in 1494 and made a great deal on the thousands of copies sold because, unusually for the time, he was granted copyright by Venice. Leonardo wrote and illustrated thirteen thousand pages of notebooks that survive and perhaps four times that in total in books from folio size down to small pocket ones. They are filled with lists of words, geometrical diagrams, sketches of faces, illustrations to show the workings of pumps and other useful machines and inventions, more fanciful flying machines, war machines, anatomical drawings, along with sums of money paid workers, the costs of his mother’s funeral, letters, speeches and self-contained essays—all written left-handed and backwards so as not to smudge the ink. None of it is really publishable, according to Martin Kemp, an authority on the notebooks, and we can’t imagine Leonardo taking the time to turn them into something that could be printed and sold.
Allen covers the literary use of notebooks in various chapters. Chaucer, he says, was introduced to notebooks in Italy and probably made use of them while he was reading borrowed manuscripts of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Hamlet refers several times, once metaphorically, to his table-book. Hemingway was delighted, in 1956, to rediscover his notebooks from the ‘20s in a trunk in the Ritz basement, and he used them to reconstruct his memoir, A Moveable Feast, his last book. Patrick Leigh Fermor similarly recovered “The Green Diary,” a notebook from his walk across Europe, when he met up again in 1965 with his Rumanian mistress from the years just before the war. He mined the diary for two memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. The most famous regular user of notebooks who turned scribbled entries into books was Bruce Chatwin, who became Leigh Fermor’s friend.
Allen notes that the availability of notebooks did not immediately lead to detailed log-keeping by ships’ masters. He contrasts the purely meteorological and navigational information recorded by one of the navigators named Albo in Magellan’s last expedition, with the much more detailed journal of Antonio Pigafetta, on another ship. Albo did not bother to record the loss of ships, a mutiny, or even Magellan’s death in a violent episode on the island of Cebu in the Philippines. But for the existence of Pigafetta’s account, Magellan’s reputation would never have recovered from the slanderous report of him given by the first expedition member to reach land. The importance of detailed written accounts would eventually result in logbooks that routinely supplied more than the weather and the ship’s course.
Allen gives us examples of notebooks used in cookery, psychology, politics---Bob Graham’s meticulously detailed notebooks that helped elect him to the governorship and the Senate, hurt his chances in his campaign for the presidential nomination, and then proved false the Republicans’ charge that Democrats had been routinely briefed by the CIA about waterboarding during the Bush administration.
It's a big book--over 400 pages--because the subject turns out to be much larger than anyone would have imagined, but it's also one you can read selectively in. Not me. I read every page.
