| First Written | 2023 |
| Genre | Nonfiction |
| Origin | UK |
| Publisher | Biblioasis |
| My Copy | library paperback |
| First Read | May 8, 2026 |
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper
Notes
Another astounding ‘the tech came before the idea’ moment. The author says that while people had been using notebooks for centuries, people did not ever write daily diaries. Never before in any time period or culture. Yes, some memoirs and letters, sure, but no ‘each day I write down what happened’. It was only after the blank notebook publisher Lett started making pre-printed date books, which were intended to be agendas for future planning, did people start a diary habit.
Just this idea that keeping a diary is an accident of preprinted diary pages and not the other way around. Wild.
Just this idea that keeping a diary is an accident of preprinted diary pages and not the other way around. Wild.
Noted on May 8, 2026
OK, I don’t think the author comes out and says this super explicitly, but they definitely say:
- a commonplace book was a thing where people would collect inspiring or original texts, and group them together under shared headings, eg one for Love, and one for Honor, etc. The texts were sorted into their common places.
- later this became so popular (everybody was doing it, and would copy from their friends books) that the texts were not actually inspiring or original
- this then became derogatory - a trite or overworn thing became known as commonplace.
- and that’s how we get that current meaning of commonplace. A total reversal!
This as a word origin / semantic shift story is so interesting.
- a commonplace book was a thing where people would collect inspiring or original texts, and group them together under shared headings, eg one for Love, and one for Honor, etc. The texts were sorted into their common places.
- later this became so popular (everybody was doing it, and would copy from their friends books) that the texts were not actually inspiring or original
- this then became derogatory - a trite or overworn thing became known as commonplace.
- and that’s how we get that current meaning of commonplace. A total reversal!
This as a word origin / semantic shift story is so interesting.
Noted on May 8, 2026
There’s a section on ‘patient diaries’, which are not written by a patient but written about a patient. Apparently when you are in a medically induced coma, or treacheotemized, etc, people come back and often have traumatic memories - not from the actual events themselves but from their brain trying to make sense of what happened; they think they were abducted by aliens, or their loved ones were replaced by robots, or they were molested in their incapacitated state. So some Danish nurses started a practice of keeping a handwritten diary for the patient, which their loved ones can also add to, about what’s happening - and then when the patient is back to normal, they give them this handwritten account, and it really helps ground the patient back into reality and make sense of their lost time. It’s so weird, and so beautiful an idea!
Noted on May 8, 2026
A history of mankind's use of notebooks, and then a little guided tour of notebooks of note. As an inveterate notebook-keeper, I was pretty into this. There were several really surprising claims, and I loved reading some of the specific stories.
Noted on May 8, 2026
Quotes
He took note of the Arabic proverb "Man lam yakun lahu al-daftar fi kummihi lam yuthbit al-hikma fi qalbihi": 'Whoever has no notebook in their sleeve will not establish wisdom in their heart.'Quoted on May 8, 2026
[ A Time of Gifts was written based on a diary / notebook that Fermor had lost for decades, returned to him by an old girlfriend who was also a Moldavian princess??? ]
The travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor also wrote his notebooks into the story. As a restless eighteen-year-old he had walked across Europe, carrying a backpack with just a few clothes - and pencils, drawing pads, notebooks, The Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace. All the way trom Rotterdam to Istanbul (which he always called Constantinople) he wrote and drew, but the backpack, notebook included, was stolen in Munich in January 1934. 1 started a fresh lot immediately, he later wrote, in thick German stiff-covered notebooks and drawing pads.' With them, he captured his vivid impressions; describing himself as 'unboreable' he found interest in everything he came across - people, buildings, clothes, songs, words, customs, mythology, religion and history. All the way, he depended on the hospitality of strangers, moving across the continent as a guest, begging introductions from one host to another down the road, and repaying them with boyish charm and the sheer novelty of his presence.
In Athens, in 1937, he struck up a love affair with a Moldavian princess, twelve years older, called Balaga Cantacuzène. Living with her in Greece and then at her rural manor in Romania, he started to turn his notes into a book, but on the outbreak of war decided to return to Britain - leaving behind one notebook, 'the Green Diary', bought in Bratislava in March 1934, which recorded his travels from there to Greece. War, and then the descent of the Iron Curtain, separated him from Cantacuzène for decades: the lovers would not meet again until 1965, by which time Leigh Fermor, settled in Kardamyli, in Greece, had established himself as a celebrated prose stylist. Cantacuzène had fared less well. Her home confiscated, she had been relocated to a flat in Bucharest - but in the frantic quarter-hour she had been given to collect her belongings, she had packed the Green Diary.
With this pre-war relic miraculously back in hand, Leigh Fermor returned to his youthful footslog and - eventually - produced tw memoirs of it, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, which brilliantly evoke a Europe at once more violent and more civilised than its post-war incarnation. They clearly drew on the Green Diary and notes that Leigh Fermor had made from other journals. However, the books owe even more to the pains that he took at his desk, drafting, redrafting, reworking, and adding adjectives until his work attained a seductive poetic density.Quoted on May 8, 2026
At this time, ready-made notebooks were hard to find in England, so Worcester improvised. He took folio-sized sheets of paper (similar to our A4) and folded several of them double so the longer edges met. This gave him a tall booklet which offered two advantages. Firstly, the stiff and narrow gathering would hold its shape as the writer held it in one hand while wielding their pen with the other. Secondly, it could be slipped into a sleeve or pouch - which gives this format its name: 'holster book'.*Quoted on May 8, 2026