A history of the blank book, and it’s better than that sounds. Allen starts in medieval Italy, where merchants worked out double-entry bookkeeping and needed something to keep it in, and paper had just gotten cheap enough. From there the notebook goes everywhere. Ships’ logs. Commonplace books where readers copied out what struck them. Leonardo’s mirror writing. Darwin’s field notes. Anne Frank’s diary. Police notebooks. Patient journals used as therapy. Bullet journals. His argument is that the notebook isn’t a passive container, it’s a thinking machine, and a fair chunk of what humans have figured out got figured out in one.
The Notebook