The Art of Manliness - The Power of the Notebook — The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.580 The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine

00:00:16.080 section of a hoarder's bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my moleskin out of my pocket and

00:00:20.980 jotted down some notes, like penitential names. I considered things like the manly arts before

00:00:25.440 settling on the Art of Manliness, categories of content and initial article ideas.

00:00:30.360 Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out.

00:00:34.760 That's the power of a pocket pad's possibilities, something Roland Allen explores in The Notebook,

00:00:39.380 a history of thinking on paper. Today on the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks

00:00:44.400 and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists.

00:00:49.280 We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks,

00:00:53.100 the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian Zimbaldone to the Friendship

00:00:56.800 Book to the Modern Bullet Journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor.

00:01:01.520 Along the way, we discuss ways you could fruitfully use notebooks today, and why, even in our digital

00:01:06.480 age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity. After the show's over,

00:01:11.000 check out our show notes at awim.is slash notebook.

00:01:26.360 All right, Roland Allen, welcome to the show.

00:01:29.040 Hi, it's nice to be here, Brett. Thank you.

00:01:30.560 So you put out a book called The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper, and this is a history

00:01:35.600 of The Humble Notebook. And I think hopefully by the end of the show, we're going to find out it's

00:01:41.000 not so humble, because if you look at any advancement in art, technology, economics, there's

00:01:48.740 typically a notebook involved. I'm curious, what got you to take this deep dive into the history of

00:01:55.100 The Notebook?

00:01:57.940 Well, I guess there are two questions. There's where did my interest come from in notebooks,

00:02:01.860 and then what made me take the deep dive. The interest came from keeping a diary myself,

00:02:06.360 essentially, which I did for years. I started in my mid-20s, and quite quickly, it became a really

00:02:12.740 important part of my life, and it still is. And keeping a diary, I started just to notice other

00:02:18.660 people's notebooks. And in my work, I'm a sales guy, I'm not especially creative, but in the publishing

00:02:24.180 companies where I worked, the really creative people always had sketchbooks and notebooks, which they

00:02:28.680 would use to design things or write books or generally be enviably creative. So I would sort

00:02:35.200 of notice them and always sneak at me if I could. How did the book come about? I guess one day, it just

00:02:41.180 occurred to me that this absolutely universal, omnipresent, really simple object had in fact been

00:02:48.100 invented at some point, like anything else. And so I thought, well, where was it invented? And it was

00:02:53.700 really hard to find out, by which I mean, Google didn't help. So that was what set me looking. And

00:02:59.820 yeah, and it sent me off on this sort of wild journey, which turned into a book pretty quickly.

00:03:04.320 And you have the results in front of you.

00:03:06.720 Yeah. And what I love about this book, it really captured, I think, the love and the mystique that I

00:03:12.460 think people have around notebooks. I know for me, there's something about buying a new notebook.

00:03:19.540 You open it up, and it just, you feel good. What do you think is going on there? Why do you think

00:03:25.180 people are so drawn to notebooks and keeping a notebook and buying new notebooks, even though

00:03:30.640 they already have unfinished notebooks at home? What's going on there, you think?

00:03:35.800 I think partly there's a promise, there's potential, isn't there? It's like any vaguely

00:03:40.780 improving thing. It tells you that you can be a better version of yourself, I think.

00:03:44.920 You can be a bit more creative. You can be better organized. You can write that novel,

00:03:48.540 or you can start keeping a journal, or you can get really on top of your workload. I think that

00:03:53.940 promise is in the blank pages. I think, but also, you find it inviting. A lot of people,

00:03:58.840 actually, particularly who aren't long-term notebookers, do find it a little bit intimidating,

00:04:04.440 almost, the blank page. And they get a bit frightened of it.

00:04:09.300 Yeah, I've known people like that. They'll buy a really nice journal,

00:04:12.520 and they won't write in it. It's like, well, I just want to make sure what I write in it is good.

00:04:16.040 Yeah, it's got to be perfect. And that's not the right attitude at all.

00:04:19.740 Yeah. So let's talk about the history of the notebook. What did humans use to keep track of

00:04:24.820 notes before paper notebooks existed?

00:04:28.140 There were three main things. And we're talking about Europe here. It's largely a European story

00:04:32.920 that I tell in the book, although I'm not arrogant enough to think that that's the entire world.

00:04:37.520 But they used parchment, which is very tough. It's very expensive. It's very tricky to write on.

00:04:44.280 And it's very hard to use parchment if you're not sitting at a desk. And in effect,

00:04:47.800 you're actually painting onto the page when you write on parchment. So it's not the most

00:04:51.460 practical medium.

00:04:52.560 For those who aren't familiar, what is parchment? Because I'm sure people have heard like,

00:04:55.080 oh, this is parchment. But like, what is parchment made out of?

00:04:58.080 Parchment is basically a kind of leather. It is animal hide, which has been stretched very thin.

00:05:03.840 So it's been tensioned while it's been, I guess, cured. But it is leather. And it's made out of the

00:05:09.660 same stuff as your boots are. And it does therefore last forever. It's incredibly tough.

00:05:15.260 It's very robust, but it's very thick pages. So if you have a parchment book with 100 pages,

00:05:19.660 it's like a brick. But it's a very tough material. And as I say, if you can sit down on your desk,

00:05:26.600 it's a great material. Then you have papyrus, which came out of Egypt, which the ancient Egyptians

00:05:33.280 famously used, but also the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans used a lot of papyrus. And it's

00:05:40.020 much easier to use for sort of quick and dirty writing. And it was very cheap, but it falls apart

00:05:45.640 over time. It's very, very hard to keep papyrus together, which is why it basically only survives

00:05:51.500 in Egyptian tombs, which are sort of the driest, stillest places in the entire world. So the Romans 1.00

00:05:58.240 had a lot of literature on papyrus, but it's all gone. And then the third thing, which is in a way,

00:06:04.840 the most interesting with these little wax tablets, which people all over the Mediterranean used and

00:06:09.660 the Middle East used for thousands of years. And these were very much the notebooks of their day.

00:06:14.020 You'd have a little pair of wooden frames, if you like, which opened like those little picture

00:06:18.360 frames with a hinge in the middle. And you'd have wax on the insides, which you could scrape into

00:06:24.700 with a stylus. And so you could fill up these pages with scratched writing. And then when you

00:06:31.320 filled the page or didn't need it, again, you could just wipe it clean. Now, obviously, that's

00:06:35.600 really, really useful if you want to just make a shopping list or keep a quick list of something

00:06:39.540 that's going on. But it's not so practical if you've got something like a contract, which you want

00:06:44.980 to preserve forever and never change. So all of these mediums had their advantages and disadvantages.

00:06:51.100 I thought that was interesting, the handheld wax tablets. There's actually mosaics of a woman,

00:06:56.780 and it looks like she's using almost like a Palm Pilot. It was really bizarre to see. It's like,

00:07:01.780 wow, this is like thousands of years old, but it looks like she's got a little PDA in her hand.

00:07:06.520 Yeah. And they were absolutely used everywhere for maybe 2,000 years or probably more. They were

00:07:13.720 really, really good little bit of technology. And then they vanished with paper, basically,

00:07:17.640 because paper was so much more practical. Yeah. And during this time, what did people keep track

00:07:23.040 of? I mean, today we use a notebook for all sorts of things. What were people keeping track of on

00:07:28.480 their handheld tablets or parchment or papyrus? Well, one of the interesting things which I found

00:07:35.260 out during the book is really that people's lives back then were as complicated almost as ours are now,

00:07:41.100 or rather that they were certainly as varied. So people had shopping lists. They had anything to do

00:07:46.080 with their businesses. If they were buying and selling or making, they inevitably had to take

00:07:50.940 notes about their customers or the money that they borrowed or lent, etc. And so any kind of business,

00:07:56.840 it was very important. But also people were writing down prayers and poems, any kind of what we would

00:08:02.300 call literature. But obviously, they didn't have printed books in those days. So if you wanted to have

00:08:07.180 poems or any kind of writing in your house, you had to have it basically in a notebook or something like

00:08:12.960 that. Okay. So these three mediums, parchment, papyrus, tablets, they allowed you to get stuff

00:08:19.260 down and keep it there. They all had their downsides. Parchment, too heavy, too expensive.

00:08:24.520 Papyrus didn't last very long. The wax handheld tablets, you know, good for shopping list and very

00:08:31.940 ethereal type things that you could just erase at the end of the day. But you talk about there was a big

00:08:37.600 change that happened in the 1200s in Italy, that basically revolutionized the notebook and created

00:08:43.740 almost the notebook that we have today. So what was going on in Italy in the 1200s that led to the

00:08:49.140 development of the paper notebook?

00:08:52.400 They, it was a really important moment in history, I think. And it was a real technological

00:08:57.960 leap forward. So they got hold of paper from the Spanish and the Spanish got hold of paper from 0.55

00:09:04.080 the Arabs or the Islamic occupiers of what is now Valencia. And for hundreds of years, they'd been 0.98

00:09:10.120 making paper there as part of the Islamic caliphates. And they got really, really good at it. And then

00:09:16.000 when the king of Catalonia, who was a guy called James II, wanted, he wanted it, basically, he went

00:09:22.420 out and conquered them. And he got hold of the paper and the papermakers kept hold of them, treated them

00:09:27.340 very well and started exporting paper everywhere. Now the Italians, what they did was they realized that 0.71

00:09:32.180 it could transform their business. Because suddenly they had this medium, which they could do business

00:09:38.880 on, which was permanent, and therefore secure. So if you had a business ledger, and he wrote something

00:09:44.540 down in it, you knew it could not be forged.

00:09:47.800 Yeah, why is that? What is it about paper? You talk about in the book that parchment, that was one of the

00:09:53.300 key differences between parchment and paper. Paper was permanent. What was it about paper that made it

00:09:56.820 permanent? If you write on paper with ink, the ink goes into the middle of the paper, and it sticks

00:10:02.080 there. And you can't get rid of it without destroying the page. If you write on a parchment

00:10:06.100 sheet with ink, it just sits on top, a bit like paint. And it's very easy to scrape it off and

00:10:11.420 replace it with something else, which people who used parchment did all the time, because it was so

00:10:15.740 expensive. So if they'd finished with a book, and they wanted to reuse the parchment, they just scraped

00:10:19.800 off the writing, and it was as good as new. But merchants suddenly had this secure way of recording

00:10:27.320 transactions, debts, deals. And of course, that enabled them to have much more interesting,

00:10:32.540 complicated businesses, because they could suddenly trust their information technology.

00:10:36.880 And this allowed the development of paper and paper books. This led to the development of,

00:10:42.620 what's that accounting, double book accounting?

00:10:44.720 Double entry bookkeeping.

00:10:45.360 Double entry bookkeeping. I mean, maybe people have heard this, but for those who aren't familiar,

00:10:49.900 what is double entry bookkeeping? And why is it such a big deal?

00:10:53.400 Right. Among your listeners, you're going to have, I hope, plenty of accountants, plenty of people

00:10:58.120 who've got double entry bookkeeping degrees or qualifications, people who have trained in any

00:11:02.620 kind of money management. And I just want to salute them, because they're the real heroes of the story.

00:11:07.620 Double entry bookkeeping is tricky, but it's a very, very useful way of managing money.

00:11:15.360 And it enables you to create a profit and loss picture out of quite a complicated array of deals,

00:11:21.640 right? So when you talk about a company's balance sheet today, you're talking in terms of double

00:11:27.100 entry bookkeeping, balancing credits and debits. When you talk about the profit and loss account,

00:11:31.780 which every company does to this day, this was invented in Italy around the year 1300.

00:11:37.800 When you talk about an annual statement or an annual statement of a company's accounts,

00:11:42.380 that was invented in Italy. They invented limited liability partnerships. They invented futures

00:11:47.700 markets. They had very sophisticated insurance and modern banking, and they invented the company.

00:11:54.060 So if you've ever worked for a company, you can thank these Italians back in the year 1300. They

00:11:58.560 invented all of these things in probably around Florence.

00:12:02.620 And it was all done in paper notebooks.

00:12:04.880 And that was their technology. Yeah. So, and because there was so much cash flying around,

00:12:09.520 Florence became one of the richest places in the world, despite the fact that it's a small city

00:12:14.060 with very few natural resources of its own. They were so good at money management that their bankers

00:12:20.140 basically ran European business for a hundred years or more. And their merchants and manufacturers

00:12:26.540 were, you know, among Europe's leading tradesmen. So basically because they were incredibly good at

00:12:32.660 managing money and that people from all over Europe would look at them enviously and say,

00:12:37.000 oh, they're doing it the Italian way, but they couldn't quite understand it because looked at

00:12:40.800 from the outside, double entry bookkeeping is quite opaque, a little bit difficult to get your head

00:12:45.180 around. So it took quite a long time for other people to do it. But then the Northern Italians 1.00

00:12:49.840 learned how, the Germans learned how, then the Dutch and the French, and eventually even the British

00:12:54.880 learned how to do double entry bookkeeping. And that is where the sort of the whole European

00:12:59.580 economic model capitalism really comes from.

00:13:03.160 And something that happened at the same time is you had these Italian accountants basically with

00:13:08.500 their notebooks, their ledgers, and there were the artists around the same time looking around like,

00:13:14.080 oh, these guys have got this cool thing. That's, they've got this medium.

00:13:18.040 This is handy.

00:13:18.880 Yeah.

00:13:19.060 Yeah.

00:13:19.200 They got this medium where they can just look at things. It's lightweight. It creates a permanent record.

00:13:24.200 Maybe we could use that for art. So how did Florentine artists co-opt paper accounting books

00:13:29.880 and then turn them into sketchbooks?

00:13:32.220 I think it really was that simple. Imagine if you are an artist in a time before paper,

00:13:37.380 then you can paint on the walls, you can paint on parchment or canvas, which are both inconvenient

00:13:43.020 and expensive. You could carve wood or stone, but you couldn't casually go out and just sketch

00:13:49.760 something. And today's artists, whether or not they're a hobbyist or a pro, good or bad,

00:13:56.440 can take it absolutely for granted. You can pick up a pencil, just go out and sketch whatever you

00:14:01.240 want or draw a picture of a person or of a rabbit or of a tree. But this is actually, again, a sort

00:14:07.660 of surprising development, which people weren't always able to do. So I think there was like a

00:14:13.380 generation of artists in Florence, basically, who saw their contemporaries using these notebooks,

00:14:18.220 which were quite cheap by this point for quite, you know, interesting business things. And they

00:14:23.600 just picked it up and started drawing in it. And they realized, or they discovered that if you draw

00:14:28.840 a lot, you get good at drawing. And suddenly they were better artists than they would have been

00:14:33.360 without these notebooks and turned into really great artists, a generation, I think, of great artists.

00:14:39.680 Yeah. That's when you see the development of perspective, like there was an artist you highlight

00:14:43.620 and you can actually see how you develop this perspective where things, because before that

00:14:48.420 time, when people drew things, you know, people have always seen those sort of like Byzantine

00:14:53.200 type paintings where they'll just basically stack people on top of each other. And maybe that might,

00:14:59.820 the person that's supposed to be far away, it looks smaller kind of, but then it's still not in

00:15:04.180 perspective. Well, the notebook, the sketching allowed these guys to figure out, oh, if we do it

00:15:08.960 this way, we can actually provide some visual depth to our art. Yeah. And they could try and

00:15:14.580 try and try again, which is really important. You know, if they produced a drawing, which wasn't very

00:15:18.180 good, all they had to do was turn the page and try again. And that was never really available to

00:15:22.920 previous generations of artists. But this movement from business technology to creative technology,

00:15:28.600 we've seen in our own time, because we've seen computers go from IBM to the Apple Mac, and then you

00:15:34.920 have Pixar and you have these amazing digital artworks, which no one could have conceived of

00:15:39.260 50 years ago. And it's a very similar story. It's information technology being co-opted by creative

00:15:45.420 people and used in crazy new ways. And the other thing that the notebook allowed artists to do was

00:15:50.560 not only could they just draw a whole bunch, but because it was lightweight, they could share things

00:15:56.700 with other artists. So it allowed artistic ideas to spread faster than, you know, before. If you,

00:16:02.880 if you wanted to see a painting, you had to like go visit a church or go look at this mosaic wall.

00:16:07.780 Now the notebook, you can just hand someone your sketchbook, go, Hey, what I'm, I'm doing this

00:16:11.240 thing with a perspective or two point perspective. You should check this out. And then it just started

00:16:16.240 spreading faster and faster. Exactly. Exactly. And there was definitely training going on in artist

00:16:22.160 studios, which worked exactly like that, where they would have, you know, some really good drawings of

00:16:26.700 feet in the studio notebooks, studio sketchbook. And then you would just practice drawing feet using

00:16:31.580 those and the, you would get good at feet. And then you'd move on to the next, uh, piece of anatomy.

00:16:37.140 And during this time too, uh, so you had the artists using paper notebooks for sketchbooks. You had

00:16:41.760 accountants keeping the ledger during this time in the Renaissance, you also had this development in

00:16:47.360 Italy of a notebook called the Zibaldone. Did I say that right? I guess so. Yeah.

00:16:53.200 Yeah. All right. So tell us about the Zibaldone. What is the Zibaldone? What was that?

00:16:57.260 Zibaldone seems to have meant at the time salad. And it was a kind of notebook, which was exactly

00:17:04.220 like a salad in that it was all mixed up. It was all different kinds of things. It was basically

00:17:08.700 just what you fancied having. So remember that again, people didn't have printed books to rely

00:17:13.960 on. If you wanted to have literature in your house of any kind, it had to be in a notebook. It had to be

00:17:18.780 handwritten and a Zibaldone was your own personal collection of your favorite bits of writing.

00:17:25.600 So very commonly it was prayers, but it could also be songs, poems, Aesop's fables, translations of

00:17:32.880 Ovid or other classical authors, or just the business of the town proclamations from the town

00:17:39.480 authorities and so on. Anything which was going to be fun or useful, people just wrote down in their

00:17:44.560 own notebooks. And they were called Zibaldone because they ended up as hodgepodges. You know,

00:17:48.400 they were completely mixed up like a salad. And these are great because they're a real insight

00:17:52.460 into what people actually were interested in. And so some of them are a bit smutty, but most of them

00:17:59.020 are very just enjoyable. You know, they wrote down the fun stuff. It's a bit like a kind of mixtape,

00:18:04.640 if you like. People copying down their favorite tracks back in the 80s, as I'm sure you did,

00:18:09.100 or I certainly did. And making these unique mixes and no two were ever the same.

00:18:14.140 I thought it was interesting too about the Zibaldone was that they were oftentimes intergenerational,

00:18:20.280 like a father would pass on his notebook to his son and then the son would pick up where his dad

00:18:25.280 left off. Exactly. Yeah. They were like a family asset and you see it in people's wills when they

00:18:30.520 died quite often, even, and this was in a time when outside of Florence, most people couldn't read by

00:18:36.980 really the vast majority of people couldn't read. But in Florence, where this went on,

00:18:41.720 the vast majority of people in their wills would leave two or three books behind. And those were

00:18:47.240 mostly Zibaldone, which they would leave, as you say, to their sons or their daughters,

00:18:51.180 and they would just be carried on in the next generation.

00:18:54.040 All right. So they were writing things like poems, prayers, catchy quotes. Did anyone do any drawing

00:19:00.120 or sketching in the Zibaldones? Yes, they did. And this is one of the things that makes them so fun

00:19:05.760 because these people aren't by and large trained artists. So when they draw, for instance,

00:19:11.080 a scene from the story, like an Aesop's fable or something, it's a bit haphazard. It's clearly the

00:19:16.720 work not of a trained artist. It can look quite childish, but therefore it's really fun and

00:19:22.860 charming. And again, it really brings the people to life who actually use them.

00:19:26.820 Did they keep to-do list or grocery shopping list in their Zibaldone or was the Zibaldone was like,

00:19:31.700 no, it's only for things we want to keep for a long time?

00:19:35.520 Yeah, I think that's right. I don't think I came across one which had anything,

00:19:39.380 you know, like a grocery list in it. They would have things like recipes in them,

00:19:43.000 though, which are pretty functional. You know, people would have cures for baldness,

00:19:47.240 for instance, which would involve mushing up various grains or herbs or produce in olive oil

00:19:53.680 and then smearing it on your head, that sort of thing. So they had that kind of list. But anything as

00:19:58.520 casual as a shopping list, they'd probably just put on a bit of scrap paper, I guess.

00:20:02.460 And there was no, again, there's no rhyme or order to the Zibaldone. It's just,

00:20:06.240 you just, whatever you want to write, I'm going to write in there. And I think that's a difference

00:20:11.020 from the commonplace book, which we'll talk about here in a bit. So it was just, it was like a,

00:20:14.960 it was like a tossed salad.

00:20:16.680 Yeah, exactly.

00:20:17.520 Okay. Well, and one of the most famous notebooks keepers during the Renaissance,

00:20:23.660 I don't know if you'd call his notebooks or Zibaldones, but it kind of like that,

00:20:26.580 was Leonardo da Vinci. How many notebooks did this guy go through during his life?

00:20:32.700 Ah, no, we can't know. But thousands and thousands of pages. I think we have surviving 1,300 pages of

00:20:39.980 his notebooks. And they estimate that that's maybe a quarter of what he produced in his lifetime.

00:20:45.580 So what's that? About 5,000 pages, which I guess is, oof, that's 20, 25 big fat moleskins.

00:20:54.560 But some of his notebooks were oversized. Some of them were pocket sized. He actually wrote about

00:20:59.400 how he used notebooks for sketching. He said he always had one tied to his belt. He never went

00:21:04.260 anywhere without a notebook. So if he ever had a thought, he could write it down. If he ever saw

00:21:08.700 something interesting, he could sketch it. And he never stopped. He basically just never stopped.

00:21:13.160 He filled pages of notebooks and sketchbooks every day.

00:21:15.960 So give us an idea. What did he keep in his notebooks? Like what kind of things was he writing down?

00:21:19.340 Oh, Lord, where to begin? He had lists. For instance, he wasn't super well educated,

00:21:25.540 Leonardo. The education he got was pretty, you'd call it elementary. And then he went off to work

00:21:30.480 in an artist studio when he was a teenager. But he was very keen on learning Latin. So for instance,

00:21:34.820 he kept lists of Latin words. He did keep shopping lists and traveling lists, for instance, packing lists

00:21:41.420 in his notebooks so that we know when he moved house, what he took with him. We know who he owed money to,

00:21:47.320 who owed him money, etc. And then sort of these very mundane everyday things go up to

00:21:53.120 incredible anatomical drawings, which he made from drawing dissected cadavers. He was way ahead of

00:22:01.120 his time as an anatomist. But then there are mathematical sketches. He was obsessed with geometry

00:22:07.200 and polyhedrons, so 12-sided things, tetrahedrons, that sort of thing. He was obsessed by mechanics.

00:22:14.740 He designed things like ball bearings. We don't know if they were ever manufactured.

00:22:18.800 And then he designed these crazy machines, which look like flying machines or tanks.

00:22:24.220 I don't think that they were necessarily ever built. One Leonardo expert said to me that you've

00:22:29.840 got to think of his sketchbooks as kind of him showing off a little bit, because his job was

00:22:34.000 basically to be a genius. He didn't actually do anything very productive apart from painting,

00:22:39.020 and he actually didn't paint very many paintings either. But he was kind of like a public

00:22:43.140 court genius, and therefore the Duke of Milan or the King of France or whoever would want to pay

00:22:48.600 him to be around. And his sketchbooks and his notebooks were really important for that,

00:22:52.880 because he could show off all of his crazy ideas just turning a few pages, and people would have

00:22:56.780 their minds blown. So Leonardo's notebooks are undoubtedly some of the best ever. And he didn't

00:23:04.960 really see any boundaries. He just wanted to write or draw everything that he thought of.

00:23:09.160 The thing that stood out to me when you're describing Leonardo's notebooks was how much

00:23:14.140 drawing he did in it. This is not like a Zibaldone where people are just keeping prayers and writing

00:23:18.820 things down. He did a lot of drawing. I think you point out what he was doing is he was,

00:23:24.380 like the title of your book says, thinking with paper. He was taking these abstract thoughts that

00:23:28.980 he had in his head, and he was trying to make them more concrete by drawing them out.

00:23:33.960 Yeah. And so for instance, very famously, he was obsessed by drawing running water. So you could

00:23:40.280 put him by a stream or by a water mill, and he would draw the water moving over the rocks very,

00:23:45.080 very happily. He must have done it for hours and hours. He was obsessed by hair as well,

00:23:49.380 by drawing curly hair and looking for similarities between it. But he was always looking, for instance,

00:23:55.120 when he was drawing the water moving, he was also thinking about fluid dynamics. And he was trying

00:24:00.120 to work out why the water moved the way it did, what forces were working on it and so on. So he

00:24:05.680 never stopped asking why. And I think that's what's kind of inspirational about Leonardo's career is he

00:24:11.160 just never, ever stopped asking why, why, why, why? Like a really irritating five-year-old, you know?

00:24:18.240 Why? Why? And of course, because he was always looking for answers, he found some.

00:24:23.280 The thing about Leonardo's drawing, it inspired me because I'm not much of a drawer. I'm trying to

00:24:29.580 become more of a drawer in my notebooks. Because I think there's something to that idea of thinking

00:24:35.680 with paper and like drawing things to help you understand things. In your experience with your

00:24:40.380 notebooks, do you do a lot of drawing? Have you found any benefit to adding sketches along with

00:24:44.380 your writing in your notebook?

00:24:46.240 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Funnily enough, I used to keep separate sketchbooks and diaries. I never

00:24:52.380 really drew in my diary, but I always love seeing people who can draw doing a visual journal. You

00:24:59.280 see so many of them online, people who go traveling and then they sit in the town square

00:25:02.680 with a coffee and they sketch the town square and then write about it around the page. And I think those

00:25:08.040 are so beautiful. I think those are wonderful. They're really inspiring. But I just don't feel

00:25:12.520 confident enough in my own drawing to do that. But drawing is a great thing to do. And you never look

00:25:17.960 at anything as closely as when you're drawing it. You never really concentrate on a scene until you've

00:25:23.760 got a pencil in your hand, I find. So if you want to really experience a place, then drawing it is the

00:25:28.400 best thing to do.

00:25:29.420 Yeah, I'd agree. One of my favorite presidents, US presidents, was Teddy Roosevelt. And he was a

00:25:35.580 naturalist. He kept journals where he talked about his adventures he went on and his observations of

00:25:41.940 nature. And he did a lot of drawing. And I was I was pretty impressed like how well how good of a

00:25:46.440 drawer this guy was. Yeah, I did not know that. Yeah, I missed him. But this is the hazard of doing

00:25:53.440 such a wide ranging book. You you miss all of the ones which you wish you found. Okay, so if you want

00:25:59.960 to have a notebook like Leonardo, just write anything and everything that you come across that you think

00:26:05.440 is interesting and do more drawing. I think that's a good takeaway from that. That's my takeaway. Yeah.

00:26:10.180 Yeah, draw more. You'll be very happy with yourself. We're gonna take a quick break for

00:26:14.500 your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So this was a renaissance period. Eventually

00:26:22.740 notebooks started spreading across Europe. And then you see this development of something that's kind

00:26:28.740 of like the Zibaldone, but different the commonplace book. What is a commonplace book? And how is it

00:26:34.360 different from a Zibaldone? So you should think about this as a reaction to the age of

00:26:40.100 print arriving. So Zibaldone you have because you can't have printed books, basically. Commonplace

00:26:45.880 books arrive about 100 or 60, 60 odd years after print. And suddenly there are books everywhere.

00:26:53.340 And suddenly for the first time in Europe, anyway, there are more books than you can ever hope to

00:26:59.480 read because of this explosion in print. So everyone's busy reading more and more books,

00:27:05.080 which are cheaper than ever. And therefore, it's hard to remember what's going on.

00:27:10.000 Commonplace books are a really good method of taking the best bits out of what you read,

00:27:17.440 organizing it, and therefore you end up making your kind of own encyclopedia, which is thematically

00:27:22.720 arranged. So for instance, if you're a legal student, if you're studying to be a lawyer,

00:27:27.000 then all of the law books you read, when you go through them, and you come across a concept like,

00:27:31.800 I don't know, divorce or murder or justice or sentencing, you take a little quotation out,

00:27:38.820 you take a snippet out on that topic, you collect all these snippets from different authors,

00:27:42.120 and you end up with your own little law encyclopedia. But that could work equally well

00:27:46.640 if you're studying to be a priest, or if you were just reading generally, or studying Latin or Greek

00:27:52.980 or anything. So they're much more organized than Zibaldones. And they're quite hard work to make, 1.00

00:27:58.140 and they're definitely less fun. But commonplace books are a very, very good way to educate yourself

00:28:03.200 to a high standard.

00:28:04.580 So who were some famous commonplace bookkeepers?

00:28:07.120 More or less anyone you've heard of between about the year 1500, 1550, and say, the mid-Victorian

00:28:15.600 period. So Shakespeare, undoubtedly, that generation of dramatists were definitely massive commonplace

00:28:23.600 bookers in their youth. That's how their education worked. That's how they were taught. But basically,

00:28:28.340 anyone who had any kind of education in the period would have kept a commonplace book at school. And

00:28:35.380 then if they carried on keeping them into adulthood, often they became quite serious, weighty tomes.

00:28:42.600 John Milton kept a commonplace book into adulthood. Isaac Newton used his stepfathers as a kind of

00:28:48.900 sketchbook. But he also would have kept his own when he was a student. So it was a really important

00:28:54.440 part of education at that time.

00:28:56.240 I think John Locke was another famous. Didn't he write a book or a treatise on how to keep a

00:29:01.460 commonplace book?

00:29:02.540 He did, yeah. And this was quite a common thing because people recognized that it was quite hard

00:29:07.140 work. So they were always trying to make it slightly easier for each other. So Locke published this,

00:29:12.380 as he said, treatise on how to commonplace, which seems to have been fairly popular. People seem to have

00:29:18.080 listened to him.

00:29:19.140 I thought it was interesting about the development of the commonplace book. You saw people borrowing

00:29:23.200 again from accounting. So I think accountants had different types of books that they kept. There's

00:29:28.920 the main ledger, and then there's a waste book. There's things that were temporary, and you shifted

00:29:33.320 it over to more permanent records in the accounting books. And people who had commonplace books had a

00:29:39.160 similar system. They'd have a work-a-day notebook that they would carry with them all the time,

00:29:43.900 write down things they came across during the day, and they would get home, and then they'd go to

00:29:47.540 their main book, and then synthesize and organize everything that they tracked down that day into

00:29:53.260 the main commonplace book.

00:29:56.060 Yeah, absolutely. They would always be organizing their thoughts. And if this is one of the most

00:30:00.400 important things you can do to help you understand things better or think more creatively, always try

00:30:05.440 and organize your thoughts. It's just a really, really good process to go through. It's the same when

00:30:10.620 you're drafting a piece of writing, or, you know, making preparatory sketches for a painting or a

00:30:16.340 drawing, or just trying to work through what you've seen. A really good example of that is Darwin,

00:30:21.160 when he was on the HMS Beagle going to the Galapagos and places like that and looking at

00:30:25.640 tortoises. The notes he made on the spot were absolutely minimal, completely illegible to anyone

00:30:31.380 but him. Very, very, very sketchy in tiny little notebooks, which he could just put in his pocket when he was

00:30:36.940 out and about. But every evening when he went back to the ship, then he would break out the big

00:30:41.940 notebooks, he would organize his thoughts, he would write a proper journal, and he would pull in facts

00:30:47.120 from his reference library, which he had with him on the boat, and create something much more

00:30:52.720 sophisticated. And then in turn, that goes on to be the foundations of the rest of his career on the

00:30:57.840 evolution of species by natural selection.

00:31:00.800 Do you keep a commonplace book?

00:31:01.860 Do you know what, literally two weeks ago, I thought, you know, I'm gonna have to do this,

00:31:06.960 I started one. And what I did was I went and got a little moleskin address book, I'm holding it in

00:31:11.500 my hand now, you know, the sort which has the tab pages. Yeah. Because what I wanted to avoid was

00:31:16.980 having to go through and, you know, write down the alphabet and all the head words hundreds of times.

00:31:21.920 So yeah, so I've got those little tab pages down the side, and I've made a few entries.

00:31:25.860 But really, I should be making more. It reminded me. Yeah. But like I say, keeping a commonplace

00:31:31.860 book is hard work.

00:31:33.240 It does sound hard. And I think part of the reason why a lot of people don't do okay, it's hard.

00:31:38.280 And I think instead, what a lot of modern people do, instead of writing things out by hand and

00:31:43.060 taking the time to organize things manually, is they'll use digital tools, where if I highlight

00:31:49.200 text on the web, it'll go to this app, that will then organize the notes. And I've, I've experimented

00:31:55.100 with those things. I don't find them particularly useful.

00:31:58.440 No. And the reason they're not that useful is because they're really easy. So your brain doesn't

00:32:03.340 have to engage too much. You just, it's no more complicated than, oh, that's interesting.

00:32:07.640 Copy, click. Bye. And then you move on. Whereas if you're actually writing something down in a

00:32:12.580 notebook, you have to pause, you have to take five, 10 minutes to write it down. And when you're writing

00:32:17.020 it down, you're concentrating on every word because you want to make it an accurate record. So yeah,

00:32:21.600 so it goes into your mind. It goes into your brain. The work is very much the point.

00:32:25.600 Yeah. The work, it's not the writing itself. It's the work you have to do to organize it.

00:32:28.940 Yeah. It's the mental work you're doing. Yeah.

00:32:30.460 Yeah. That reminds me of when I was in law school in class, you would take notes, lecture notes.

00:32:35.520 But the thing that really helped the most was after class, I'd have to go and take those notes

00:32:40.580 and then put them into my outline, which I guess you call my commonplace book for that law class.

00:32:45.420 Exactly. Exactly. There you go. Yeah.

00:32:47.200 Okay. So if you want to do a commonplace book, you'd probably recommend get yourself an actual

00:32:52.040 physical analog notebook and make that your come. Don't try to do this digitally.

00:32:56.740 But I would also say, like when I was a teenager making mixtapes, if I heard a song and I particularly

00:33:03.400 liked the lyrics, I would always write the lyrics down. I had a notebook, which was just nothing but,

00:33:07.460 you know, snippets of Bob Dylan and things like that. And which actually I didn't know,

00:33:13.180 but that was my Zubaldoni. And I would recommend that really. If just anything you read, which you

00:33:18.200 like, just write it down in a notebook, keep it.

00:33:21.580 Yeah. So after you talk about the development of the commonplace book, what I love, you take these

00:33:27.040 little side journeys and different fads that notebooks went through throughout Western history.

00:33:33.180 And one you talk about was the friendship book. What was the friendship book?

00:33:38.100 Oh, these were lovely. Yeah. So these, these started off as a kind of autograph book

00:33:43.180 in Germany and students who were particularly impressed by their professors would take them

00:33:48.640 up to Luther or to Melanchthon and get these little notebooks signed and autographed by their

00:33:54.780 professors who were their stars. And then they would go off and study at another university because

00:33:59.420 they, in those days, when you studied at university, you were expected to travel from place to place

00:34:03.780 quite a lot. You didn't really root yourself in one place. And when you arrived in your new town,

00:34:09.000 you would whip out your autograph book and you would show it to Professor so-and-so. And you would

00:34:13.200 say, look, I am friends with Professor such-and-such over in that other town. And he would say, ah,

00:34:18.260 well, you must be a clever young chap. So this is what Germans did. And then the Dutch got hold of it. 0.98

00:34:22.360 And this is around the year 1600 or so. And they made it into something much more fun,

00:34:27.180 which was the friendship album. So it wasn't just for students and professors anymore. It was for anyone.

00:34:32.020 And when you went out for dinner with new people, you would take your friendship book,

00:34:36.360 your album Amicorum in Latin. And if you met someone interesting, you would whip it out and

00:34:41.420 say, it's so nice to meet you. Could you dedicate yourself into my book? You would give them a page

00:34:46.840 of your book. They would write down a little prayer again, or a snippet of poetry or a motto of

00:34:51.940 proverb, or they would do a sketch of something and hand it back. And that would be a little record of

00:34:56.740 your friendship. And you can see thousands of these things have survived in Holland. They were hugely

00:35:01.000 popular. And you can see people making these little social networks in these notebooks and recording

00:35:07.240 their friendships for, again, passing down through generation after generation. And of course,

00:35:13.360 you have people like Rembrandt or the other great Dutch painters would leave sketches in people's

00:35:19.100 notebooks. So these are now, you know, incredible little works of art in their own right. But they're

00:35:24.280 lovely. I mean, really, really nice things. Really strangely, no one ever did it apart from the

00:35:29.000 Dutch. We don't really know why they did it for a couple of hundred years. And then they kind of 1.00

00:35:33.080 just stopped. It petered out. But it was such a nice habit to be in for those couple of centuries.

00:35:39.660 It sounds like it was like the 1600 version of Dutch Facebook.

00:35:44.740 Yeah, it exactly was. You're exactly right. Yeah.

00:35:47.400 That's funny. Another thing you talk about in the book is do a chapter about the role of notebooks

00:35:51.680 in traveling. What role did the notebook play in the lives of travelers?

00:35:55.920 Well, it's really interesting. People seem to have an impulse when they go traveling to write

00:36:01.160 a diary to keep a journal. It seems very natural. But people did this when they would never have

00:36:06.400 dreamt of keeping a diary at home. So you have people like Marco Polo, for instance, who kept an

00:36:12.640 amazing travel journal when he was in China. But then any kind of traveler afterwards would. And then

00:36:20.080 these became a kind of literary subgenre. Because when people went traveling, they would keep notes

00:36:25.300 expecting it to be published when they got back if their journey was particularly remarkable.

00:36:29.700 So yeah, traveler's notebooks are always great. And particularly if they are filled as well with

00:36:33.840 sketches and things like that. There are so many wonderful, wonderful examples.

00:36:38.060 Well, yeah. Going back to Teddy Roosevelt, there's actually records of his travel journals that he kept

00:36:42.600 as a boy when he did this European tour. I think he also went to Egypt. And he drew pictures of the

00:36:48.320 things he saw in Egypt and writing about how it was boring on the ship and that sort of thing.

00:36:53.280 It was really cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing things. Yeah. And then I guess the most famous

00:36:57.960 travel journal would be or travel notebook keeper, Charles Darwin, you mentioned him earlier. He kept

00:37:03.760 like a notebook with him all the time where he just kind of wrote, you know, slipshod notes that he

00:37:09.180 could later transcribe in his main notebook. And that eventually what's crazy on these little

00:37:14.020 notebooks, you can see him develop the theory of evolution in real time.

00:37:18.700 Yeah. And also he seems to have been a really nice guy, Charles Darwin. He was very chatty. He was

00:37:24.560 not secretive at all. He would share his ideas with whoever he met, but he would also whip out

00:37:29.280 his notebooks. And if anyone said anything interesting, he'd be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

00:37:32.840 yeah. I get that. And he would make a little note of their conversation and then that would get fed

00:37:37.280 into his writing later on. So he absolutely never stopped taking notes.

00:37:41.380 Wasn't there, there's like an excerpt from one of, I think maybe a diary or a notebook that he had

00:37:46.280 about marriage. Like he was doing this pro and con list of whether or not to get married.

00:37:50.940 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And he sort of weighs up the cost of his independence against the sort of the

00:37:56.340 benefits of companionship and not being lonely and things like that. And in the end, he plumps to get

00:38:01.340 married. And fortunately he made a very happy marriage and it worked out well for him, but he

00:38:06.020 did have to think it through before he did.

00:38:07.560 Yeah. You talk about too, the history of the diary. And I thought this was interesting. So notebooks

00:38:13.080 had been around, like the paper notebook, around since about the 1200s. And people had commonplace

00:38:19.560 books, the Zibaldones, they had ledger books, they had sketchbooks. There weren't a lot of people who

00:38:24.860 were using their notebooks to write about their thoughts and feelings.

00:38:29.980 They really didn't. It's so, so strange. When you think of, you know, people who buy moleskins these

00:38:35.560 days, they're doing it basically to write journals, a lot of them. And it's a completely normal thing to

00:38:41.100 do. But for hundreds of years, no one did it. And when I was researching, I'd keep on coming across

00:38:46.340 mention of a notebook, which was called the diary of so-and-so. And then I'd go and look at it and it

00:38:50.660 wouldn't be a diary at all. It would be an account book or it would be a business notebook or it would

00:38:55.060 be, you know, a town chronicle or something like that. It would never be a personal diary. Like here's

00:39:01.260 what I did today. I got up, I had this breakfast and how did I feel?

00:39:05.220 Yeah. And it was funny too. Even if you look at these notebooks from the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s,

00:39:11.540 people would sometimes talk about children dying, but it was almost like they were just keeping track

00:39:16.200 of livestock. They never talked about like, oh, I felt sad. I'm grieving. You know, what most people

00:39:21.700 do today with a notebook, if a child died, they didn't do that.

00:39:24.460 Yeah. No, it was very much because it was to do with accounting. And I don't mean that in a cold way,

00:39:29.380 but they viewed it as that or rather they wrote about these terrible events or wonderful events.

00:39:35.580 They wrote about the birth of children as well. They would mark the day. But again,

00:39:39.560 there was no emotion really. Sometimes they would, for instance, write a prayer or they would write

00:39:44.380 the formula saying how sad they were. But then, you know, two years later, another child would die

00:39:49.540 and they would write exactly the same thing. So, you know, it was a formula rather than a genuine,

00:39:54.300 you know, feeling pouring onto the page.

00:39:56.340 So when did diary keeping that, the way we know it today is the sort of self-reflective

00:40:02.120 notebook. When did that come to be a thing?

00:40:06.220 Well, this, this is England's moment to shine. So for most of the story, England is this terrible

00:40:11.820 backwater inhabited by thugs, very poor education and muddy roads and all that. But for some reason

00:40:18.780 around the year 1600 in England, they do invent the diary, the daily diary as we know it.

00:40:23.760 We don't really know why. Various theories out there, but I'm not convinced by any of them. I

00:40:29.060 can't think of any explanation myself. But by the year 1600, it was definitely a fashion which,

00:40:35.880 for instance, people in plays could refer to. So there's a play by Ben Johnson from 1604 in which

00:40:41.660 one of his characters writes a diary and people take the piss out of him for it. And he's very

00:40:47.360 humiliated and everyone's familiar with that. I think the idea that some stranger reading your diary

00:40:51.820 is a terrible humiliation. So by then, by 1600, people were keeping diaries. We know that. But

00:40:57.060 where it came from, we have no idea.

00:40:59.400 And you talk about they kind of went out of style in the 1940s. What do you think was going on there?

00:41:03.960 I think time, actually. The mass media comes along. Imagine 120 years ago, imagine in 1900,

00:41:10.220 you don't have radio, you don't have any internet, you don't have the movies, don't have any TV.

00:41:14.800 What do you do in the evenings? You read, okay? You chat, you talk, you sing,

00:41:18.940 you play instruments. But you've just got quite a lot of time, particularly in the Northern

00:41:23.780 Hemisphere with long, cold winters when it's dark. You know, diary keeping is a good way to fill that

00:41:28.540 time. And then over the 20th century, you have more and more distractions. You have the cinema,

00:41:33.080 you have the radio, you then have the TV, and then you have the internet. And every time it chips away at

00:41:38.020 people's evenings, essentially. So it became harder and harder, I think, to find the time just to sit

00:41:44.520 down and think, okay, I'll think about what I did today for half an hour. And I find it difficult

00:41:48.960 to carve out the time. No, I agree. And something else you point out in the book is that keeping

00:41:54.000 diaries declined in the West, because we live in a peaceful time. And you can see that in the 19th

00:41:59.880 and 20th centuries, it was during times of war, that sales of diaries or journals would spike.

00:42:06.080 Yeah. And this is, I'm sure, true to this day. Whenever there is some upsetting, traumatic event,

00:42:13.500 your world turns upside down, people start keeping diaries, which is why teenagers keep diaries,

00:42:18.440 because their lives are in turmoil automatically, because of hormone poisoning, as someone said to

00:42:23.200 me. So teenagers keep diaries, and people in war zones keep diaries for the same reason. And I think,

00:42:28.820 you know, anywhere, you'll see it now, I'm sure, in Ukraine, for instance, there'll be a lot of people

00:42:32.920 keeping diaries who didn't before. Yeah, I've seen that in my own life. I was a big journal

00:42:37.140 keeper in high school, and then the early part of young adulthood. And then I remember, and if I

00:42:42.920 look back at what I wrote, it was a lot of the just ruminating over, oh, here's this problem,

00:42:47.340 here's this big decision I got to make, I'm feeling anxious about test scores, if I'm going to get a job.

00:42:52.560 And then I remember, I kind of reached this point in my 30s, you know, career established,

00:42:57.680 had a house, kids, I just didn't really have the itch to write in a journal anymore. And I

00:43:02.720 stopped doing it. But I'll notice whenever I have a problem going on in my life,

00:43:07.240 I will bust out the journal to write. Very healthy habit. Really healthy habit. Yeah.

00:43:13.340 Yeah. When you talk about this, there's research that backs this up of it's called expressive

00:43:17.920 writing, where you just write kind of stream of conscious what's going on in your thoughts and

00:43:23.140 your emotions. Yeah. And this, I think, was the single most surprising thing I came across in the

00:43:30.040 whole project, you know, three year project, whatever it was, that writing your emotions down

00:43:36.340 on the page, then helps your body heal from physical wounds, because it reduces the levels

00:43:42.500 of stress in your body so much that your body is able to recover from, for instance, an operation

00:43:48.560 or an injury or a burn more quickly, simply if you write down your emotional trauma. And this is now

00:43:56.180 they've researched it and researched and researched it, tested it, all kinds of experiments, it holds

00:44:01.140 up completely. And this blows my mind every time, you know, if you go for a cancer biopsy, you will

00:44:07.740 heal more quickly if you have written your diary beforehand. It's absolutely baffling to me how powerful

00:44:13.160 it is. Yeah. You talked to the researcher, James Pennebaker, who sort of the father of expressive

00:44:18.960 writing. And I think one of the things he noted too, is that in order to make expressive writing

00:44:23.520 effective, you don't have to do it all the time. Like you don't have to journal every day to get

00:44:28.240 the benefits basically. So just do it when you feel like you need to do it. Exactly. And when I asked him

00:44:32.740 about that, you know, I said to him, do you ever keep a journal? And he said, yeah, yeah. When I'm feeling

00:44:36.820 low and, or when I've got something to think about some problem. And I said, do you keep it all the

00:44:41.080 time? He just laughed. He said, no, why would I do that? I'm fine. He also has some advice on how

00:44:45.900 to get the most out of it. I think one problem that people run into, I've run into this problem

00:44:49.500 when I've kept a journal, when I'm trying to sort through problems is I ended up doing a lot of

00:44:54.280 ruminating, just belly aching. And it's not very productive because I'm always asking why is this

00:44:58.660 happening and why that one bit of advice, instead of asking why in your journal, ask how and what

00:45:05.220 because that'll give you better, more concrete answers. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:45:10.580 Because it's often hard to pinpoint why something happened. And then also what writing does in

00:45:16.100 general is it forces you because it's very logical and linear, you have to call in your

00:45:22.420 prefrontal cortex. So it calms you down if you're really emotional. So it gets you to think more

00:45:27.800 clearly and turns your emotions into actual thoughts. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You have this

00:45:33.740 fun chapter on bullet journaling and I'm sure our listeners, if they've been on Instagram,

00:45:37.840 they've seen pictures of people's really cool looking bullet journals. Tell us about the history

00:45:43.920 of bullet journaling. When did that get started? So I guess people have been keeping lists obviously

00:45:49.660 and checking them off since they were able to write anything down. Ryder Carroll, however,

00:45:55.720 sort of taken the list and turned it into a kind of, I wouldn't say art form, but a very sophisticated

00:46:00.780 way of organizing your thoughts and feelings. And the reason he felt driven to do this was because

00:46:06.620 he had a very pronounced ADHD, which made school life for him impossibly difficult. He couldn't

00:46:14.320 concentrate. He couldn't focus. He couldn't get anything done. He was constantly being shouted at

00:46:19.800 by his teachers, et cetera. And school was miserable for him until I think at college, I want to say,

00:46:26.440 he started just writing things down in lists, in bullet pointed lists, and he did it with everything.

00:46:32.540 And this kind of had a transformative effect on how he was able to approach his day because it helped

00:46:37.360 him to focus. It helped him break big, unmanageable tasks down into small, actionable little things and

00:46:44.440 therefore complete things. And he went from being this sort of constant headache for his teachers and

00:46:49.960 his parents to being super, super productive, very entrepreneurial. I've got to say he's a lovely guy

00:46:56.500 anyway, but he's also incredibly productive and gets a lot done with his time in a really interesting

00:47:03.140 way. And he invented the bullet journal thing, which is essentially a really ingenious way of

00:47:08.760 creating lists that organize your thoughts and organize your day. And it took off. He wrote a

00:47:13.660 couple of books and has thousands of hundreds of thousands, probably of people who have got his

00:47:18.280 little method now and use it to organize their lives and benefit from it.

00:47:22.100 What I think is interesting about the bullet journal is the visual aspect of it. Whenever

00:47:25.760 you look at them, there's lists, people just kind of keep it to a list, but sometimes people get

00:47:29.100 really fancy and they add in little pictures and drawings and they kind of look like zibaldones

00:47:34.460 sometimes when you look at the pages.

00:47:37.020 And again, the feeling of making something with your hands, I think is really powerful. So every time

00:47:43.200 you fill up a page of a notebook like that and tick everything off and you can look back and think,

00:47:46.960 yeah, I've really accomplished something.

00:47:48.240 Have you experimented with bullet journaling in your notebooking?

00:47:52.000 Not formally, but all of my notebooks are full of lists. Full of lists. So I'm a great believer in

00:47:58.940 lists and therefore I'm a kind of bullet journaler, but I never had the ADHD type issues, which I did it.

00:48:06.780 So after your deep dive into the history of the notebook, what do you think is the future

00:48:11.040 of the notebook?

00:48:12.720 I don't think it's going to go away. I think a conversation I often have is people

00:48:17.080 sort of waving their iPads and saying, oh, aren't these things going to take over?

00:48:21.400 But what we're seeing, I think, is a reaction to it when people, people like you, you know,

00:48:25.800 you're saying that Evernote or whatever doesn't seem to work for you as well as a commonplace

00:48:30.700 book does. So you're going back to keeping a commonplace book or a written notebook.

00:48:34.340 That's quite a common experience. People are realizing now, certainly the scientists all know,

00:48:39.060 the psychologists all know that writing by hand is better in terms of learning and it's better

00:48:44.440 in terms of thinking things through than typing all the time. So I don't think that notebooks

00:48:49.180 are going to go away anytime soon. People are always experimenting as well with these clever

00:48:54.140 kinds of half notebook, half iPad things, the remarkable tablet, things like that. And they

00:48:59.920 have their place, I think, particularly in the office, but I don't see, you know, the next

00:49:04.300 Leonardo da Vinci using a notable tablet.

00:49:06.480 How do you combine your use of an analog notebook with digital tools?

00:49:10.780 I try and go through a handwritten phase with every project. I mean, not when I'm bashing

00:49:19.320 out emails for work because I have a day job as well, but when I'm doing anything creative

00:49:23.580 for work or anything kind of strategic or trying to do any kind of deep thought, then I pick

00:49:28.000 up a pencil first rather than go straight to typing. And then when it's my own creative

00:49:33.460 work, anything I'm writing, I'm writing another book at the moment and thinking about, you know,

00:49:37.020 the book after that, it's all in notebooks to begin. And they're full of spider grams

00:49:41.260 and little charts and graphs and lists and notes from what I'm reading. And I've become

00:49:48.220 more organized over time with that. So now I keep a notebook basically, or a series of

00:49:52.940 notebooks for every chapter I'm working on. Then my notes are pretty organized, which they

00:49:57.660 certainly weren't six years ago when I started writing about notebooks. My notes from then, that

00:50:02.940 time are really haphazard, but now they're very organized.

00:50:05.780 Do you refer back to your notebooks from old projects at all?

00:50:08.980 Ha, that's interesting. Yeah, I did. I had a quick flick through the notebook ones

00:50:13.860 once fairly recently, and they were just horrible. It was so like the ones I use,

00:50:19.880 the ones I make now is so much better organized. And it's interesting that I sort of really educated

00:50:23.940 myself on the journey. And I found so many examples of really good note taking, which I could

00:50:28.800 essentially copy. Yeah. So my old notebooks, my old writing notebooks are pretty horrible.

00:50:34.180 The ones I make at the moment now, I like a lot. I'm sure I'm going to hold on to them for a long

00:50:38.900 time. Well, Roland, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn

00:50:41.920 more about the book and your work? Well, the book is out in the States. It's published by

00:50:46.960 Biblioasis, who are a fine Canadian independent publisher. And it's available everywhere,

00:50:52.260 your Barnes & Noble or your local independent bookstore, or even online if you've got no other

00:50:56.940 choice. But yeah, so seek it out, The Notebook by me, Roland Allen. I'd be really grateful.

00:51:02.780 And when you pick up the book at the Barnes & Noble, you got to check out the Moleskine

00:51:06.040 section. Get yourself a Moleskine too while you're at it. 1.00

00:51:08.180 Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

00:51:11.640 Roland, it's been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:51:14.720 Thanks very much for having me. I've really enjoyed it.

00:51:18.520 My guest here is Roland Allen. He's the author of the book, The Notebook,

00:51:21.380 A History of Thinking on Paper. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can

00:51:25.540 find more information about his work at his website, roland-allen.com. Also check out our

00:51:30.040 show notes at aom.is slash notebook. You can find links to resources when we delve deeper into this

00:51:34.400 topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website

00:51:46.340 at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It's

00:51:50.240 called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It's a great way to support the show.

00:51:55.200 As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you

00:51:58.800 to tell us the AOM podcast would put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - February 18, 2025

The Power of the Notebook — The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper

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