The Power of the Notebook — The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper
Episode Stats
Summary
The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine section of a hoarder s bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my moleskin out of my pocket and jotted down some notes. Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out. That s the power of a pocket pad s possibilities, something Roland Allen explores in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine
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section of a hoarder's bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my moleskin out of my pocket and
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jotted down some notes, like penitential names. I considered things like the manly arts before
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settling on the Art of Manliness, categories of content and initial article ideas.
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Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out.
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That's the power of a pocket pad's possibilities, something Roland Allen explores in The Notebook,
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a history of thinking on paper. Today on the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks
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and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists.
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We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks,
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the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian Zimbaldone to the Friendship
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Book to the Modern Bullet Journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor.
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Along the way, we discuss ways you could fruitfully use notebooks today, and why, even in our digital
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age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity. After the show's over,
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check out our show notes at awim.is slash notebook.
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So you put out a book called The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper, and this is a history
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of The Humble Notebook. And I think hopefully by the end of the show, we're going to find out it's
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not so humble, because if you look at any advancement in art, technology, economics, there's
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typically a notebook involved. I'm curious, what got you to take this deep dive into the history of
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Well, I guess there are two questions. There's where did my interest come from in notebooks,
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and then what made me take the deep dive. The interest came from keeping a diary myself,
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essentially, which I did for years. I started in my mid-20s, and quite quickly, it became a really
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important part of my life, and it still is. And keeping a diary, I started just to notice other
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people's notebooks. And in my work, I'm a sales guy, I'm not especially creative, but in the publishing
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companies where I worked, the really creative people always had sketchbooks and notebooks, which they
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would use to design things or write books or generally be enviably creative. So I would sort
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of notice them and always sneak at me if I could. How did the book come about? I guess one day, it just
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occurred to me that this absolutely universal, omnipresent, really simple object had in fact been
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invented at some point, like anything else. And so I thought, well, where was it invented? And it was
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really hard to find out, by which I mean, Google didn't help. So that was what set me looking. And
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yeah, and it sent me off on this sort of wild journey, which turned into a book pretty quickly.
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Yeah. And what I love about this book, it really captured, I think, the love and the mystique that I
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think people have around notebooks. I know for me, there's something about buying a new notebook.
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You open it up, and it just, you feel good. What do you think is going on there? Why do you think
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people are so drawn to notebooks and keeping a notebook and buying new notebooks, even though
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they already have unfinished notebooks at home? What's going on there, you think?
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I think partly there's a promise, there's potential, isn't there? It's like any vaguely
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improving thing. It tells you that you can be a better version of yourself, I think.
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You can be a bit more creative. You can be better organized. You can write that novel,
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or you can start keeping a journal, or you can get really on top of your workload. I think that
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promise is in the blank pages. I think, but also, you find it inviting. A lot of people,
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actually, particularly who aren't long-term notebookers, do find it a little bit intimidating,
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almost, the blank page. And they get a bit frightened of it.
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Yeah, I've known people like that. They'll buy a really nice journal,
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and they won't write in it. It's like, well, I just want to make sure what I write in it is good.
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Yeah, it's got to be perfect. And that's not the right attitude at all.
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Yeah. So let's talk about the history of the notebook. What did humans use to keep track of
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There were three main things. And we're talking about Europe here. It's largely a European story
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that I tell in the book, although I'm not arrogant enough to think that that's the entire world.
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But they used parchment, which is very tough. It's very expensive. It's very tricky to write on.
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And it's very hard to use parchment if you're not sitting at a desk. And in effect,
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you're actually painting onto the page when you write on parchment. So it's not the most
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For those who aren't familiar, what is parchment? Because I'm sure people have heard like,
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oh, this is parchment. But like, what is parchment made out of?
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Parchment is basically a kind of leather. It is animal hide, which has been stretched very thin.
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So it's been tensioned while it's been, I guess, cured. But it is leather. And it's made out of the
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same stuff as your boots are. And it does therefore last forever. It's incredibly tough.
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It's very robust, but it's very thick pages. So if you have a parchment book with 100 pages,
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it's like a brick. But it's a very tough material. And as I say, if you can sit down on your desk,
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it's a great material. Then you have papyrus, which came out of Egypt, which the ancient Egyptians
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famously used, but also the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans used a lot of papyrus. And it's
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much easier to use for sort of quick and dirty writing. And it was very cheap, but it falls apart
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over time. It's very, very hard to keep papyrus together, which is why it basically only survives
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in Egyptian tombs, which are sort of the driest, stillest places in the entire world. So the Romans
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had a lot of literature on papyrus, but it's all gone. And then the third thing, which is in a way,
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the most interesting with these little wax tablets, which people all over the Mediterranean used and
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the Middle East used for thousands of years. And these were very much the notebooks of their day.
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You'd have a little pair of wooden frames, if you like, which opened like those little picture
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frames with a hinge in the middle. And you'd have wax on the insides, which you could scrape into
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with a stylus. And so you could fill up these pages with scratched writing. And then when you
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filled the page or didn't need it, again, you could just wipe it clean. Now, obviously, that's
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really, really useful if you want to just make a shopping list or keep a quick list of something
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that's going on. But it's not so practical if you've got something like a contract, which you want
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to preserve forever and never change. So all of these mediums had their advantages and disadvantages.
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I thought that was interesting, the handheld wax tablets. There's actually mosaics of a woman,
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and it looks like she's using almost like a Palm Pilot. It was really bizarre to see. It's like,
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wow, this is like thousands of years old, but it looks like she's got a little PDA in her hand.
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Yeah. And they were absolutely used everywhere for maybe 2,000 years or probably more. They were
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really, really good little bit of technology. And then they vanished with paper, basically,
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because paper was so much more practical. Yeah. And during this time, what did people keep track
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of? I mean, today we use a notebook for all sorts of things. What were people keeping track of on
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their handheld tablets or parchment or papyrus? Well, one of the interesting things which I found
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out during the book is really that people's lives back then were as complicated almost as ours are now,
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or rather that they were certainly as varied. So people had shopping lists. They had anything to do
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with their businesses. If they were buying and selling or making, they inevitably had to take
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notes about their customers or the money that they borrowed or lent, etc. And so any kind of business,
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it was very important. But also people were writing down prayers and poems, any kind of what we would
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call literature. But obviously, they didn't have printed books in those days. So if you wanted to have
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poems or any kind of writing in your house, you had to have it basically in a notebook or something like
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that. Okay. So these three mediums, parchment, papyrus, tablets, they allowed you to get stuff
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down and keep it there. They all had their downsides. Parchment, too heavy, too expensive.
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Papyrus didn't last very long. The wax handheld tablets, you know, good for shopping list and very
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ethereal type things that you could just erase at the end of the day. But you talk about there was a big
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change that happened in the 1200s in Italy, that basically revolutionized the notebook and created
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almost the notebook that we have today. So what was going on in Italy in the 1200s that led to the
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They, it was a really important moment in history, I think. And it was a real technological
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leap forward. So they got hold of paper from the Spanish and the Spanish got hold of paper from
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the Arabs or the Islamic occupiers of what is now Valencia. And for hundreds of years, they'd been
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making paper there as part of the Islamic caliphates. And they got really, really good at it. And then
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when the king of Catalonia, who was a guy called James II, wanted, he wanted it, basically, he went
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out and conquered them. And he got hold of the paper and the papermakers kept hold of them, treated them
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very well and started exporting paper everywhere. Now the Italians, what they did was they realized that
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it could transform their business. Because suddenly they had this medium, which they could do business
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on, which was permanent, and therefore secure. So if you had a business ledger, and he wrote something
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Yeah, why is that? What is it about paper? You talk about in the book that parchment, that was one of the
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key differences between parchment and paper. Paper was permanent. What was it about paper that made it
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permanent? If you write on paper with ink, the ink goes into the middle of the paper, and it sticks
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there. And you can't get rid of it without destroying the page. If you write on a parchment
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sheet with ink, it just sits on top, a bit like paint. And it's very easy to scrape it off and
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replace it with something else, which people who used parchment did all the time, because it was so
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expensive. So if they'd finished with a book, and they wanted to reuse the parchment, they just scraped
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off the writing, and it was as good as new. But merchants suddenly had this secure way of recording
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transactions, debts, deals. And of course, that enabled them to have much more interesting,
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complicated businesses, because they could suddenly trust their information technology.
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And this allowed the development of paper and paper books. This led to the development of,
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what's that accounting, double book accounting?
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Double entry bookkeeping. I mean, maybe people have heard this, but for those who aren't familiar,
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what is double entry bookkeeping? And why is it such a big deal?
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Right. Among your listeners, you're going to have, I hope, plenty of accountants, plenty of people
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who've got double entry bookkeeping degrees or qualifications, people who have trained in any
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kind of money management. And I just want to salute them, because they're the real heroes of the story.
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Double entry bookkeeping is tricky, but it's a very, very useful way of managing money.
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And it enables you to create a profit and loss picture out of quite a complicated array of deals,
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right? So when you talk about a company's balance sheet today, you're talking in terms of double
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entry bookkeeping, balancing credits and debits. When you talk about the profit and loss account,
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which every company does to this day, this was invented in Italy around the year 1300.
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When you talk about an annual statement or an annual statement of a company's accounts,
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that was invented in Italy. They invented limited liability partnerships. They invented futures
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markets. They had very sophisticated insurance and modern banking, and they invented the company.
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So if you've ever worked for a company, you can thank these Italians back in the year 1300. They
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invented all of these things in probably around Florence.
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And that was their technology. Yeah. So, and because there was so much cash flying around,
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Florence became one of the richest places in the world, despite the fact that it's a small city
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with very few natural resources of its own. They were so good at money management that their bankers
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basically ran European business for a hundred years or more. And their merchants and manufacturers
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were, you know, among Europe's leading tradesmen. So basically because they were incredibly good at
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managing money and that people from all over Europe would look at them enviously and say,
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oh, they're doing it the Italian way, but they couldn't quite understand it because looked at
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from the outside, double entry bookkeeping is quite opaque, a little bit difficult to get your head
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around. So it took quite a long time for other people to do it. But then the Northern Italians
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learned how, the Germans learned how, then the Dutch and the French, and eventually even the British
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learned how to do double entry bookkeeping. And that is where the sort of the whole European
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And something that happened at the same time is you had these Italian accountants basically with
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their notebooks, their ledgers, and there were the artists around the same time looking around like,
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oh, these guys have got this cool thing. That's, they've got this medium.
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They got this medium where they can just look at things. It's lightweight. It creates a permanent record.
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Maybe we could use that for art. So how did Florentine artists co-opt paper accounting books
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I think it really was that simple. Imagine if you are an artist in a time before paper,
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then you can paint on the walls, you can paint on parchment or canvas, which are both inconvenient
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and expensive. You could carve wood or stone, but you couldn't casually go out and just sketch
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something. And today's artists, whether or not they're a hobbyist or a pro, good or bad,
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can take it absolutely for granted. You can pick up a pencil, just go out and sketch whatever you
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want or draw a picture of a person or of a rabbit or of a tree. But this is actually, again, a sort
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of surprising development, which people weren't always able to do. So I think there was like a
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generation of artists in Florence, basically, who saw their contemporaries using these notebooks,
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which were quite cheap by this point for quite, you know, interesting business things. And they
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just picked it up and started drawing in it. And they realized, or they discovered that if you draw
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a lot, you get good at drawing. And suddenly they were better artists than they would have been
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without these notebooks and turned into really great artists, a generation, I think, of great artists.
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Yeah. That's when you see the development of perspective, like there was an artist you highlight
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and you can actually see how you develop this perspective where things, because before that
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time, when people drew things, you know, people have always seen those sort of like Byzantine
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type paintings where they'll just basically stack people on top of each other. And maybe that might,
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the person that's supposed to be far away, it looks smaller kind of, but then it's still not in
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perspective. Well, the notebook, the sketching allowed these guys to figure out, oh, if we do it
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this way, we can actually provide some visual depth to our art. Yeah. And they could try and
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try and try again, which is really important. You know, if they produced a drawing, which wasn't very
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good, all they had to do was turn the page and try again. And that was never really available to
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previous generations of artists. But this movement from business technology to creative technology,
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we've seen in our own time, because we've seen computers go from IBM to the Apple Mac, and then you
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have Pixar and you have these amazing digital artworks, which no one could have conceived of
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50 years ago. And it's a very similar story. It's information technology being co-opted by creative
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people and used in crazy new ways. And the other thing that the notebook allowed artists to do was
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not only could they just draw a whole bunch, but because it was lightweight, they could share things
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with other artists. So it allowed artistic ideas to spread faster than, you know, before. If you,
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if you wanted to see a painting, you had to like go visit a church or go look at this mosaic wall.
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Now the notebook, you can just hand someone your sketchbook, go, Hey, what I'm, I'm doing this
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thing with a perspective or two point perspective. You should check this out. And then it just started
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spreading faster and faster. Exactly. Exactly. And there was definitely training going on in artist
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studios, which worked exactly like that, where they would have, you know, some really good drawings of
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feet in the studio notebooks, studio sketchbook. And then you would just practice drawing feet using
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those and the, you would get good at feet. And then you'd move on to the next, uh, piece of anatomy.
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And during this time too, uh, so you had the artists using paper notebooks for sketchbooks. You had
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accountants keeping the ledger during this time in the Renaissance, you also had this development in
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Italy of a notebook called the Zibaldone. Did I say that right? I guess so. Yeah.
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Yeah. All right. So tell us about the Zibaldone. What is the Zibaldone? What was that?
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Zibaldone seems to have meant at the time salad. And it was a kind of notebook, which was exactly
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like a salad in that it was all mixed up. It was all different kinds of things. It was basically
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just what you fancied having. So remember that again, people didn't have printed books to rely
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on. If you wanted to have literature in your house of any kind, it had to be in a notebook. It had to be
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handwritten and a Zibaldone was your own personal collection of your favorite bits of writing.
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So very commonly it was prayers, but it could also be songs, poems, Aesop's fables, translations of
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Ovid or other classical authors, or just the business of the town proclamations from the town
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authorities and so on. Anything which was going to be fun or useful, people just wrote down in their
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own notebooks. And they were called Zibaldone because they ended up as hodgepodges. You know,
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they were completely mixed up like a salad. And these are great because they're a real insight
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into what people actually were interested in. And so some of them are a bit smutty, but most of them
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are very just enjoyable. You know, they wrote down the fun stuff. It's a bit like a kind of mixtape,
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if you like. People copying down their favorite tracks back in the 80s, as I'm sure you did,
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or I certainly did. And making these unique mixes and no two were ever the same.
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I thought it was interesting too about the Zibaldone was that they were oftentimes intergenerational,
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like a father would pass on his notebook to his son and then the son would pick up where his dad
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left off. Exactly. Yeah. They were like a family asset and you see it in people's wills when they
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died quite often, even, and this was in a time when outside of Florence, most people couldn't read by
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really the vast majority of people couldn't read. But in Florence, where this went on,
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the vast majority of people in their wills would leave two or three books behind. And those were
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mostly Zibaldone, which they would leave, as you say, to their sons or their daughters,
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and they would just be carried on in the next generation.
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All right. So they were writing things like poems, prayers, catchy quotes. Did anyone do any drawing
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or sketching in the Zibaldones? Yes, they did. And this is one of the things that makes them so fun
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because these people aren't by and large trained artists. So when they draw, for instance,
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a scene from the story, like an Aesop's fable or something, it's a bit haphazard. It's clearly the
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work not of a trained artist. It can look quite childish, but therefore it's really fun and
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charming. And again, it really brings the people to life who actually use them.
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Did they keep to-do list or grocery shopping list in their Zibaldone or was the Zibaldone was like,
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no, it's only for things we want to keep for a long time?
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Yeah, I think that's right. I don't think I came across one which had anything,
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you know, like a grocery list in it. They would have things like recipes in them,
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though, which are pretty functional. You know, people would have cures for baldness,
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for instance, which would involve mushing up various grains or herbs or produce in olive oil
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and then smearing it on your head, that sort of thing. So they had that kind of list. But anything as
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casual as a shopping list, they'd probably just put on a bit of scrap paper, I guess.
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And there was no, again, there's no rhyme or order to the Zibaldone. It's just,
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you just, whatever you want to write, I'm going to write in there. And I think that's a difference
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from the commonplace book, which we'll talk about here in a bit. So it was just, it was like a,
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Okay. Well, and one of the most famous notebooks keepers during the Renaissance,
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I don't know if you'd call his notebooks or Zibaldones, but it kind of like that,
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was Leonardo da Vinci. How many notebooks did this guy go through during his life?
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Ah, no, we can't know. But thousands and thousands of pages. I think we have surviving 1,300 pages of
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his notebooks. And they estimate that that's maybe a quarter of what he produced in his lifetime.
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So what's that? About 5,000 pages, which I guess is, oof, that's 20, 25 big fat moleskins.
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But some of his notebooks were oversized. Some of them were pocket sized. He actually wrote about
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how he used notebooks for sketching. He said he always had one tied to his belt. He never went
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anywhere without a notebook. So if he ever had a thought, he could write it down. If he ever saw
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something interesting, he could sketch it. And he never stopped. He basically just never stopped.
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He filled pages of notebooks and sketchbooks every day.
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So give us an idea. What did he keep in his notebooks? Like what kind of things was he writing down?
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Oh, Lord, where to begin? He had lists. For instance, he wasn't super well educated,
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Leonardo. The education he got was pretty, you'd call it elementary. And then he went off to work
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in an artist studio when he was a teenager. But he was very keen on learning Latin. So for instance,
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he kept lists of Latin words. He did keep shopping lists and traveling lists, for instance, packing lists
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in his notebooks so that we know when he moved house, what he took with him. We know who he owed money to,
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who owed him money, etc. And then sort of these very mundane everyday things go up to
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incredible anatomical drawings, which he made from drawing dissected cadavers. He was way ahead of
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his time as an anatomist. But then there are mathematical sketches. He was obsessed with geometry
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and polyhedrons, so 12-sided things, tetrahedrons, that sort of thing. He was obsessed by mechanics.
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He designed things like ball bearings. We don't know if they were ever manufactured.
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And then he designed these crazy machines, which look like flying machines or tanks.
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I don't think that they were necessarily ever built. One Leonardo expert said to me that you've
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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
00:24:46.240
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
00:25:29.420
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,
00:27:58.140
and they're definitely less fun. But commonplace books are a very, very good way to educate yourself
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
00:28:56.240
I think John Locke was another famous. Didn't he write a book or a treatise on how to keep a
00:29:02.540
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
00:29:19.140
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
00:29:56.060
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
00:31:01.860
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
00:31:33.240
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.
00:32:30.460
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.
00:32:47.200
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.
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
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
00:38:07.560
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,
00:39:56.340
So when did diary keeping that, the way we know it today is the sort of self-reflective
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
00:40:59.400
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
00:47:37.020
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,
00:47:48.240
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
00:48:12.720
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
00:49:06.480
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.
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.