The Notebook
by Roland Allen
21 October 2026
It’s taken me forever to finish this book; I started it back in March (it’s now October) and I’ve read it in several chunks having been through the library’s print and digital copies of it. The subtitle is “A history of thinking on paper” and whilst there was a brief survey of notes before paper - wax tablets, papyrus etc - the book really dives into the many uses of notebooks since paper was invented and bound into a small format for notes. The moleskine is the classic example - the name comes from French notebooks of the 19th century though the brand is much more modern - but the book goes back right to the earliest notebooks.
The many uses include record keeping, account books, logbooks, journals, cookbooks, author’s notes, songwriting, diaries and a whole lot more that have slipped my memory now. It includes references to all the things you might expect - Samuel Pepys’ diary, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Isaac Newton’s - as well as a lot of otherwise anonymous people who we know a lot about as a result of the notes they left behind. I found the book really fascinating when it got into how notes have a second life beyond their original purpose, for example how old ship’s logs are being used again now to collect evidence of climate change from the historical observations they contain.
I’m not sure reading the book fast was ever going to be an option for me and I don’t regret taking it slow. Each chapter could have been a book of its own really. There’s a wealth of research and I often went off looking for extra info on the internet. And sparking me into exploring those kind of rabbit holes is absolutely a positive aspect of the book as far as I’m concerned. It was well worth the time I spend reading and exploring it. And it was extra evidence that in general I much prefer a print copy of a book to the digital. And the book also made me think that my own long term effort to move all my notes from paper to digital format is kind of misguided and I should take more notes on paper myself.
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