A notebook kept by an illiterate sharecropper in Italy in the 15th century has captured my imagination. The book recorded sales, dowries, rent and purchases. Since the sharecropper, Benedetto del Massarizia, could not write, he relied on others. Craftsmen, notaries and priests made entries. The book is written in more than 30 hands.
I could empathize. I, too, would find a way to make a record, even if I couldn’t write.
The wonderful detail is in Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. If you keep a notebook, journal or diary, you’ll find it wonderful, although you’ll pick a few quarrels along the way.
Orange Crate Art’s review mentioned three conspicuous omissions: Joseph Joubert, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Arthur Inman. I missed Eric Hoffer, whose remarks about how he worked through notebooks and index cards are the most helpful things I’ve found on how people think on paper.
I think The Notebook is stronger as a history than as an account of how we think. But Allen made me think, time and again, about a tool I use every day. I’ll come back to this book.
• Sources and notes: Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper; Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2024. The account of the notebook in many hands is on p. 62.
A quibble: Does anyone else think the account of Sir Thomas Browne’s daughters (pp. 134-5) puts them and their father in the wrong century?
Michael Leddy’s review in Orange Crate Art is here:
1770: that’s a bad slip. I should have noticed it. (I like Thomas Browne.) Elizabeth was born c. 1648, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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