Books are things like us

On the history of the notebook

Inside pages for This Little Book Contains Every Reason Why Women Should Not Vote (Cornell University Library)

I recently lost my phone, by which I mean I broke it in an embarrassing manner. It wasn’t really a problem but it did mean I lost some notes and the beginnings of some poems, mostly the nonsense verse that I’m writing a lot of at the moment. One went something like this:

Sing crayfish
Sing partridge
Sing magpie
Sing bee

My love is
a slow curl 
smoke leaving
the lake 

Another observed that it was “very strange that dogs have eyes”. Without the poem to refer to, I’m not sure how, or whether, I went on to justify this.¹

It all reminded me why I still make notes on paper. Which reminded me, in turn, of Roland Allen’s recent history of the notebook, which I wrote about in The London Magazine last year. You can read a short, updated version of that essay/review below. Effectively, I argue that literature as we know it is a physical thing, a collaboration between us and the book. This isn’t a new observation, but it is one of those truths that need constantly restating and the implications are more alarming than I let on. The question I don’t ask is where we go from here and how it relates to the “post-literate” society I keep reading about on my phone. I suppose, cards on the table, we have to take the physical world far more seriously.

I have another review in the curent edition of TLM, which you can get here (one way of taking the physical world seriously is by buying print…). The piece is a cruel, blank verse impersonation of Ryan Ruby’s blank verse history of poetry. Like the original, the footnotes mean you have to read it in hard copy. That… unsharability was one of the more admirable things about Ruby’s book, which otherwise gave me the moral and aesthetic equivalent of an allergic reaction.

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The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper | Roland Allen (2024)

Drawings of whales in the log of the ship Indian Chief kept by Thomas R. Bloomfield (1842–1844).

Before he died, Philip Larkin asked his partner Monica Jones to destroy his diaries. Larkin once told Andrew Motion that he intended to do it himself. “When I see the Grim Reaper coming up the path… I’m going to the bottom of the garden, like Thomas Hardy, and I’ll have a bonfire of all the things I don’t want anyone to see.” In the event, Jones asked Betty Mackereth, Larkin’s secretary (and, in their later years, lover) to do the job. Mackereth took ‘thirty odd-volumes’ to Larkin’s office at the Brynmor Jones Library and fed them into a shredder, page by page.

In the years since, stories spread about the diary’s contents. Surely, Larkin had something terrible to hide? One theory, apparently baseless, argued that the notebooks included some kind of pornographic diary. Mackereth did not read the diaries, but she “couldn’t help seeing little bits and pieces.” They were, she said, very unhappy. Desperate, really. What survived of Larkin’s papers, like the notebooks where he wrote most of his poetry, revealed an endless appetite for self-reproach. One note beneath the draft of the poem ‘High Windows’ reads and fucking piss. It is not hard to imagine the diaries filled with more of the same. Larkin’s diaries were a loss to his biographers, but the contents do not really matter. The act of destruction tells us all we need to know.

We tend to take it for granted that there are physical places where we can, like Larkin, secrete our innermost thoughts but, as Roland Allen demonstrates, even the most familiar technology has a history. The concept (cheap, decent paper in a portable binding) has only been possible for a thousand years. Its widespread use is more recent still. Allen’s story is about everybody who used and uses notebooks: he is as interested in wool-merchants and whalers as he is poets and scholars. The result is subtly revolutionary: a familiar thing becomes strange and strangely powerful. The notebook seems to have been more or less responsible for the Renaissance in Florence. Without the portable sketchbook, Allen implies, you don’t get Leonardo de Vinci, or the unprecedented realism of an artist like Giotto. Without double-entry bookkeeping, you don’t get the wealth which patronised them, or the invention of companies which exist as legal entities independent of the people who benefit from them (in retrospect, a bad move).

The Notebook skips very readably from early medieval Florence to the present day, jumping across time and space as the themes and taxonomies demand: bullet journals, nature journals, diaries, ship’s logs, policeman’s notebooks. Like the writers and artists he writes about, Allen draws on a wonderfully diverse range of examples, from an early Dutch ‘fishbook’, full of staggering drawings and practical observations, to Agatha Christies’ sprawling, completely unsystematic and distinctly un-Christie-like notes for her novels. Still, for many readers and at least for me the most compelling and unnerving passages are the ones which deal with the way in which notebooks get mingled up with our own sense of self - the strange way in which they blur the boundary between the public and deeply private and the literary culture which they made possible.

In particular, Allen draws attention to the work of the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who argue that technologies like notebooks are “extended minds”, ones without clear boundaries distinguishing them from whatever it is we think is going on inside our heads. If someone reads our diary, they are reading us. Bookish people are part-book. And the transformation goes both ways: notebooks also have neurological effects. Artists who spend a lifetime sketching have more grey matter in certain parts of the brain than the rest of us, while students taking notes by hand gain ‘deeper’ short term and long-term memory than those using laptops, because they have to select and paraphrase, but also because the paper itself provides them with a place for the mind to go back to.

“Despite the billions poured into product development by the likes of Apple… the best cognitive tool we have was invented hundreds of years ago.”

That meeting between the mind and blank page, the combination of self-making and brain-forming, is where literature and literariness begins. I often think about literature as a conversation with the past, but the word conversation makes it sound like a play taking place inside our heads. The reality is both more and less ghostly. There is an object in front of us and the object is talking. When we make a note that matters to us, we take it to heart. We don’t just commit it to memory, like a photo in an album, we change our relationship with the text. This was the basis of every past literary culture, from medieval manuscripts to the world of letter writing which produced the nineteenth-century novel (sometimes I think the end of the letter is the central fact of modern literature). “Transcribing a poem or a letter forces the writer to read it multiple times,” Allen writes, “paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order.” As a result, “you only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.”

More people think on paper now than ever before, but we think in all kinds of less tangible places too and spend increasing amounts of time here. The author and critic Brandon Taylor recently wrote an essay on this platform about note-taking. I enjoyed it and agreed with everything he argued. It also gave me whiplash. Taylor explains how he has been searching for the best technique for making notes from books. He searches the web; he asks social media. In the end, he finds his method from a YouTuber, who suggests selecting the key passages in a text and copying them out by hand, condensing where possible. What’s so disorientating (and this is no reflection on Taylor, it’s just where we are) is that this is what notetaking is and always has been. It’s the method I used as an undergrad at my old and august university, not that long ago. It’s also, as Allen’s book shows, the very origins of literary culture. And we’re so separated from the practice that Taylor could only find it on YouTube, advertised as a lifehack.

I live that separation out every day. If I really like a poem, a phrase or observation, I try to write it down. The poems I know the best are the ones I have copied by hand and spoken aloud. But I don’t do it as often as I could. Instead, I take pictures of poems or paragraphs I like and share them on social media. The impulse to share is strong and not always suspect, however much it has been gamified by algorithms; early modern writers of ‘commonplace books’ would take them round to each other’s houses to share their favourite quotes. And it is not necessarily a question of doing one thing or the other. In practice, however, the way we spend our time becomes who we are (as someone once said, how we live measures our own nature). The person who takes a picture of a sentence and feeds it to an app is not the same one who sits down and copies it.

For many of the characters in Allen’s story, making notes is a way of making a mark. Familiarity with books is almost always a spur to make or meddle with them yourself, whether by scribbling in the margins or flooding a new blank page with words. We teach children to read by teaching them to hold books and the first thing they want to do is grab at and turn the pages. Later, they might try and make their own by stapling pieces of card together. Books are things like us.

“I see the story of Europe’s adventure with the notebook as one of enlargements…” Allen writes, “as curious minds expand to interact with, and fill, the blank spaces that notebooks presented.” He is less excited by the “creative constraints” they offer. But I am not sure it is possible to separate the one from the other. Those blank spaces are so inviting because each one is a self-contained world, waiting for us to change it and be changed by it in turn. Here, the notebook says, is a space where you can think for yourself. Where such a thing is possible.

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1. T. S. Eliot used to throw away drafts on the grounds that if the lines were any good, he would remember them. Good for him I guess.