Review: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (New York: Biblioasis, 2024). 416 pp. $19.95 paper.

        Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!

        Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended
        Mind”

The philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, quoted in the final pages of The Notebook, have made a compelling case that the materials of our thinking — say, a calcuator, or a Filofax — are rightfully considered parts of our cognitive processes, parts of an extended mind. Ludwig Wittgenstein offered a similar conclusion sans analytical argument:

“Thinking takes place in the head” really means only “the head is connected with thinking.” — Of course one says also “I think with my pen” and this localisation is at least as good.

And, of course, a pen needs something to think on, or in — say, a notebook.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook is a briskly paced, deeply researched, endlessly surprising account of the ways in which humankind has thought in notebooks. The story begins circa 1305 BCE with a beeswax diptych, and moves to the technologies of codex and paper and what their meeting (in Baghdad, circa 800 CE) made possible: many kinds of notebooks for many uses. Allen’s history includes accounting ledgers, sketchbooks, the bewildering variety of specific-use notebooks found in Renaissance Italy — ricordanzi (home account books), libri di segreti (for confidential business), libri di ricordi (memoirs), libri di famiglia (family books), and zibaldoni (personal miscellanies) — portolans (handbooks for navigators), musical treatises, commonplace books, travel journals, Stammbücher (autograph books), memory-tables (pocket-sized whiteboards), dated diaries (thanks to John Letts, 1811), police notebooks (often used for fiction, not fact), patient diaries (first used in Sweden, written by nurses and family members for those in intensive care, att ge tillbaka förlorad tid, “to give back lost time”), bullet journals, and now-mythologized Moleskines.

Along the way we encounter a variety of unusual characters, both unfamed and famed: among them, Michalli da Ruoda, or Michael of Rhodes, a fifteenth-century mariner who enlisted in the Venetian navy as an oarsman, rose through the ranks, and compiled a 400-page notebook of shipbuilding, navigation, mathematics, astrology, and heraldry; Adriaen Coenen, a sixteenth-century Dutch fish merchant who created an 800-page Visboek, or fishbook, with watercolors depicting aquatic life; and Isaac Newton, whose youthful notebooks included magic tricks and how-tos (e.g., how to make birds drunk), and whose later Waste Book held the seeds of his mathematical thinking. Most endearing is Bob Graham, one-time governor of and senator for Florida, whose habit of recording more or less everything in little spiral-bound notebooks (4,000 in all) became the subject of mockery when he was considered as a vice presidential pick. Most moving is Michael Rosen, the writer and broadcaster, who offers his eloquent gratitude to the medical staff who wrote his patient diary during his long ICU ordeal with COVID.

I find three people conspicuously missing from this book — and yes, I think there should be room for them: Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), whose notebooks of aphorisms, Pensées, are well known; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1798), whose “waste books” or ‌Sudelbücher are also celebrated; and Arthur Inman (1895–1963), mediocre poet and maker of one of the strangest and longest diaries known. I jotted their names in my notebook while reading this Notebook.

Related reading
All OCA notebook posts : Twenty-two Joubert posts : Two Lichtenberg posts (Pinboard)

[“The Extended Mind” appeared in Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19. The Wittgenstein sentences are from Philosophical Grammar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Wittgenstein makes a number of similar statements elsewhere. Allen explains “waste book”: “for bookkeepers, and therefore for all writers of the period, a ‘waste book’ was the place where you made your first notes, on the fly. Later you would extract what you needed and copy it into the formal ledger.”]

Moleskine: seventy-five words

From Roland Allen’s “Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era” (The Walrus ), a brief commentary on the the prose in the little leaflet that comes with every Moleskine — which apparently ran to seventy-five words in the original Italian. The leaflet’s prose, in translation:

The Moleskine is an exact reproduction of the legendary notebook of Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse. Anonymous custodian of an extraordinary tradition, the Moleskine is a distillation of function and an accumulator of emotions that releases its charge over time. From the original notebook a family of essential and trusted pocket books was born. Hard cover covered in moleskine, elastic closure, thread binding. Internal bellowed pocket in cardboard and canvas. Removable leaflet with the history of Moleskine. Format 9 x 14 cm.

Allen’s commentary:

The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not “exact reproductions of the old”) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities — usefulness and emotion — to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. [Maria] Sebregondi and [Francesco] Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.

This piece is an excerpt from a new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . I’m looking forward to reading it.

As I have confessed in these pages, I am a prisoner of Moleskine.

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts : notebook posts (Pinboard)

A Paterson notebook

It was smart to end up watching Paterson (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2016) for a second time, last night with friends, one day after posting a review of Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. In a closing scene at the Great Falls, a Japanese poet visiting the city of Paterson (Masatoshi Nagase) takes out a bilingual paperback of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and asks Paterson (Adam Driver) if he knows Williams’s work. Yes. Is Paterson a poet? No. (As the viewer knows, Paterson is a poet, but the notebook that held his poems has just been torn to shreds by his dog). After some further talk of Jean Dubuffet and Frank O’Hara, the visiting poet hands Paterson a notebook:

“A gift?”

“Sometime empty page present most possiblities.”

How about that?

Related reading
All OCA notebook posts (Pinboard)

[Fun fact: Masatoshi Nagase played the Carl Perkins fan in Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989).]

The zibaldone

The mid-fourteenth-century word zibaldone, a bit of Florentine slang, came to signify a personal notebook of miscellaneous contents. From Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (New York: Biblioasis, 2024):

The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook. You could copy out as much or as little as you wanted, neatly or not, and refer to it a little, or as much, as you wanted. The collection could be poetry or prose, fictional or factual, thematic or random, religious or profane, in Latin or Tuscan, or any mixture of any of these components; you could even draw pictures in it. The notebook itself could be large or small, luxurious or utilitarian....

Zibaldoni, although always idiosyncratic and personal to their owner, were not necessarily private, or intimate: you would share the highlights of your own with your friends, and if you saw something that you liked in theirs, you’d copy it over.

Sounds a lot like blogging to me.

I am seventy-one pages into this book, and it’s a joy.

Also from the book
Moleskine: seventy-five words

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, TCM, YouTube.]

From the Criterion Channel’s Noir in Color collection

Accused of Murder (dir. Joseph Kane, 1956). Whodunit: was it the hitman (Warren Stevens) hired to kill a crooked lawyer, or the nightclub singer (Vera Ralston) who rebuffed the lawyer’s advances? And can the police lieutenant (David Bryan) falling for the singer be trusted to come up with the correct answer? The funnest thing about this movie is that it’s from Republic Pictures but plays like a real movie — like Storm Over Lisbon, it’s another Republic effort with which they seem to have gone all out. In lurid Naturama, Republic’s answer to Technicolor. ★★★

Foreign Intrigue (dir. Sheldon Reynolds, 1956). Press agent Dave Bishop (Robert Mitchum) finds his wealthy employer on the floor, and it’s odd: everyone wants to know if the man said anything before dying. It’s foreign intrigue indeed — from Monte Carlo to Stockholm to Vienna, as Bishop’s effort to figure out the facts of the dead man’s life pulls him into a world of blackmail and murder. Eastmancolor (which looks more natural to my eye than Technicolor) and Paul Durand’s score (heavy on acoustic bass and percussion) make this movie feel like it’s already the 1960s. With Geneviève Page and Ingrid Thulin. ★★★★

The River’s Edge (dir. Allen Dwan, 1957). Ben Cameron (Anthony Quinn) and his city-slicker ex-con wife Meg (Debra Paget) are trying to make a go of it on Ben’s New Mexico cattle ranch, but Meg can’t get the hang of ranch life, and she and Ben argue about everything. Into their bickering world comes trouble in a sports car. The driver is Nardo Denning (Ray Milland), a man with a past, who enlists Ben and Meg to guide him and his suitcase of money across the border to Mexico. Difficult to think of this as noir, but it’s certainly suspense, with overtones of The Postman Always Rings Twice (beautiful woman, two contrasting men), The Killing, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. ★★★★

The Badlanders (dir. Delmar Daves, 1958). A loose remake of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, recasting the story in late-nineteenth-century Arizona. Alan Ladd and Ernest Borgnine play newly released prisoners with a scheme to extract gold from a abandoned mine. But complications abound. Scenes of extraordinary brutality, deep danger (underground), and romance (Borgnine and Katy Jurado), and one never stops rooting for the so-called badlanders to succeed. ★★★★

Man of the West (dir. Anthony Mann, 1958). Can noir pair well with bright wide-open western spaces? I’m still not persuaded, but I can say that this is a great movie on its own terms. As solemn-looking Link Jones, traveling by train to hire a schoolteacher for his town, Gary Cooper meets up with relatives from his criminal past, in the person of psychopathic Uncle Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb) and his gang. As the gang presses Link back into service, It’s the one against the many, with strong overtones of Key Largo. With Jack Lord, Arthur O’Connell, and Julie London as a singer who never sings. ★★★★

*

The North Star (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1943). In the summer of 1941, Ukrainian villagers make a valiant stand against Nazi forces, in what I think of as two movies. The one movie has a strong cast (Dana Andrews, Anne Baxter, Walter Huston, Erich von Stroheim), suspenseful scenes of ambush and sabotage, brilliant cinematography (James Wong Howe), and a score by Aaron Copland. The other movie has a cringeworthy screenplay by Lillian Hellman and shameless propagandizing for the joys of collective farming. The best scene: a Ukrainian doctor confronts a Nazi doctor to raise the question of legacy, with great resonance for our times. ★★★★ / ★ (TCM)

*

No Down Payment (dir. Martin Ritt, 1957). Four young mortgage-paying couples in Sunrise Hills, an LA subdivision where the houses are close, very close. Life appears good on the surface (steak every night, someone says), but the storyline brings in alcoholism, disparities in social class and education, domestic violence, racism, rape, the unending thirst for more money, and what we would now recognize as PTSD. Brutal and spectacular, with great performances from Joanne Woodward and Cameron Mitchell (the Boones), Tony Randall and Sheree North (the Flaggs), Pat Hingle and Barbara Rush (the Kreitzers), and Jeffrey Hunter and Patricia Owens (the Martins). I must cite what David Bowie wrote in his reply to a first fan letter from the States: “I was watching an old film on TV the other night called ‘No Down Payment’ a great film, but rather depressing if it is a true reflection of The American Way of Life.” ★★★★ (YT)

*

Sealed Cargo (dir. Alred Werker, 1951). “This is the story of one small victory in World War II,” says the on-screen introduction. The story concerns U-boats off the Canadian coast and a Gloucester fishing boat captained by Dana Andrews. An eerie encounter with a ghost ship prepares for greater mysteries, as Andrews tries to figure out who can be trusted: the passenger he’s taking to her remote village? the new recruit who speaks Danish with an odd accent? With Carla Balenda (Lassie’s Miss Hazlit!) and Claude Rains. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Desperate (dir. Anthony Mann, 1947). A Hitchcockian story of a newly married Chicago truckdriver (Steve Brodie) who takes on a job that threatens to doom him and his wife (Audrey Long). The flight from feral Raymond Burr and other hoods to an aunt and uncle’s Minnesota farm takes the couple through improbable semi-comic scenarios reminscent of The 39 Steps and Saboteur : riding with a sheriff, hiding behind fun-house masks, agreeing to a traditional Czech wedding. But there’s real darkness in this story, and George E. Diskamp’s cinematography — that swinging lamp — intensifies the atmosphere of danger. Our household’s annus mirabilis of movies comes through for us again. ★★★★ (TCM)

[Not a halo. Raymond Burr and the swinging lamp.]

*

The Furies (dir. Anthony Mann, 1950). The Furies is a cattle ranch, and Walter Huston is its owner, T.C. Jeffords, a man egomaniacal enough to have given his late wife a floor-to-ceiling portrait of himself. Barbara Stanwyck is T.C.’s daughter and confidante Vance, and their relationship has more than a touch of vaguely incestuous feeling about it. Wendell Corey is Rip Darrow, the man Vance wants; Gilbert Roland is Juan Herrera, a squatter on the ranch who adores Vance; and Judith Anderson — uh-oh — is Flo Burnett, T.C.’s new wife. Vance’s revolt against the patriarchy suggests to me Antigone and Electra and Cordelia, in a story that’s utterly insane — which is not a bad thing. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Grand Central Murder (dir. S. Sylvan Simon, 1942). It plays like a radio drama, with a many suspects — too many. Each has a good reason to have killed Broadway star Mida King (Patricia Dane); each tells their story in a flashback. As a private detective, Van Heflin is the nominal star, but I found Tom Conway and Virginia Grey more interesting, at least in part because they so strongly resemble George Sanders and Lucille Ball (Conway and Sanders were brothers). A last-minute deus ex machina (is there any other kind?) serves to identify the killer. But I liked the ridiculously snappy patter: “He’s ready to yodel after putting on the clam all evening.” ★★ (YT)

*

The Fearmakers (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1958). I’ve already written about and quoted from this movie, which is prescient in ways its makers did not imagine, suggesting the Facebook/Fox/Newsmax/OAN/Twitter/
YouTube disinformation diet that shapes so many people’s mistaken ideas about reality. Genial Dick Foran (cowboy star, and Ed Washburne on Lassie) is a surprising pick for the role of evil media mastermind; as his nemesis, Dana Andrews’s character carries the burden of his time as a POW and victim of brainwashing, a past that comes into the story merely as a way for the bad guys to damage his credibility. (This movie is not The Manchurian Candidate.) Mel Tormé is a dweebish underling; Veda Ann Borg and Kelly Thordsen are seedy underlings; Marilee Earle is a dutiful secretary but wooden, bad enough for me to drop a star. ★★★ (TCM)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)