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.”]

“A bridge between two mysteries”

Fernando Pessoa, from “Self-Examination,” The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Bernardo Soares, the authorial identity to whom Pessoa attributes The Book of Disquiet, sometimes seems to speak for everyone, sometimes only for himself. Here, I’d say, he speaks for us all.

Senhor Soares has come to remind me of Henry Darger: like Darger, he is a secret maker, the creator of imaginary worlds known only to him. No one passing Soares on the street would have any idea, &c. Soares also reminds me of J. Alfred Prufrock: like Prufrock, he lives as an observer of life, removed, renunciatory, acutely aware of what he calls “the shy and ridiculous abnormality of my soul.”

I also think of Soares in the company of Joseph Joubert and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, writers whose work survives as pieces whose only order is the order of their composition. I think of Soares as especially close to Joubert: though Soares is far less given to aphorism, he too is a writer whose writing is always a preparation for writing, notes toward a project never to be realized. Here writing becomes a form of life: not the making of a great work but just what one does.

I once described Joubert as a writer who would be of interest to a reader who values “the fragmentary, the provisional, the unfinished.” So too Fernando Pessoa, in the person of Bernardo Soares.

This passage is the last I’m posting from The Book of Disquiet.

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)

Thinking and writing (2)

Joseph Joubert:

Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection, trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

Paul Auster describes the French writer Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) as “a man of letters without portfolio,” “a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that ever came to be written, a writer of the highest rank who paradoxically never produced a book.” Joubert wrote, for forty years, in notebooks — aphorisms, observations, phrases. His work will be of interest to any reader who values the fragmentary, the provisional, the unfinished.

On my bookshelf, this book will go next to the NYRB edition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books .

“Creatures of hope”

From J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella A Month in the Country :

By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

The novella has been reissued by New York Review Books (2000).

Other NYRB finds of my acquaintance: William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere. I’m not sure it’s possible to go wrong looking for NYRB spines in a bookstore.

From The Waste Books

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a professor of experimental physics and a keeper of Sudelbücher, “waste books” filled with observations and opinions. Here are three non-consecutive entries:

I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

*

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

*

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older . . .

From The Waste Books. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books, 2000). Originally published as Aphorisms (1990).

One could do worse than be a reader of New York Review Books books.

A related post
From The Waste Books

From The Waste Books

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a professor of experimental physics and a keeper of Sudelbücher, “waste books”:

Merchants have a waste-book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch, I think it is in German), in which they enter from day to day everything they have bought and sold, all mixed up together in disorder; from this it is transferred to the journal, in which everything is arranged more systematically, and finally it arrives in the ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of book-keeping. . . . This deserves to be imitated by the scholar.

Sounds like proto-blogging. One more sample:

It is strange indeed that long syllables are designated with a ˉ and short ones with a ˘, since the former is the shortest way between two points and the latter is a crooked line. The inventor of these things must therefore have been been thinking of something else when he invented them, if he was thinking of anything at all.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books, 2000). Originally published as Aphorisms (1990).

[The macron and breve mark long and short syllables (and sometimes stressed and unstressed syllables) in metrical poetry.]