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; 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.”]

Meta detective

One of several meta moments in this detective story.

Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger. 1971. Trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).

Two more Sciascia posts
From The Day of the Owl : From To Each His Own

Ladies & Gents Restaurant

[56 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

On the Lower East Side, another 56 3rd Avenue. I was ready to write that as in Brooklyn, a large building now bears the 56, but this Manhattan building and its neighbors are still standing. At no. 56 today (or at least recently), Saki, a “sushi restaurant in minimalist digs.” They’d be unlikely to offer the sauerkraut cocktail that William Lins, successor to L. Reinken, offered. (Look closely.)

At no. 52, Sig. Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop. Could this be where Ed Norton bought the spats he gives Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners episode “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”?

[Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Who uses libraries most?

From the Washington Post Department of Data (gift link): “Who uses public libraries the most?”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, offering an easier Stumper of his own making. Easier it was. I took me twenty-odd minutes, with some difficulty in the northwest that cleared up with 4-D, three letters, “Traffic stopper.” Note to self: read every clue.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, six letters, “Go downhill fast.” Wonderful word.

9-D, five letters, “Tried to keep one’s seat.” Stumper-y.

14-A, eight letters, “One-third power.” POSEIDON would fit (sharing rule with Zeus and Hades).

24-D, seven letters, “Verb coined by Lewis Carroll.” A gift.

26-D, seven letters, “Silhouette border.” I kept thinking of the people with scissors who appear at old-timey recreations.

30-A, five letters, “Pajama-clad title character of a ’51 film.” And look what follows.

31-A, three letters, “Big ape.” Ha!

40-A, eight letters, “Batcave facility.” But of course.

63-A, eight letters, “Sarcastic show of support.” New to me. I’ve seen it but didn’t know the name.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, six letters, “Instrument made from bamboo.” SHAKUHACHI just wouldn’t fit.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Der Deppenapostroph

From The Guardian, “Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval”:

A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.

Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession....

However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.

The article notes that a spelling guide used in schools and public institutions gives “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Flower Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as acceptable spellings but proscribes “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”). Because Brille is plural?

*

October 12: There’s now an explanation in the comments that seems right: “Eva’s Blumenladen” is a proper noun, the name of a particular shop, but “Eva’s Brille” isn’t. Thanks to Cassidy Napoli for bringing things into focus.

[And it has to be said: the apostrophe is not a matter of grammar. I agree with Geoffrey Pullum that it’s not even a matter of punctuation. It’s a matter of spelling.]

ColorNoise

As I discovered this morning, the Background Sounds feature in macOS Sequoia shuts off for no apparent reason. At least I know it’s not just my problem.

An alternative: the free app ColorNoise: white, pink, and brown noise, available from the menu bar. But you won’t see that Neapolitan ice-cream icon in the menu bar: up there it’s just in black and white.

Note: this app works only from the menu bar. The icon in the dock won’t do a thing. So add the app to your login items and you can then run ColorNoise (and hide the dock icon) via the menu bar.

Thank you, Peter Hafner!

A related post
Noisy macOS, noisy iOS

Overheard

[In a grocery aisle.]

“I’ve heard of those Oreos.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

The Guardian on Milton

From an editorial:

What marks Florida out is the disparity between the concern rightly given to the consequences of the storms and the widespread unwillingness of many there to acknowledge the causes of extreme weather – still less the role in it that the US plays. It has the greatest planet-heating emissions per capita of the top 10 emitters. Global heating makes preparing for such events, and recovering from their consequences, more essential than ever. But it is ludicrous to take such steps without also addressing what is making them more extreme and more frequent.

Clarity itself. Nothing yet from The New York Times editorial board.

“The padlock knocks”

Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (1877).

This image of an empty house being done in by the weather makes me wonder if “Time Passes,” the middle section of To the Lighthouse, owes something to this novel. And Deephaven has a lighthouse. But I see no evidence that Deephaven ever came to Virginia Woolf’s awareness.

Related reading
All OCA Sarah Orne Jewett posts