Description
By (author) Allen Roland
Short /annotation:
Diaries, sketchbooks, common-places, notebooks, ledgers and ships” logs: how the blank book changed the way we think, and helped us change the world.
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A New Yorker Book of the Year 2024A Ryan Holiday ”(Very) Best Book I Read in 2024””Excellent” Ian Samson, TLS”From plans for flying machines to philosophy – the remarkable joy of jotting things down” Guardian”Surprisingly revealing” The Sunday TimesWe see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think?In this wide-ranging story, Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of medieval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine.On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world.
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A book that I absolutely loved, it”s incredible.
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A restless, arresting new history of the notebook … a fine book on a fabulous subject
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Remarkable … Allen points to evidence that maintaining a notebook with pen and paper is best for processing and retaining information. It can stave off depression and act as ballast to those struggling with ADHD. It is tactile, a form of “embodied cognition”, another example of the superiority of slowness … paying attention, caring, handwriting: this is love.
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A revealing document of a relationship so intimate as to be sacred: that of the writer and the page
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A different, fascinating, entertaining, witty approach to writing cultural history
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A fascinating study of notebooks through history,… beautifully written and a complete delight to dip in to or read from cover to cover
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The story that Allen tells dances from the pages of the earliest Arabic texts and the oldest surviving European scribbles from the 13th century, to friendship albums in the Netherlands in the 16th century, and onto recipes, cures and bookkeeping
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With this fascinating exploration, Allen has written a very original, diverting and surprising history of a humble everyday object
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Informative and uplifting, The Notebook may leave you feeling that you should chuck away your smartphone, pick up a nice, clean journal and start jotting
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Fluently and engagingly written
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The humble notebook is surprisingly revealing … despite what Apple, Evernote and the like might try to tell us, the best cognitive tool available to us today was invented in the counting houses of Renaissance Florence
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The fascinating stories [The Notebook] tells certainly make you want to take out a pen and jot down a few points … Allen considers the notebook in its various forms, from the wax tablet to the electronic spreadsheet, and from early modernity to the present day … his writing has the lightness of touch needed to turn the dry pages of notebooks into living hi
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