đź“š Finished reading: The Notebook by Roland Allen. It starts off strong, with an anecdote about the creation of the Moleskine brand, then goes in much depth about writing during renaissance and the enlightenment, topping it off with a few modern developments like BuJo. The chapters are self-contained and packed with information without being bogged down into too much detail — the Moleskine chapter is a good example of what to expect — at the expense of an overarching “story”. So, this is a collection of vignettes more than a systemic review and categorization of the types of notebooks through history, and that’s fine.
A few higlights:
- Michael of Rhodes, a 15th century member of the Venetian navy whose manuscript was the LinkedIn of the day: started of with personal interests, ended up full of useless (at best) and dangerously misleading information meant to impress future employers.
- Leonardo Da Vinci had no introspective passages in any of the thousands of pages he wrote down in his many notebooks. Janan Ganesh was right.
- The term commonplace arose from the commonplace book and used to mean a striking, exemplary passage in a book, play or speech one should write down and keep. Once commonplace books became popular and writers started including flowery passages with the express purpose of having them written down in the book the public got onto them and the adjective “commonplace” became derogatory. So it goes…
- The album amicorum or — and this may remind you of a certain online service — the friendship book made a similar turn, from an exclusive ritual of the educated few in 16th century Dutch universities to an 18th century fad among young women that was looked down upon by the patriarchy. What used to take two and a half centuries now happens in a few short years.
- The New York Times has always been evil; just read the chapter on Bob Graham’s notebooks to see why.