The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine section of a Borders bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my Moleskine out of my pocket and jotted down some notes, like potential names — I considered things like “The Manly Arts” before settling on “The Art of Manliness” — categories of content, and initial article ideas. Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out.
That’s the power of a pocket pad’s possibilities, something Roland Allen explores in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. Today on the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists. We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks, the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian zibaldone to the friendship book to the modern bullet journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor. Along the way, we discuss ways you can fruitfully use notebooks today, and why, even in our digital age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Article: 100 Ways to Use Your Pocket Notebook
- AoM Article: The Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook
- AoM Article: The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men
- AoM Podcast #194: The Field Notes of Theodore Roosevelt
- AoM Article: The Right and Wrong Way to Journal
- AoM Article: Finally Understand How to Keep a Bullet Journal
- Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks
- Charles Darwin’s notebooks
- John Locke’s Method for Commonplace Books
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine section of a boarder’s bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my moleskin out of my pocket and jotted down some notes like penitential names. I considered things like the manly arts before settling on the Art of Manliness categories of content and initial article ideas. Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out. That’s the power of a pocket pad’s possibilities, something. Roland Allen explores in the Notebook, A History of Thinking on Papers. Today in the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists. We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks, the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian Zibaldone to the Friendship Book to the modern Bullet Journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor. Along the way, we discuss ways you can fruitfully use notebooks today and why, even in our digital age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. All right, Roland Allen, welcome to the show.
Roland Allen: Hi. It’s nice to be here, Brett. Thank you.
Brett McKay: So you put out a book called the Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. And this is a history of the humble notebook. And I think hopefully by the end of the show we’re going to find out it’s not so humble because if you look at any advancement in art, technology, economics, there’s typically a notebook involved. I’m curious, what got you to take this deep dive into the history of the notebook?
Roland Allen: Well, I guess there are two questions. There’s where did my interest come from in notebooks? And then what made me take the deep dive? The interest came from keeping a diary myself, essentially, which I did for years. I started in my mid-20s, and quite quickly it became a really important part of my life, and it still is. And keeping a diary, I started just to notice other people’s notebooks. And in my work, I’m a sales guy. I’m not especially creative. But in the publishing companies where I worked, the really creative people always had sketchbooks and notebooks which they would use to design things or write books or generally be enviably creative. So I would sort of notice them and always sneak a peek at them if I could. How did the book come about? I guess one day it just occurred to me that this absolutely universal, omnipresent, really simple object had in fact been invented at some point like anything else. And so I thought, well, where was it invented? And it was really hard to find out, by which I mean Google didn’t help. So that was what set me looking. And yeah, and it sent me off on this sort of wild journey which turned into a book pretty quickly. And you have the results in front of you.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And what I loved about this book, it really captured, I think, the love and the mystique that I think people have around notebooks. I know for me there’s something about buying a new notebook. You open it up and it just. You feel good. What do you think is going on there? Why, why do you think people are so drawn to notebooks and keeping a notebook and buying new notebooks even though they already have unfinished notebooks at home? What’s going on there, you think?
Roland Allen: I think partly there’s a promise. There’s potential, isn’t there? It’s like any vaguely improving thing. It tells you that you can be a better version of yourself. I think you can be a bit more creative, you can be better organized, you can write that novel or you can start keeping a journal or you can get really on top of your workload. I think that promise is in the blank pages, I think. But also you find it inviting. A lot of people actually, particularly who aren’t long term notebookers, do find it a little bit intimidating, almost the blank page and they get a bit frightened of it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve known people like that. They’ll buy a really nice journal and they won’t write in it, like, well, I just want to make sure what I write in it is good.
Roland Allen: Yeah, it’s got to be perfect. And that’s not the right attitude at all.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So let’s talk about the history of the notebook. What did humans use to keep track of notes before paper notebooks existed?
Roland Allen: There were three main things and we’re talking about Europe here. It’s largely a European story that I tell in the book, although I’m not arrogant enough to think that that’s the entire world. But they used parchment, which is very tough. It’s very expensive. It’s very tricky to write on. It’s very hard to use parchment if you’re not sitting at a desk and in effect you’re painting onto the page when you write on parchment. So it’s not the most practical medium.
Brett McKay: For those who aren’t familiar. What is parchment? I’m sure people have heard, like, oh, this is parchment. But, like, what is parchment made out of?
Roland Allen: A parchment is basically a kind of leather. It is animal hide, which has been stretched very thin, so it’s been tensioned while it’s been, I guess, cured. But it is leather and it’s made out of the same stuff as your boots are, and it does therefore last forever. It’s incredibly tough, it’s very robust, but it’s very thick pages. So if you have a parchment book with 100 pages, it’s like a brick, but it’s a very tough material. And as I say, if you can sit down on your desk, it’s a great material. Then you have papyrus, which came out of Egypt, which the ancient Egyptians famously used, but also the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans used a lot of papyrus, and it’s much easier to use for sort of quick and dirty writing. And it was very cheap, but it falls apart over time. It’s very, very hard to keep papyrus together, which is why it basically only survives in Egyptian tombs, which are sort of the driest, stillest places in the entire world. So the Romans had a lot of literature on papyrus, but it’s all gone. And then the third thing, which is, in a way the most interesting, were these little wax tablets which people all over the Mediterranean used and the Middle east used for thousands of years.
And these were very much the notebooks of their day. You’d have a little pair of wooden frames, if you like, which opened, like those little picture frames with a hinge in the middle, and you’d have wax on the insides, which you could scrape into with a stylus. And so you could fill up these pages with scratched writing. And then when you filled the page or didn’t need it again, you could just wipe it clean. Now, obviously, that’s really, really useful if you want to just make a shopping list or keep a quick list of something that’s going on. But it’s not so practical if you’ve got something like a contract, which you want to preserve forever and never change. So all of these mediums had their advantages and disadvantages.
Brett McKay: I thought that was interesting, the handheld wax tablets. There’s actually mosaics of a woman, and it looks like she’s using almost like a PalmPilot. It was really bizarre to see.
Roland Allen: Yeah.
Brett McKay: It’s like, wow, this is like thousands of years old, but it looks like she’s got a little PDA in her hand.
Roland Allen: Yeah. And they were absolutely used everywhere for maybe 2,000 years or probably more. They were really, really good. Little bit of technology, and then they vanished with paper, basically, because paper was so much more practical.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And during this time, what did people keep track of? I mean, today we use a notebook for all sorts of things. What were people keeping track of on their handheld tablets or parchment or papyrus?
Roland Allen: Well, one of the interesting things which I found out during the book is really that people’s lives back then were as complicated almost as ours are now, or rather that they were certainly as varied. So people had shopping lists, they had anything to do with their businesses. If they were buying and selling or making, they inevitably had to take notes about their customers or the money that they borrowed or lent, et cetera. And so any kind of business, it was very important. But also, people were writing down prayers and poems, any kind of what we would call literature. But obviously they didn’t have printed books in those days. So if you wanted to have poems or any kind of writing in your house, you had to have it basically in a notebook or something like that.
Brett McKay: Okay. So these three mediums, parchment, papyrus, tablets, they allowed you to get stuff down and keep it there. But they all had their downsides. Parchment too heavy, too expensive. Papyrus didn’t last very long. The wax handheld tablets good for shopping list, and very ethereal type things that you could just erase at the end of the day. But you talk about. There was a big change that happened in the 1200s in Italy that basically revolutionized the notebook and created almost the notebook that we have today. So what was going on in Italy in the 1200s that led to the development of the paper notebook?
Roland Allen: They… It was a really important moment in history, I think, and it was a real technological leap forward. So they got hold of paper from the Spanish, and the Spanish got hold of paper from the Arabs or the Islamic occupiers of what is now Valencia. And for hundreds of years, they’d been making paper there as part of the Islamic caliphates, and they got really, really good at it. And then when the king of Catalonia, who was a guy called James II, wanted. He wanted it, basically, he went out and conquered them, and he got hold of the paper, and the paper makers kept hold of them, treated them very well, and started exporting paper everywhere. Now, the Italians, what they did was they realized that it could transform their business because suddenly they had this medium which they could do business on, which was permanent and therefore secure. So if you had a business ledger and you wrote something down in it, you knew it could not be forged.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Why is that? What is it about paper you talk about in the book, that parchment? That was one of the key difference between parchment and paper. Paper was permanent. What was it about paper that made it permanent?
Roland Allen: If you write on paper with ink, the ink goes into the middle of the paper and it sticks there and you can’t get rid of it without destroying the page. If you write on a parchment sheet with ink, it just sits on top a bit like paint, and it’s very easy to scrape it off and replace it with something else, which people who used parchment did all the time because it was so expensive. So if they’d finished with a book, they wanted to reuse the parchment, they just scraped off the writing and it was as good as new. So. But merchants suddenly had this secure way of recording transactions, debts, deals. And of course, that enabled them to have much more interesting, complicated businesses because they could suddenly trust their information technology.
Brett McKay: And this allowed the development of paper and paper books. This led to the development of… What’s that? Accounting. Double book accounting…
Roland Allen: Double entry bookkeeping.
Brett McKay: Double entry bookkeeping. I mean, maybe people have heard this, but for those who aren’t familiar, what is double entry bookkeeping and why is it such a big deal?
Roland Allen: Right. Among your listeners, you’re going to have, I hope, plenty of accountants, plenty of people who’ve got double entry bookkeeping degrees or qualifications, people who have trained in any kind of money management. And I just want to salute them because they’re the real heroes of the story. Double entry bookkeeping is tricky, but it’s a very, very useful way of managing money. And it enables you to create a profit and loss picture out of quite a complicated array of deals. So when you talk about a company’s balance sheet today, you’re talking in terms of double entry bookkeeping, balancing credits and debits. When you talk about the profit and loss account, which every company does to this day. This was invented in Italy around the year 1300. When you talk about an annual statement or an annual statement of a company’s accounts, that was invented in Italy. They invented limited liability partnerships, they invented futures markets, they had very sophisticated insurance and modern banking, and they invented the company. So if you’ve ever worked for a company, you can thank these Italians. Back in the year 1300, they invented all of these things in probably around Florence.
Brett McKay: And it was all done in paper notebooks.
Roland Allen: And that was their technology. Yeah. And because there was so much cash flying around, Florence became one of the richest places in the world, despite the fact that it’s a small city with very few natural resources of its own. They were so good at money management that their bankers basically ran European business for 100 years or more. And their merchants and manufacturers were among Europe’s leading tradesmen, so basically because they were incredibly good at managing money. And that people from all over Europe would look at them enviously and say, oh, they’re doing it the Italian way. But they couldn’t quite understand it because looked at from the outside, double entry bookkeeping is quite opaque, a little bit difficult to get your head around. So it took quite a long time for other people to do it. But the northern Italians learned how, the Germans learned how, then the Dutch and the French and eventually even the British learned how to do double entry bookkeeping. And that is where the sort of the whole European economic model capitalism really comes from.
Brett McKay: And something that happened at the same time is you had these Italian accountants basically with their notebooks, their ledgers. And there were the artists around the same time, looking around like, oh, these guys have got this cool thing that’s. They got this medium.
Roland Allen: This is handy, yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah, they got this medium where they can just look at things. It’s lightweight, it creates a permanent record. Maybe we could use that for our art. So how did Florentine artists co opt paper accounting books and then turn them into sketchbooks?
Roland Allen: I think it really was that simple. Imagine if you are an artist in a time before paper, then you can paint on the walls, you can paint on parchment or canvas, which are both inconvenient and expensive. You could carve wood or stone, but you couldn’t casually go out and just sketch something. And today’s artist, whether or not they’re a hobbyist or a pro, good or bad, can take it absolutely for granted. You can pick up a pencil, just go out and sketch whatever you want, or draw a picture of a person or of a rabbit or of a tree. But this is actually again, a sort of surprising development which people weren’t always able to do. So I think there was like a generation of artists in Florence basically, who saw their contemporaries using these notebooks, which were quite cheap by this point, for quite interesting business things. And they just picked it up and started drawing in it. And they realized or they discovered that if you draw a lot, you get good at drawing. And suddenly they were better artists than they would have been without these notebooks and turned into really great artists. A generation, I think, of great artists.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s when you see the development of perspective. Like there was an artist you highlight and you can actually see how you develop this perspective, where things. Because before that time when people drew things people have always seen those sort of like Byzantine type paintings where they’ll just basically stack people on top of each other. And maybe they might. The person that’s supposed to be far away looks smaller, kind of, but then it’s still not in perspective. Well, the notebook, the sketching allowed these guys to figure out, oh, if we do it this way, we can actually provide some visual depth to our art.
Roland Allen: Yeah, and they could try and try and try again, which is really important. You know, if they produced a drawing which wasn’t very good, all they had to do was turn the page and try again. And that was never really available to previous generations of artists. But this movement from business technology to creative technology, we’ve seen in our own time, because we’ve seen computers go from IBM to the Apple Mac and then you have Pixar and you have these amazing digital artworks which no one could have conceived of 50 years ago. And it’s a very similar story. It’s information technology being co opted by creative people and used in crazy new ways.
Brett McKay: And the other thing that the notebook allowed artists to do was not only could they just draw a whole bunch, but because it was lightweight, they could share things with other artists. So it allowed artistic ideas to spread faster than before. If you wanted to see a painting, you had to like, go visit a church or go look at this mosaic wall. Now, the notebook, you could just hand someone your sketchbook. Hey, what? I’m doing this thing with perspective or two point perspective. You should check this out. And then it just started spreading faster and faster.
Roland Allen: Exactly, exactly. And there was definitely training going on in artists studios which worked exactly like that, where they would have some really good drawings of feet in the studio. Notebook. Studio sketchbook. And then you would just practice drawing feet using those. And you would get good at feet, and then you’d move on to the next piece of anatomy.
Brett McKay: And during this time too. So you had the artists using paper notebooks for sketchbooks. You had accountants keeping the ledger. During this time in the Renaissance, you also had this development in Italy of a notebook called the Zibaldone. Did I say that right?
Roland Allen: I guess so, yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. All right, so tell us about the Zibaldone. What is the Zibaldone? What was that?
Roland Allen: Zibaldone seems to have meant at the time salad. And it was a kind of notebook which was exactly like a salad in that it was all mixed up, it was all different kinds of things. It was basically just what you fancied having. So remember that, again, people didn’t have printed books to rely on. If you wanted to have literature in your house of any kind, it had to be in a notebook, it had to be handwritten. And a Zibaldone was your own personal collection of your favourite book bits of writing. So very commonly it was prayers, but it could also be songs, poems, Aesop’s Fables, translations of Ovid or other classical authors, or just the business of the town, proclamations from the town authorities and so on. Anything which was going to be fun or useful, people just wrote down in their own notebooks. And they were called Zibaldoni because they ended up as hodgepodges. You know, they were completely mixed up like a salad. And these are great because they’re a real insight into what people actually were interested in. And so some of them are a bit smutty, but most of them are very just enjoyable. They wrote down the fun stuff. It’s a bit like a kind of mixtape, if you like people copying down their favorite tracks back in the ’80s, as I’m sure you did, or I certainly did, and making these unique mixes. And no two were ever the same.
Brett McKay: I thought was interesting too, about the Zibaldone was that they were oftentimes intergenerational. Like a father would pass on his notebook to his son and then the son would pick up where his dad left off.
Roland Allen: Exactly, yeah. They were like a family asset. And you see it in people’s wills when they died, quite often even. And this was in a time when, outside of Florence, most people couldn’t read by really, the vast majority of people couldn’t read. But in Florence, where this went on, the vast majority of people in their wills would leave two or three books behind, and those were mostly Zibaldoni, which they would leave, as you say, to their sons or their daughters, and they would just be carried on in the next generation.
Brett McKay: All right, so they were writing things like poems, prayers, catchy quotes. Did anyone do any drawing or sketching in the Zibaldone?
Roland Allen: Yes, they did. And this is one of the things that makes them so fun, because these people aren’t by and large, trained artists. So when they draw, for instance, a scene from the story, like an Aesop’s Fable or something, it’s a bit haphazard. It’s clearly the work not of a trained artist. It can look quite childish, but therefore it’s really fun and charming. And again, it really brings the people to life who actually used them.
Brett McKay: Did they keep to do list or grocery shopping list in their Zibaldone, or was the Zibaldone was like, no, it’s only for things we want to keep for a long time.
Roland Allen: Yeah, I think that’s right. I don’t think I came across one which had anything like a grocery list in it. They would have things like recipes in them, though, which are pretty functional. You know, people would have cures for baldness, for instance, which would involve mushing up various grains or herbs or produce in olive oil and then smearing it on your head, that sort of thing. So they had that kind of list. But anything as casual as a shopping list, they probably just put on a bit of scrap paper, I guess.
Brett McKay: And there was no. Again, there’s no rhyme or order to the Zibaldone.
Roland Allen: No.
Brett McKay: It’s just, you just whatever you want to write, I’m gonna write in there.
Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah.
Brett McKay: And I think that’s a difference from the commonplace book, which we’ll talk about here in a bit. So it was just. It was like. It was like a tossed salad.
Roland Allen: Yeah, exactly.
Brett McKay: Okay, well. And one of the most famous notebooks keepers during the Renaissance, I don’t know if you’d call his notebooks or zibaldonis. They’re kind of like that was Leonardo da Vinci. How many notebooks did this guy go through during his life?
Roland Allen: Ah, no, we can’t know, but thousands and thousands of pages. I think we have surviving 1,300 pages of his notebooks, and they estimate that that’s maybe a quarter of what he produced in his lifetime. So what’s that, about 5,000 pages?
Brett McKay: Wow.
Roland Allen: Which I guess is. Oof. That’s 20, 25 big fat moleskins. But some of his notebooks were oversized. Some of them were pocket sized. He actually wrote about how he used notebooks for sketching. He said he always had one tied to his belt. He never went anywhere without a notebook. If he ever had a thought, he could write it down. If he ever saw something interesting, he could sketch it. And he never stopped. He basically just never stopped. He filled pages of notebooks and sketchbooks every day.
Brett McKay: So give us an idea. What did he keep in his notebooks? Like, what kind of things was he writing down?
Roland Allen: Oh, Lord, where to begin? He had lists, for instance. He wasn’t super well educated, Leonardo. The education he got was pretty. You’d call it elementary. And then he went off to work in an artist studio when he was a teenager, but he was very keen on learning Latin. So for instance, he kept lists of Latin words. He did keep shopping lists and traveling lists, for instance, packing lists in his notebooks so that we know when he moved house, what he took with him, we know who he owed money to, who owed him money, etc. And then sort of these very mundane everyday things go up to incredible anatomical drawings, which he made from drawing dissected cadavers. He was way ahead of his time as an anatomist. But then there are mathematical sketches. He was obsessed with geometry and polyhedrons, so 12 sided things, tetrahedrons, that sort of thing. He was obsessed by mechanics. He designed things like ball bearings, we don’t know if they were ever manufactured. And then he designed these crazy machines which look like flying machines or tanks. I don’t think that they were necessarily ever built.
One Leonardo expert said to me that you’ve got to think of his sketchbooks as kind of him showing off a little bit, because his job was basically to be a genius. He didn’t actually do anything very productive apart from painting. And he actually didn’t paint very many paintings either. But he was kind of like a public court genius. And therefore the Duke of Milan or the King of France or whoever would want to pay him to be around. And his sketchbooks and his notebooks were really important for that because he could show off all of his crazy ideas, just turning a few pages and people would have their minds blown. So, yeah, so Leonardo’s notebooks are undoubtedly some of the best ever. And he didn’t really see any boundaries. He just wanted to write or draw everything that he thought of.
Brett McKay: The thing that stood out to me when you’re describing Leonardo’s notebooks was how much drawing he did in it. This is not like a Zibaldone, where people are just keeping prayers and writing things down. He did a lot of drawing, I think you pointed out. What he was doing is he was like the title of your book says, thinking with paper. He was taking these abstract thoughts that he had in his head and he was trying to make them more concrete by drawing them out.
Roland Allen: Yeah. And so, for instance, very famously, he was obsessed by drawing running water. So he could put him by a stream or by a watermill and he would draw the water moving over the rocks very, very happily. Must have done it for hours and hours. He was obsessed by hair as well, by drawing curly hair and looking for similarities between it. But he was always looking, for instance, when he was drawing the water moving. He was also thinking about fluid dynamics and he was trying to work out why the water moved the way it did, what forces were working on it and so on. So he never stopped asking why. And I think that’s what’s kind of inspirational about Leonardo’s career is he just never ever stopped asking why, why, why, why? Like a really irritating five year old why, why? And of course, because he was always looking for answers. He found some.
Brett McKay: The thing about Leonardo’s drawing, it inspired me because I’m not much of a drawer. I’m trying to become more of a drawer in my notebooks because I think there’s something to that idea of thinking with paper and like drawing things to help you understand things. In your experience with your notebooks, do you do a lot of drawing? Have you found any benefit to adding sketches along with your writing in your notebook?
Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Funny enough, I used to keep separate sketchbooks and diaries. I never really drew in my diary, but I always love seeing people who can draw doing a visual journal. You see so many of them online, people who go traveling and then they sit in the town square with the coffee and they sketch the town square and then write about it around the page. And I think those are so beautiful. I think those are wonderful. They’re really inspiring. But I just don’t feel confident enough in my own drawing to do that. But drawing is a great thing to do and you never look at anything as closely as when you’re drawing it. You never really concentrate on a scene until you’ve got a pencil in your hand, I find. So if you want to really experience a place, then drawing it is the best thing to do.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’d agree. One of my favorite presidents, US Presidents was Teddy Roosevelt and he was a naturalist. He kept journals where he talk about his adventures he went on and his observations of nature. And he did a lot of drawing and I was, I was pretty impressed, like how, well, how good of a drawer this guy was.
Roland Allen: Yeah, I did not know that. I missed him. But this is the, the hazard of doing such a wide ranging book. You, you miss all of the ones which you wish you found.
Brett McKay: Okay. So if you want to have a notebook like Leonardo, just write anything and everything that you come across do you think is interesting and do more drawing. I think that’s a good takeaway from that.
Roland Allen: That’s my takeaway. Yeah, yeah. Draw more. You’ll be very happy with yourself.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So this was a Renaissance period. Eventually notebooks started spreading across Europe and then you see this development of something that’s kind of like the Zibaldone but different, the commonplace book. What is a commonplace book and how is it different from a Zibaldone?
Roland Allen: So you should think about this as a reaction to the age of print arriving. So Zibaldone you have. Because you can’t have printed books, basically, commonplace books arrive about 100 or 60, 60 odd years after print and suddenly there are books everywhere. And suddenly, for the first time in Europe anyway, there are more books than you can ever hope to read because of this explosion in print. So everyone’s busy reading more and more books, which are cheaper than ever, and therefore it’s hard to remember what’s going on. Commonplace books are a really good method of taking the best bits out of what you read, organising it, and therefore you end up making your kind of own encyclopedia, which is thematically arranged.
So, for instance, if you’re a legal student, if you’re studying to be a lawyer, then all of the law books you read, when you go through them and you come across a concept like, I don’t know, divorce or murder or justice or sentencing, you take a little quotation out, you take a snippet out on that topic, you collect all these snippets from different authors and you end up with your own little law encyclopedia. But that could work equally well if you’re studying to be a priest or if you were just reading generally, or studying Latin or Greek or anything. So they’re much more organized than Zibaldonis and they’re quite hard work to make and they’re definitely less fun. But commonplace books are very, very good way to educate yourself to a high standard.
Brett McKay: So who were some famous commonplace bookkeepers?
Roland Allen: More or less anyone you’ve heard of between about the year 1500, 1550 and say the mid Victorian period? So Shakespeare, undoubtedly, that generation of dramatists with definitely massive commonplace bookers in their youth, that’s how their education worked, that’s how they were taught. But basically anyone who had any kind of education in the period would have kept a commonplace book at school. And then if they carried on keeping them into adulthood, often they became quite serious, weighty tomes. John Milton kept a commonplace book into adulthood. Isaac Newton used his stepfather’s as a kind of sketchbook, but he also would have kept his own when he was a student. So it was a really important part of education at that time.
Brett McKay: I think John Locke was another famous. Didn’t he write a book or a treatise on how to keep a commonplace book?
Roland Allen: He did, yeah. And this is quite a common thing because people recognized that it was quite hard work, so they’re always trying to make it slightly easier for each other. So Locke published this, as he said, treatise on how to commonplace, which seems to have been fairly popular. People seem to have listened to him.
Brett McKay: I thought was interesting about the development of the commonplace book. You saw people borrowing again from accounting. So I think accountants had different types of books that they kept. There’s like the main ledger and then there’s like a waste book. There’s things that were like, temporary and you shifted it over to more permanent records in the. The accounting books. And people who had commonplace books had a similar system. They’d have like a work a day notebook that they would carry with them all the time, write down things they came across during the day and they would get home and then they’d go to their main book and then synthesize and organize everything and that they track down that day into the main commonplace book.
Roland Allen: Yeah, absolutely. They would always be organizing their thoughts. And if this is one of the most important things you can do to help you understand things better or think more creatively, always try and organize your thoughts. It’s just a really, really good process to go through. It’s the same when you’re drafting a piece of writing or making preparatory sketches for a painting or a drawing, or just trying to work through what you’ve seen. A really good example of that is Darwin when he was on the HMS Beagle, going to the Galapagos and places like that and looking at tortoises. The notes he made on the spot were absolutely minimal, completely illegible to anyone but him. Very, very, very sketchy, in tiny little notebooks, which he could just put in his pocket when he was out and about. But every evening when he went back to the ship, then he would break out the big notebooks, he would organize his thoughts, he would write a proper journal and he would pull in facts from his reference library, which he had with him on the boat, and create something much more sophisticated. And then in turn, that goes on to be the foundations of the rest of his career on the evolution of species by natural selection.
Brett McKay: Do you keep a commonplace book?
Roland Allen: Do you know what? Literally two weeks ago, I thought I’m going to have to do this. I started one and what I did was I went and got a little Moleskine address book. I’m holding it in my hand now. You know, the sort which has the tabbed pages.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Roland Allen: Because what I wanted to avoid was having to go through and if I would need to write down the Alphabet and all the head words hundreds of times. So, yeah, so I’ve got those little tab pages down the side and I’ve made a few entries, but really, I should be making more. You’ve reminded me. But like I say, keeping a commonplace book is hard work.
Brett McKay: It does sound hard. And I think part of the reason why a lot of people don’t do okay, it’s hard. And I think instead, what a lot of modern people do, instead of writing things out by hand and taking the time to organize things manually, is they’ll use digital tools where if I highlight text on the web, it’ll go to this app that will then organize the notes. And I’ve. I’ve experimented with those things. I don’t find them particularly useful.
Roland Allen: No. And the reason they’re not that useful is because they’re really easy. So your brain doesn’t have to engage too much. You just. It’s no more complicated than, oh, that’s interesting. Copy, click, pi.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Roland Allen: And then you move on. Whereas if you’re actually writing something down in a notebook, you have to pause. You have to take five, 10 minutes to write it down. And when you’re writing it down, you’re concentrating on every word because you want to make it an accurate record. So. Yeah, so it goes into your mind, it goes into your brain. The work is very much the point.
Brett McKay: Yeah, the work. It’s not the writing itself. It’s the work you have to do to organize.
Roland Allen: Yeah, it’s the mental work you’re doing. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. That reminds me of when I was in law school. In class, you would take notes, lecture notes, but the thing that really helped the most was after class, I’d have to go and take those notes and then put them into my outline, which I guess you call my commonplace book for that law class.
Roland Allen: Exactly, exactly. There you go. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Okay. So if you want to do a commonplace book, you probably recommend, get yourself an actual physical analog notebook and make that your come. Don’t try to do this digitally.
Roland Allen: But I would also say, like, when I was a teenager. Making mixtapes, if I heard a song and I particularly liked the lyrics, I would always write the lyrics down. I had a notebook which was just nothing but snippets of Bob Dylan and things like that and which actually I didn’t know, but that was my Zibaldone and I would recommend that, really, if just anything you read, which you like, just write it down in a notebook. Keep it.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So after you talk about the development of the commonplace book, what I love, you take these little side journeys and different fads that notebooks went through throughout Western history. And one you talk about was the Friendship Book. What was the Friendship Book?
Roland Allen: Oh, these were lovely. Yeah. So these, these started off as a kind of autographed book in Germany, and students who were particularly impressed by their professors would take them up to Luther or to Melanchthon and get these little notebooks signed and autographed by their professors, who were their stars, and then they would go off and study at another university. Because in those days when you studied at university, you were expected to travel from place to place quite a lot. You didn’t really root yourself in one place. And when you arrived in your new town, you would whip out your autograph book and you would show it to professor so and so, and you would say, look, I am friends with professor such and such over in that other town. And he would say, ah, well, you must be a clever young chap. So this is what Germans did, and then the Dutch got hold of it, and this is around the year 1600 or so, and they made it into something much more fun, which was the Friendship Album. So it wasn’t just for students and professors anymore, it was for anyone. And when you went out for dinner with new people, you would take your friendship book, your album Amicorum in Latin, and if you met someone interesting, you would whip it out and say, it’s so nice to meet you.
Could you dedicate yourself into my book? You would give them a page of your book, they would write down a little prayer again, or a snippet of poetry, or a motto of proverb, or they would do a sketch of something and hand it back, and that would be a little record of your friendship. And you can see thousands of these things have survived in Holland. They were hugely popular. And you can see people making these little social networks in these notebooks and recording their friendships for again passing down through generation after generation. And of course, you have people like Rembrandt or the other great Dutch painters would leave sketches in people’s notebooks. So these are now incredible little works of art in their own right. But they’re lovely. I mean, really, really nice things, really. Strangely, no one ever did it, apart from the Dutch. We don’t really know why they did it. For a couple hundred years and then they kind of just stopped. It petered out. But it was such a nice habit to be in for those couple of centuries.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it sounds like it was like the 1600 version of Dutch Facebook.
Roland Allen: Yeah, it exactly was. You’re exactly right. Yeah.
Brett McKay: That’s funny. Another thing you talk about in the book is do a chapter about the role of notebooks in traveling. What role did the notebook play in the lives of travelers?
Roland Allen: Well, it’s really interesting. People seem to have an impulse when they go traveling to write a diary, to keep a journal. It seems very natural. But people did this when they would never have dreamt of keeping a diary at home. So you have people like Marco Polo, for instance, who kept an amazing travel journal when he was in China, but then any kind of traveler afterwards would. And then these became a kind of literary sub genre, because when people went traveling, they would keep notes, expecting it to be published when they got back if their journey was particularly remarkable. So, yeah, travelers notebooks are always great, and particularly if they are filled as well with sketches and things like that. There are so many wonderful, wonderful examples.
Brett McKay: Well, yeah, going back to Teddy Roosevelt, there’s actually records of his travel journals that he kept as a boy when he did this European tour. And I think he also went to Egypt, and he drew pictures of the things he saw in Egypt and writing about how it was boring on the ship and that sort of thing. It was really cool.
Roland Allen: Yeah, that’s amazing things.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And then I guess the most famous travel journal would be or travel notebook keeper, Charles Darwin. You mentioned him earlier. He kept, like, a notebook with him all the time where he just kind of wrote slipshod notes that he could later transcribe in his main notebook and that eventually. And what’s crazy, on these little notebooks, you can see him develop the theory of evolution in real time.
Roland Allen: Yeah. And also, he seems to have been a really nice guy, Charles Darwin. He was very chatty. He was not secretive at all. He would share his ideas with whoever he met, but he would also whip out his notebooks, and if anyone said anything interesting, he’d be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. And he would make a little note of their conversation, and then that would get fed into his. His writing later on. So he absolutely never stopped taking notes.
Brett McKay: Wasn’t there. There’s like an excerpt from one of, I think, maybe a diary or a notebook that he had about marriage. Like he was doing this pro and con list of whether or not to get married.
Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he sort of weighs up the cost of his independence against the sort of the benefits of companionship and not being lonely and things like that. In the end, he plumps to get married. And fortunately he made a very happy marriage and it worked out well for him. But he did have to think it through before. He did.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you talk about too, the history of the diary. And I thought, this is interesting. So notebooks had been around, like the paper notebook around since about 1200s. And people had commonplace books, the Zibaldones, they had ledger books, they had sketchbooks. There weren’t a lot of people who were using their notebooks to write about their thoughts and feelings.
Roland Allen: They really didn’t. It’s so, so strange when you think of people who buy moleskins these days. They’re doing it basically to write journals, a lot of them, and it’s a completely normal thing to do, but for hundreds of years no one did it. And when I was researching, I’d keep on coming across mention of a notebook which was called the Diary of so and so. And then I’d go and look at it and it wouldn’t be a diary at all. It would be an account book or it would be a business notebook, or it would be a town chronicle or something like that. It would never be a personal diary. Like, here’s what I did today. I got up, I had this breakfast and how did I feel?
Brett McKay: Yeah, and it was funny too. Even if you look at these notebooks from the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, people would sometimes talk about children dying, but it’s almost like they were just keeping track of livestock. They never talked about, like, oh, I felt sad, I’m grieving. You know what most people do today with a notebook, if a child died? They didn’t do that.
Roland Allen: Yeah, no, it was very much because it was to do with accounting. And I don’t mean that in a cold way, but they viewed it as that. Rather, they wrote about these terrible events and wonderful events. They wrote about the birth of children as well. They would mark the day, but again, there was no emotion really. Sometimes they would, for instance, write a prayer or they would write a little formula saying how sad they were. But then two years later, another child would die and they would write exactly the same thing. So it was a formula rather than a genuine feeling pouring onto the page.
Brett McKay: So when did diary keeping, the way we know it today, is the sort of self reflective notebook. When did that come to be a thing?
Roland Allen: Well, this is England’s moment to shine. So for most of the story, England is this terrible backwater inhabited by thugs, very poor education and muddy roads and all that. But for some reason, around the year 1600, in England, they do invent the diary, the daily diary as we know it. We don’t really know why. Various theories out there, but I’m not convinced by any of them. I can’t think of any explanation myself. But by the year 1600, it was definitely a fashion which, for instance, people in plays could refer to. So there’s a play by Ben Jonson from 1604 in which one of his characters writes a diary and people take the piss out of him for it, and he’s very humiliated. And everyone’s familiar with that. I think the idea that some stranger reading your diary is a terrible humiliation. So by then, by 1600, people were keeping diaries. We know that, but where it came from, we have no idea.
Brett McKay: And you talk about. They kind of went out of style in the 1940s. What do you think was going on there?
Roland Allen: I think time, actually the mass media comes along. Imagine 120 years ago. Imagine in 1900, you don’t have radio, you don’t have any Internet, you don’t have the movies, don’t have any tv. What do you do in the evenings? You read. Okay. You chat, you talk, you sing, you play instruments. But you’ve just got quite a lot of time, particularly in the Northern hemisphere with long, cold winters when it’s dark. You know, diary keeping is a good way to fill that time. And then over the 20th century, you have more and more distractions. You have the cinema, you have the radio. You then have the tv, and then you have the Internet. And every time, it chips away at people’s evenings, essentially. So it became harder and harder, I think, to find the time just to sit down and think, okay, I’ll think about what I did today for half an hour. And I find it difficult to carve out the time.
Brett McKay: No, I agree. And something else you point out in the book is that keeping a diary has declined in the west because we live in a peaceful time. And you can see that in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was during times of war that sales of diaries or journals would spike.
Roland Allen: Yeah. And this is, I’m sure, true to this day. Whenever there is some upsetting, traumatic event, your world turns upside down. People start keeping diaries, which is why teenagers keep diaries, because their lives are in turmoil automatically because of hormone poisoning, as someone said to me. So teenagers keep diaries and people in war zones keep diaries for the same reason. And I think anywhere you’ll see it now, I’m sure in Ukraine, for instance, there’ll be a lot of people keeping diaries who didn’t before.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve seen that in my own life. I was a big journal keeper in high school and then the early part of young adulthood, and then I remember. And if I look back at what I wrote, it was a lot of the. Just ruminating over, oh, here’s this problem, here’s this big decision I got to make. I’m feeling anxious about test scores if I’m going to get a job. And then I remember I kind of reached this point in my 30s career established, had a house, kids. I just didn’t really have the itch to write in a journal anymore. And I, I stopped doing it. But I’ll notice whenever I have a problem going on in my life, I will bust out the journal to write.
Roland Allen: Very healthy habit. Really healthy habit. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talk about this. There’s research that backs this up of. It’s called expressive writing, where you just write, kind of stream of conscious what’s going on in your thoughts and your emotions.
Roland Allen: Yeah. And this, I think, was the single most surprising thing I came across in the whole project. You know, three year project, whatever it was, that writing your emotions down on the page then helps your body heal from physical wounds because it reduces the levels of stress in your body so much that your body is able to recover from, for instance, an operation or an injury or a burn more quickly simply if you write down your emotional trauma. And this is now they’ve researched it and researched it and researched it, tested it, all kinds of experiments. It holds up completely. And this blows my mind every time. If you go for a cancer biopsy, you will heal more quickly if you have written your diary beforehand. It’s absolutely baffling to me how powerful it is.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You talked to the researcher, James Pennebaker, who sort of the father of expressive writing.
Roland Allen: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And I think one of the things he noted too, is that in order to make expressive writing effective, you don’t have to do it all the time. Like you don’t have to journal every day to get the benefits, basically. So just do it when you feel like you need to do it.
Roland Allen: Exactly. And when I asked him about that I said to him, do you ever keep a journal? He said, yeah, yeah, when I’m feeling low or when I’ve got something to think about some problem. And I said, do you keep it all the time? He just laughed. He said, no, why would I do that? I’m fine.
Brett McKay: He also has some advice on how to get the most out of it. I think one problem that people run into, I’ve run into this problem when I’ve kept a journal, when I’m trying to sort through problems, is I end up doing a lot of ruminating, just bellyaching. And it’s not very productive because I’m always asking, why is this happening? And why that one bit of advice? Instead of asking why in your journal, ask how and what? Because that’ll give you better, more concrete answers.
Roland Allen: Interesting. Okay. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Because it’s often hard to pinpoint why something happened. And then also what writing does in general is it forces you because it’s very logical and linear. You have to call in your prefrontal cortex. So it calms you down if you’re really emotional. So it gets you to think more clearly and turns your emotions into actual thoughts.
Roland Allen: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Brett McKay: You have this fun chapter on bullet journaling and I’m sure our listeners, if they’ve been on Instagram, they’ve seen pictures of people’s really cool looking bullet journals. Tell us about the history of bullet journaling. When did that get started?
Roland Allen: So I guess people have been keeping lists obviously, and checking them off since they were able to write anything down. Ryder Carroll, however, sort of taken the list and turned it into a kind of, I wouldn’t say art form, but a very sophisticated way of organizing your thoughts and feelings. And the reason he felt driven to do this was because he had very pronounced ADHD, which made school life for him impossibly difficult. He couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t focus, he couldn’t get anything done. He was constantly being shouted at by his teachers, et cetera. And school was miserable for him until, I think at college, I want to say he started just writing things down in lists in bullet pointed lists. And he did it with everything. And this kind of had a transformative effect on how he was able to approach his day because it helped him to focus.
It helped him break big, unmanageable tasks down into small, actionable little things and therefore complete things. And he went from being this sort of constant headache for his teachers and his parents to being super, super productive, very entrepreneurial. I’ve got to say, he’s a lovely guy anyway, but he’s also incredibly productive and gets a lot done with his time in a really interesting way. And he invented the Bullet Journal thing, which is essentially a really ingenious way of creating lists that organize your thoughts and organize your day. And it took off. He wrote a couple of books and has thousands of hundreds of thousands probably of people who have gotten his little method now and use it to organize their lives and benefit from it.
Brett McKay: What I think is interesting about the Bullet Journal is the visual aspect of it. Whenever you look at them, there’s lists. People just kind of keep it to a list. But sometimes people get really fancy and they add in little pictures and drawings and they kind of look like Zibaldonis sometimes when you look at the pages.
Roland Allen: Yeah. And again, the feeling of making something with your hands, I think, is really powerful. So every time you fill up a page of a notebook like that and tick everything off and you can look back and think, yeah, I’ve really accomplished something.
Brett McKay: Have you experimented with bullet journaling in your notebooking?
Roland Allen: Not formally, but all of my notebooks are full of lists.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Roland Allen: Full of lists. So I’m a great believer in lists and therefore I’m a kind of bullet journaler. But I never had the ADHD type issues, which Ryder did.
Brett McKay: So after your deep dive into the history of the notebook, what do you think is the future of the notebook?
Roland Allen: I don’t think it’s going to go away. I think a conversation I often have is people sort of waving their iPads and saying, oh, aren’t these things going to take over? But what we’re seeing, I think, is a reaction to it. When people like you, you’re saying that Evernote or whatever doesn’t seem to work for you as well as a commonplace book does. So you’re going back to keeping a commonplace book or a written notebook. That’s quite a common experience. People are realizing now, certainly the scientists all know, the psychologists all know, that writing by hand is better in terms of learning and it’s better in terms of thinking things through than typing all the time. So I don’t think that notebooks are going to go away anytime soon. People are always experimenting as well, with these clever kinds of half notebook, half iPad things, the remarkable tablet, things like that. And they have their place, I think, particularly in the office. But I don’t see the next Leonardo da Vinci using a notable tablet.
Brett McKay: How do you combine your use of an analog notebook with digital tools?
Roland Allen: I try and go through a handwritten phase with every project. I mean, not when I’m bashing out emails for work, because I have a day job as well, but When I’m doing anything creative for work or anything kind of strategic or trying to do any kind of deep thought, then I pick up a pencil first rather than go straight to typing. And then when it’s my own creative work, anything I’m writing, I’m writing another book at the moment and thinking about the book after that. It’s all in notebooks to begin, and they’re full of spidergrams and little charts and graphs and lists and notes from what I’m reading. And I’ve become more organized over time with that. So now I keep a notebook, basically, or a series of notebooks for every chapter I’m working on. Then my notes are pretty organized, which they certainly weren’t six years ago when I started writing about notebooks. My notes from then that time are really haphazard, but now they’re very organized.
Brett McKay: Do you refer back to your notebooks from old projects at all?
Roland Allen: Ha! That’s interesting. Yeah, I did. I had a quick flick through the notebook ones once fairly recently, and they were just horrible. It was so like the ones I use, the ones I make now are so much better organized. And it’s interesting that I sort of really educated myself on the journey and I found so many examples of really good note taking which I could essentially copy. Yeah. So my old notebooks, my old writing notebooks are pretty horrible. The ones I make at the moment now I like a lot. I’m sure I’m going to hold on to them for a long time.
Brett McKay: Well, Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Roland Allen: Well, the book is out in the States. It’s published by Biblioasis, who are a fine Canadian independent publisher. And it’s available everywhere. Your Barnes and Noble or your local independent bookstore, or even online if you’ve got no other choice. But yeah, so seek it out. The Notebook by me, Roland Allen. I’d be really grateful.
Brett McKay: And when you pick up the book at the Barnes and Noble, you got to check out the moleskin section. Get yourself a moleskin too, while you’re at it.
Roland Allen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Roland Allen: Thanks very much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Roland Allen. He’s the author of the book The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, roland-allen.com also check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. You can find our links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast but to put what you’ve heard into action.
