The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper 9781788169325, 9781782839156

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The Notebook A HISTORY OF THINKING ON PAPER

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Profile Books 29 Cloth Fair, London EC1A 7JQ www.profilebooks.com 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Sabon to a design by Henry Iles. Copyright © Roland Allen, 2023 The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1788169325 eIBSN 978-1782839156

The Notebook A HISTORY OF THINKING ON PAPER

Roland Allen

For my father

Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Before notebooks The Mediterranean 1000 BCE–1250 CE Chapter 2: Red book, white book, cloth book The invention of accounting, Provence and Florence 1299 Chapter 3: Slight strokes in a little book The sketchbook, Florence 1300–1500 Chapter 4: Ricordi, ricordanzi, zibaldoni Notebooks in the home, Florence 1300–1500 Chapter 5: Pepper in Alexandria The Book of Michael of Rhodes, Venice 1434 Chapter 6: Wicked wives and and mouths stopped with wool The notebook comes to England, 1372–1517 Chapter 7: The long life of LHD 244 Singing in harmony, Bologna c.1450–1600 Chapter 8: ‘Alas, this will never get anything done…’ Two notebook-keepers, Italy 1455–1519 Chapter 9: O the pains and labour to record what other people have aid! Common-place books, 1512–present

Chapter 10: From one mouth to the other runs East and West The world ocean, 1519–1522 Chapter 11: King of the herring Fishbook, The Netherlands 1570 Chapter 12: A dull Dutch fashion Friendship books, northern Europe 1645 Chapter 13: Several gems Industrial observations, Germany 1598 Chapter 14: Let him not stay long Travellers and their notebooks, 1470–present Chapter 15: The Waste Book Mathematics, Lincolnshire 1612 Chapter 16: A tale of two notebooks Fouquet and Colbert, Paris 1661–80 Chapter 17: But 18 pence in money; and a table-book Table-books, England and the Netherlands 1520s–1670s Chapter 18: Albetrosses Logged journey, London to Amoy 1699 Chapter 19: I think Naturalists’ notebooks, 1551–1859 Chapter 20: One way to immortality Diaries and journals, 1600–present Chapter 21: You’re spot on Police notebooks, 1829–present Chapter 22: Yes, better if dentist is dead Authors’ notebooks, 1894–present

Chapter 23: Preserving and Coockery Recipe books, 1639–present Chapter 24: Express yourself Journaling as self-care, 1968–present Chapter 25: Blue, green, red, yellow Electioneering, Florida 1977–2003 Chapter 26: Non-trivial Climate logs, 1850s–present Chapter 27: Attention deficit Bullet journaling, Brooklyn 2010 Chapter 28: In search of lost time Patient diaries, 1952–present Chapter 29: Egodocuments Notebook studies, 1883–present Chapter 30: A different part of the brain Observing artists, 2022 Conclusion: Otto carries a notebook The extended mind, 1938–present Notes and references Image credits Acknowledgements Index

THE NOTEBOOK

INTRODUCTION An apt place to open the story: an Italian, on a boat, in the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1995, Maria Sebregondi was mulling over a knotty question, sailing with friends off the Tunisian coast. At thirty-six, she had already enjoyed a fruitful career, translating Marguerite Duras, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Vladimir Nabokov into Italian. She was particularly intrigued by the French pair of Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau, who wrote novels and poetry using formal constraints as a spur to creativity. Perec had written an entire novel, La disparition, without using the letter ‘e’; in Exercices de style, Queneau told the same simple story in ninety-nine versions, using a different prose genre for each one. They called their playful genre Oulipo, an acronym derived from the French for ‘workshop of potential literature’. So Sebregondi was accustomed to the generation of ideas within set parameters, and on this particular sultry evening she was presented with just such a challenge. Her holidaying shipmates included Francesco Franceschi, a friend whose company Modo & Modo sold designer gifts, and that night he shared a problem. His business depended on other people conceiving and manufacturing products for him to sell, which kept profit margins low. What, asked Franceschi, could Modo & Modo manufacture themselves, and thus sell more profitably? The group exchanged ideas long into the night, discussing emerging trends like mobile phones, email and cheap flights. They decided that the consumer they wanted to target with a hypothetical new product belonged to this new era: creative, free-spirited and mobile. Sebregondi labeled their design-conscious customer the ‘Contemporary Nomad’. But before any of the party could work out what to manufacture for them, the holiday was over and she had returned home with her children to Rome. The question nagged at her for weeks, and she toyed with ideas, including a traveller’s toolkit which would include exquisitely designed

pens, bags, T-shirts, penknives and so on. Nothing met the requirements of Franceschi’s brief, which demanded a product that would be easy to produce, yet offer wide commercial potential. Then she came across two passages in the book that she was reading for pleasure: The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, a global bestseller since its publication eight years before. In the novel, a lightly fictionalised version of Chatwin explores the Australian outback, coming to understand that its aboriginal culture offers an insight into the origins of human culture, and perhaps into the restlessness of human nature itself. Conspicuously ‘creative, free-spirited, and mobile’, Chatwin himself seemed a perfect fit for the ‘Contemporary Nomad’, and two passages in his novel triggered Sebregondi’s memory: ‘Do you mind if I use my notebook?’ I asked. ‘Go ahead.’ I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band. ‘Nice notebook,’ he said. ‘I used to get them in Paris,’ I said. But now they don’t make them any more.’ ‘Paris?’ he repeated, raising an eyebrow as if he’d never heard anything so pretentious. Then he winked and went on talking. Later in the book, Chatwin expands on the story. Some months before I left for Australia, the owner of the papeterie said that the vrai moleskine was getting harder and harder to get. There was one supplier: a small family business in Tours. They were very slow in answering letters. ‘I’d like to order a hundred,’ I said to Madame. ‘A hundred will last me a lifetime.’ She promised to telephone Tours at once, that afternoon. At lunchtime, I had a sobering experience. The headwaiter of Brasserie Lipp no longer recognised me, ‘Non, Monsieur, il n’y a pas de place.’ At five, I kept my appointment with Madame. The manufacturer had died. His heirs had sold the business. She

removed her spectacles and, almost with an air of mourning, said, ‘Le vrai moleskine n’est plus.’ This passage had struck many of Chatwin’s readers; its intimations of mortality seemed to foreshadow the author’s premature death only a year and a half after The Songlines’ publication. But to Sebregondi it meant something more personal, because she recognised, from her time as a student in Paris, the notebooks Chatwin described. Indeed, she still had several. Digging them out of old boxes, she looked at them for the first time in years, and with new eyes. Why had Chatwin become so attached to this particular model that he would order a hundred rather than risk running out? How could such a utilitarian object assume such importance? Then it struck her that she might have hit upon a solution to Franceschi’s challenge – a simple product, easy to manufacture, appealing to creatives and imparting promises of travel, of glamour, of discovery. Phone calls to France confirmed Chatwin’s account (a sensible move: Chatwin always preferred a good story to the literal truth), and Sebregondi’s hunch was confirmed by serendipitous sightings of le vrai moleskine in other contexts: exhibitions of Matisse and Picasso’s sketchbooks, a photo of Hemingway at work. This product, she realised, already had a pedigree. More to the point, it had commercial promise, for millions around the world had already read Chatwin’s endorsement. It even accorded with the classic principles of Italian design: like an espresso, a pair of Persol sunglasses or a Prada dress, le moleskine was minimal, functional and assertively black.

Maria Sebregondi, literary translator, Chatwin enthusiast and originator of the modern Moleskine notebook for the ‘contemporary nomad’.

And yet, miraculously, no-one made it any more. Sebregondi took the idea to Milan, where Franceschi realised that she was on to something. With Chatwin having already solved the thorniest problem faced by anyone marketing a new product (what to call the damn thing), the pair entered into what became a two-year process of product design, which resulted in the classic Moleskine notebook.

You don’t need me to tell you what a Moleskine looks like, but you may not have considered how insistently its design sends messages to the ‘Contemporary Nomad’. The minimal black cover looks, at first glance, like it might be leather: robust, but also luxurious. The non-standard dimensions, a couple of centimetres narrower than the familiar A5, let you slip the notebook into a jacket pocket, and the rounded corners – which add considerably to the production cost – help with this. They also stop your pages from getting dog-eared and, together with the elastic strap and unusually heavy cover boards, confirm that the notebook is ready for travel. The edges of the board sit flush with the page block, ensuring that your Moleskine can never be mistaken for a printed book. In use, it lies obediently open and flat, and the pocket glued into the back cover board invites you to hide souvenirs – photos, tickets stubs, the phone numbers of beautiful strangers. Two hundred pages suggest that you have plenty to write about; the paper itself, tinted to a classy ivory shade and unusually smooth to the touch, implies that your ideas deserve nothing but the best, and the ribbon marker helps you navigate your musings. Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled Nike, Mercedes or Apple – and like the best cues, the messaging works on a subconscious level. But in case those cues alone were not enough, Moleskine spelled out its brand values in the small folded leaflet which the notebook’s new owner would ‘discover’ – as Sebregondi tellingly puts it – tucked in the pocket. The leaflet’s copy has evolved over time, and more and more languages have been added to it, but the central message has changed little from the early, Italian-only, version:

The Moleskine is an exact reproduction of the legendary notebook of Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse. Anonymous custodian of an extraordinary tradition, the Moleskine is a distillation of function and an accumulator of emotions that releases its charge over time. From the original notebook a family of essential and trusted pocket books was born. Hard cover covered in moleskine, elastic closure, thread binding. Internal bellowed pocket in cardboard and canvas. Removable leaflet with the history of Moleskine. Format 9 x 14 cm. The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not ‘exact reproductions of the old’) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound those seventy-five words proved themselves one of the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities – usefulness and emotion – to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. Sebregondi and Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. ‘Made in China’, on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out. Modo & Modo ordered the initial production run of three thousand notebooks in 1997, and the new Moleskine first went on sale in Milan, in a small bookshop on the Corso Buenos Aires. It sold through its consignment in days. Avoiding traditional stationers, the company targeted design retailers and bookstores: the strategy worked, and in 1998 they sold thirty thousand notebooks. From 1999 they used their existing networks to distribute around Europe and then across the Atlantic. Within ten years, the American chain bookseller Barnes & Noble had become the brand’s largest retail partner. Just as Franceschi had hoped, the high profit margins transformed Modo & Modo’s fortunes. In 2006, a private equity firm bought him out, and sales continued to grow. In 2013, the Moleskine SpA launched on the Italian stock exchange, and in 2016 a Belgian car distributor bought the company outright, for half a billion euros. Small wonder that the story is now taught in business schools as a textbook example of successful product design and marketing. In 2017, the story came full circle when Moleskine and Chatwin’s publisher struck a deal to publish a new edition of The Songlines, bound in the now-familiar black boards, complete with elastic closure, rounded corners, ribbon markers and

pocket. You bought it shrink-wrapped to a blank journal, embossed – in a gesture which Chatwin would surely have recoiled from – with the motivational boost ‘Enjoy your travel writing’. Sebregondi herself stayed relentlessly on message for two decades, giving scores of interviews whose recurring theme was that the Moleskine was ‘first of all, an enabler for creativity’. Having stayed with the business through its various incarnations, she stepped back in 2017, and currently gives her time to the charitable Moleskine Foundation, which aims to drive social change, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe, through – naturally – creativity. She also remains involved with Oplepo, the Italian offshoot of Oulipo. Her most recent translation is of Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, in which the reader randomly generates sonnets from the book’s thousands of rhyming lines: constraints proving creative.

I bought my first Moleskine during the early years of that boom, and a while later found myself working for a book publisher keen to share in the Moleskine-driven growth of the upscale stationery market. Notebooks, we reasoned, had no words and no pictures – the tricky, expensive things that make ‘real’ books so difficult to profit from. How hard could it be to cash in? So we created a range of notebooks, brightly designed and packed with gimmicks, and placed a substantial order at the printers. I was charged with visiting Barnes & Noble’s Fifth Avenue head office to present our wares, and suggested that our colourful product could supply healthy turnover if racked alongside Moleskine in their stores. The buyer eyed me sceptically. ‘Along with the Moleskines,’ he said. ‘Do you know, there’s a section of our customer base that buys a fresh Moleskine every time they come into a store? Once a week, some people. We have no idea what they do with them.’ I showed off my samples, stressing the cream paper, the ribbon markers and the striking cover designs that supposedly set our brand apart. He shook his head, and handed me a familiar black notebook in response. ‘See this?’ he said. ‘We make them ourselves, own-brand. The same size, the same number of pages. We use the same paper, the same boards, we make them at the same plants in China. They’re every bit as good as a Moleskine, and we ask half as much for them.’ He paused for effect. ‘And Moleskine still outsells us. And you’re asking me to take shelf space away?’ I was learning a hard lesson about the power of the brand. Others, however, made a better go of it. From 2005 Leuchtturm, whose speciality had been stamp collectors’ albums, took on Moleskine, matching them for quality while offering – the impudence! – a range of colours; older companies like Clairefontaine, Rhodia and Paperblanks refreshed their offering. Western hipsters, always alert to high-end Japanese design, started to import notebooks from companies like Midori, Hobonichi and Stalogy, which bested any of the European brands with their exquisite papers and bindings.* In the US, Field Notes struck a utilitarian chord with a midcentury aesthetic. All presented a fresh spin on the basic product, and all benefited from the product-building that Moleskine had done. If you cared for upmarket stationery, the 2010s were a golden age. At the same time, the Moleskine became a potent status symbol. Tech CEOs toted them, as did the designers, journalists and writers whom Sebregondi had envisaged, and even more people whose aspirations

perhaps outran their actual creativity. Spotted in your local Starbucks, these characters were easily mocked: the satirical website Stuff White People Like made hay with their accessorising, as did the right-wing politician Karl Rove, who once told his audience at Yale that he knew them to be pretentious by their Moleskines. The mockery did nothing to hurt sales. Neither did a growing interest, from psychologists and lifestyle gurus, in the notebook’s practical effectiveness. Sebregondi herself suggested that the notebook’s minimal form made it a perfect creative tool, talking of it in the same terms as Raymond Queneau’s deliberately constrained work: ‘a simple object’, giving her the ‘sense of extraordinary possibility born from small things’. The productivity guru David Allen Green recommended making lists in notebooks, as did neuroscientist Daniel Levitin; the journalist David Sax wrote a book, The Revenge of Analog, which depicted paper notebooks (along with vinyl LPs, board games and film cameras) mounting a spirited resistance against digital replacement. It became commonplace to contrast the old technology with the new. The original Moleskine had launched at the same time as the Palm Pilot, the first handheld digital organiser, and had from day one faced competition from increasingly powerful devices. The laptop, the BlackBerry, the iPhone and the iPad all seemed to offer far greater functionality than their paper antecedent, but a stubborn constituency of users refused to move over into the digital sphere, and numerous peer-reviewed studies soon showed that their obduracy made sense. Something about the act of writing by hand, and the production of a physical object, makes the older technology more effective than the new. Sebregondi had, unwittingly, prompted serious inquiry into the workings of the human brain.

My own interest in notebooks had also progressed beyond the commercial. I read Samuel Pepys, loving the unfettered way in which he documented work, home, leisure, his urban environment and his sex life; then I discovered my grandfather’s eye-opening pre-war diaries, just as wide-ranging, although much briefer. So I started keeping my own journal in 2002, and each year added to a steadily growing heap of battered notebooks. Writing a diary made me happier; keeping things-to-do lists made me more reliable (which in turn made those around me happier), and I

learned never to go to a doctor’s appointment, or a meeting of any kind, without taking notes of what I heard. But there appeared to be creative benefits too. Every artist I met seemed to have a sketchbook to hand, as did graphic designers, and even web designers, whose product was entirely digital. Authors all kept notebooks, as did journalists, critics and other creative types – and the more assiduously they used those notebooks, the better their work seemed to be. The same applied to my colleagues’ work: playful lists, diagrams and sketches regularly disgorged surprisingly good ideas. How did this happen? Was there a connection between notebooks and creativity? What other parts did they play in culture, and industry? What could someone’s notebook tell us about them? Why did keeping a diary bring happiness, or at least contentment? Is it significant that we ‘keep’ a diary, as we keep an animal, a promise or a secret? Did the notebook’s physical constraints paradoxically make it more useful than an unlimited digital device? And – most fundamentally of all – where had notebooks actually come from? Who had invented them? Intriguingly, no-one seemed to know the answers. I could find no book on the subject, and nothing online to help. A Google search – ‘when was the notebook invented?’ – results in answers ranging arbitrarily from 60 CE in China to 1934 in New England, none of which bears examination. My questions remained open and, after a late-night conversation in Frankfurt one October, I decided to take the problem more seriously. I can recall the scene vividly: which topped-barrel table I and my friend Simon sat at, what we drank, the fug of German cigarettes and the recorded horse’s whinny that sounded every time the door opened to admit the students who formed that odd spot’s regular clientele. (You remember long-gone moments well, if you keep a diary.) I told Simon of my preoccupation, and he responded with the question that any self-respecting publisher always asks. ‘Why don’t you write a book about it?’ Back in the hotel room, as I wrote the day up in my diary – one of many scarlet week-to-view Moleskines, falling apart as they always did by the autumn – this seemed an intriguing idea. So the next morning I bought a fresh notebook, a chunky teal Leuchtturm, as a place for my researches, and began populating its pages with notes, dates, plans, lists, stories, questions, mind maps, references and doodles. Eventually I filled it and started another, a grey hardback which in due course gave way to red then blue

Japanese softbacks. So now, a decade on, a multicoloured stack of notebooks sits within reach of my left hand. They contain more than a thousand pages of notes: lines culled from scores of books, lists of hundreds of notebook-keepers, digests of histories, biographies, memoirs and scores of academic articles and scientific papers, none of it ordered or indexed.

Bruce Chatwin drafts a telegram in a ‘moleskine’: ‘PHONE HOPELESS COME ALGIERS 9 OCT… BRING DESERT SHOES ONE DRESS AND NOT LESS THAN 250 POUNDS WILL REPAY WILL GO CENTRAL SAHARA’.

And in them, unsorted and unprocessed, are the answers to the questions I’d asked. The notebook, it transpired, had not come into being in either 60 CE or 1934, or in China or New England. Working out when it did arrive, I realised that this story interlaced with all kinds of others – of culture and science, of innovation and discovery – and I came to believe that this was no coincidence. When notebooks appear on the scene, interesting things happen.

But in any telling, the story turns out to be intimately connected to Italians, on boats, in the Mediterranean. * Moleskine and Leuchtturm both use mainly Taiwanese paper.

CHAPTER 1

BEFORE NOTEBOOKS The Mediterranean 1000 BCE–1250 CE The oldest item that looks to modern eyes like a notebook sits in a display case in a castle in a Turkish city, thousands of years ago a thriving commercial and intellectul hub and now an equally busy holiday resort. In exemplary displays, the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology shows off items recovered from the bottom of the Mediterranean. The Ulu Burun shipwreck is one of its glories, and its gallery dedicates a display case to a small wood-and-ivory item: a hinged writing tablet which, when folded shut, would sit nicely on the palm of your hand. Like many items in the museum, this tablet – or diptych – was pieced together from many broken parts, but the restorers did an excellent job and it’s easy to picture what it looked like before it was carried to the sea bed off Ulu Burun, a sharp headland on Turkey’s rocky southern coast. Recesses were cut into two boxwood leaves and these were filled with a layer of soft beeswax, in which the owner could write with a stylus. When they needed to reuse the diptych, its wax could be smoothed over again. The wood in the recesses was scored, to help the beeswax adhere and that wax may have been mixed with orpiment, a bright yellow compound of arsenic and sulphur which would have given it a rich yellow colour, making it easier to read from, though poisonous. The fine woodwork and ivory hinges suggest that the diptych had once been a prized possession. But whose? The wreck is the oldest shipwreck yet excavated: it went down in about 1305 BCE, and its other contents confirm that we inherit the diptych from a sophisticated trading network. Divers recovered 506 hefty copper ingots, probably from Cyprus; a ton of tin, probably from Sardinia; amber beads from the Baltic; jars filled with beads, olives and orpiment; tortoise shells; ebony logs; elephant ivory; hippopotamus teeth; thirty-seven pieces of gold;

arrowheads, spearheads, daggers, and maces; almonds, figs, cumin and sumac; and so on. The tablet survived in such good condition because it sank in a clay jar, along with a chisel, a razor and some pomegranates. Together, the ship carried goods from no fewer than ten cultures – a cargo as varied as any on one of today’s container ships. We can deduce, therefore, that the tablet’s owner was probably some kind of sailor, trader or diplomat, and cosmopolitan in experience.

The Ulu Burun discovery, from c. 1305 BCE: wax tablets like this were Europe’s notebooks for two thousand years.

We know that they used the tablet for writing, but we can’t know exactly what they wrote. Diptych tablets were limited by their capacity; one might scratch a couple of hundred words into the wax before running out of space. This made them extremely useful for a things-to-do-list, the draft of a letter, or a phrase that you wanted to remember, but no good if you had anything more complicated in mind. And your words were vulnerable: the wax could be wiped smooth in a second. So what did our forebears write on when they needed more space, or permanence?

In this part of the world, for five hundred years or more before this time, people had written in cuneiform on clay tablets. These make an impressively permanent, tamper-proof record, and survivals from Mesopotamia and Anatolia include tax receipts, payments for goods received, and similarly weighty transactions. But there were no clay tablets on the Ulu Burun ship. During the same period, the ancient Egyptians made papyrus from a tall reed which thrives by the Nile but is surprisingly difficult to cultivate elsewhere. Papyrus was cheap, and – unlike clay tablets – practical. It can be rolled up into long scrolls, and therefore used for longer texts than clay or wax tablets, and what’s written on the page lasted as long as the papyrus. So it’s likely that the Ulu Burun ship carried documents on papyrus sheets or scrolls – maybe letters, and paperwork to do with its valuable cargo, like a bill of lading. But papyrus doesn’t hold together well, even if it isn’t submerged in fifty metres of seawater; it cracks when folded, frays easily, and over time disintegrates in almost any other conditions than arid desert air. So the anonymous owner of the Ulu Burun tablet had a choice of ways to write, each with their own pros and cons. But none were both durable and portable.

About a century after the Ulu Burun shipwreck, the complex economy which had sustained the unlucky ship’s cargo disintegrated. Historians argue over the causes of the late Bronze Age collapse, but its results can clearly be read in the archaeological record: a series of wars and other disasters saw every city from Greece to the Levant – hundreds in total – destroyed. Settlements were depopulated, entire cultures and trading networks evaporated, and there must have been much less demand for writing materials. The Romans, when they eventually succeeded the Bronze Age and Hellenic civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean, adopted small Ulu Burun-style tablets, which they called pugillares or ‘handhelds’. They made them more capacious, either by making the leaves larger (and calling the results tabellae) or adding more leaves: tablets with three (and therefore four, not two, faces to write on) became common, and one survivor from Pompeii has eight. Many paintings on the walls of Pompeii and

Herculaneum depict them and – as usual in Rome – their usage seems to have been firmly gendered. When Roman men are shown with their tablets, the context is always one of business, or the ‘sober management of the family’s wealth’; for women, the picture is more complicated. The enticingly ambiguous mural (opposite) is often said, without cause, to represent the poet Sappho, which it certainly doesn’t. The subject may, possibly, have been a Roman wife keeping her accounts or writing a letter, but recent scholarship argues that she is in fact one of the muses, the divine sources of scientific and artistic knowledge. ‘Men could aspire to the literary life,’ concludes Elizabeth Meyer’s study of the Pompeian tablets, ‘but their companions – Muses or women portrayed as Muses – could only aspire to inspire it.’ In any case, the artist wasn’t looking too closely: the tablet is depicted without hinges, and in real life would have fallen apart. The Romans solved one of the medium’s problems, finding a way to protect the writing on a wax tablet, making it suitable for legal documents or contracts. They drilled holes through its frame, tied it shut with a cord, and applied wax seals – up to seven, depending on the seriousness of the document. You couldn’t then read what was written inside, but you could trust that it hadn’t been interfered with. Traders used similar systems to close their diptychs and make them tamper-proof.

The so-called Sappho fresco from Pompeii, showing a woman, or perhaps a divine muse, with her pugillare, or ‘handheld’ tablet.

When Romans wanted a legible permanent record, they usually used papyrus, and if they couldn’t lay their hands on that, they would write on strips of wood: but the most durable substrate they had was parchment, invented in a Greek kingdom, Pergamon, in northwestern Anatolia. Tough as old boots, for the excellent reason that it’s made of the same stuff, parchment is hard work to make, and expensive: an entire animal hide (goat, sheep and cow-hide will all do the job) will only yield a few pages. The Greeks wrote on it, as did the Romans, either on single sheets or scrolls, until around the year 80 CE, when someone in Rome created the first

bound book of papyrus pages folded within a protective parchment cover. This innovative format – the codex – proved useful, and it grew in size and scope over time, particularly with the spread of Christianity, which – unlike earlier religions – came with its own holy book. You can see the result in the British Library, where the formidable Codex Sinaiticus, 694 pages of calf- and sheep-skin parchment, represents the finest in fourth-century bookbinding. It shows off the codex’s main advantages over the scroll: you can easily move around the text, jumping from page to page, you don’t need a flat table to unroll it on, you can write on both sides of the sheet, and you can use it for extremely long texts. A scroll version of the Sinaiticus codex, written in the same hand, would have been a quarter of a mile long. So despite its punishing expense, the parchment codex represented a huge step forward.

A cheaper material had already been invented, but it would take hundreds of years to arrive in the West. Cai Lun, a Han dynasty eunuch, is said to have been responsible for the invention of paper, discovering that pulp vegetable fibres drained over a fine mesh dried into a durable, versatile and affordable material. Although the Chinese didn’t immediately think of it as a writing material (preferring split bamboo for everyday use, and silk for high-status texts) paper found a multitude of applications across the Chinese empire while the codex spread across the Roman Mediterranean and Near East. Usefully, it could be made from a variety of raw materials; hemp, mulberry bark and old fishing nets all made good paper, and linen fibres, readily available in the form of worn-out underwear, worked particularly well. Over the middle centuries of that first millennium, as the Roman empire waned and the Chinese empire grew, their respective innovations approached each other along the silk roads. The codex moved east, as paper moved west, until finally, around the year 800, they met in the middle at the Abbasid Caliphate’s capital, Baghdad, which was rapidly becoming the world’s largest and richest city. Paper supplanted papyrus, having ‘a transformative effect’, as Jonathan Bloom, the leading historian of the subject, puts it. For the following four centuries, Persian, Arabic and other Muslim intellectuals raced ahead of their rivals and counterparts in

Christian Europe. In law, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, art, trade, literacy, in all the enterprises of civilisation, the Caliphates enjoyed a cosmopolitan golden age while Europe receded. Islamic cities boasted million-volume libraries and streets of booksellers: administrators, students, teachers, and thinkers of all kinds relied on relatively cheap, plentiful paper to do their work. Even as paper revolutionised the spread of thought and culture in the Islamic world, a number of cultural barriers blocked its adoption in western Europe. Protectionism, for one: although the Caliphs were happy to see paper mills spread across their sphere of influence, they did not let papermakers take their skills elsewhere. Neither did merchants in the Maghreb or Levant export paper in significant quantities to Europe, where the most literate section of the population, the clergy, were committed to the use of parchment. They didn’t like paper’s suspiciously infidel origins, its novelty, or its recycled origins: one opponent fulminated against the idea that the word of God could be written on menses-stained rag. This clerical resistance was matched by that of most of the continent’s rulers: in 1221, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who ruled Europe from Sicily to northern Germany, decreed that parchment, not paper, was the only material an official document could be written on. Christendom was aware of paper, but sceptical.* Events in Spain, where a struggle rumbled between the Almohad Caliphs and the ambitious Christian monarchs of the north, would change that for good. The town of Xátiva was the prize. Located on a fertile plain inland from Valencia, where abundant water flowed from the surrounding mountains of the Serra de Crevillent, this had been an Islamic possession for five centuries and had been famed for the quality of its linen cloths for centuries before that. The easy availability of flax and fresh water encouraged Muslim papermakers to establish themselves there, and by 1150 Xátivan paper was known across the Islamic world for its quality.Temptingly close to the borders of his expanding realm, this industry appealed to King Jaume of Aragon, also ruler of Catalonia, who spent nearly twenty years attempting to take Xátiva, finally succeeding in 1244. A gifted administrator and military campaigner, Jaume was obsessed by paper, and when he finally had control of the town’s workshops, he made every effort to sustain and grow their trade. Muslim papermakers were allowed to

keep their businesses, and when their demand for linen outstripped local supply, permitted to import shipments of rags from overseas duty-free. Jaume’s own government was their largest customer: historians note that during his long reign (he came to the throne in 1213 and ruled until his death in 1276) the amount of official paperwork and documentation doubled each decade, as he imposed his rule on his expanded kingdom, taxed it and encouraged the rule of law. Like the bureaucrats in faraway Baghdad, he created an administration that demanded deeds, writs, regulations, notarised statements, official correspondence and other paperwork in ever greater quantities. Paper exports also grew exponentially. Xátivan paper retained its reputation for excellence, and was shipped to customers as far away as Byzantium, and the industry spread across Jaume’s realm, to Majorca and Provence, whose workshops were the first to brand their product with watermarks. Paper bolstered Jaume’s administration and helped him solidify the rule of law across his territories, but it also transformed the way commoners lived and worked. For the Mediterranean’s trade routes were becoming busier with each passing year: not yet as busy as they had been during the glory days of Rome, but getting that way. A new breed of merchants were learning to trade in increasingly sophisticated ways; building companies, investing in partnerships, transporting commodities across Europe, amassing huge fortunes. And they did it with notebooks. * There was one attempt to manufacture paper in Genoa in the 1230s, but the product was inferior and the business failed.

CHAPTER 2

RED BOOK, WHITE BOOK, CLOTH BOOK The invention of accounting, Provence and Florence 1299 It is yet another long lockdown evening, and I am reading a history of medieval paper mills while my partner studies. She is retraining as an accountant, and tonight taking an online practice test; I hear her muttering its questions under her breath. ‘Transfer from the cash book to the general ledger…’ she says, then after a pause taps in her answer. ‘Calculate the book value…’ ‘What are you doing?’ I ask. ‘Balancing the books.’ This all sounds oddly paper-oriented for a modern accountancy course. She’s training for a profession that lives in software – Excel, QuickBooks, Sage, SAP, Stripe – yet its technical vocabulary is a lexicon of papery metaphors. The bought ledger, cash book, general ledger and journal are a company’s everyday records, while the bookkeeper is one of its key professions. We judge a company’s health from its balance sheet; we write down – or, worse, write off – assets to calculate book value; and when we sell a company we open the books to potential buyers. In particular they will want to see the order book, which, hopefully, shows that we operate at a good margin and don’t cook our books. The sheer number of financial terms and idioms that stem from notebooks, or the act of writing in them, suggests an intimate connection between the profession and the object. To understand how that came about, we should turn our gaze seven hundred years back in time, to a small market town in the south of France,

not far from Jaume’s ancestral lands.

In 1299, Provence was one of the busiest corners of Europe, a crossroads where economies connected. By road and river, trade routes led north to the wool markets of Champagne and the Low Countries, while the bustling Mediterranean port of Marseilles received ships from Italy, Spain, the Balearics and North Africa. It exported salt, wine, oil, grain, olives and dyes, and imported silks, spices and cloth. Merchants shared the roads with the pope’s agents, carrying silver to Rome from the pious congregations and profitable church lands of the north. The area was an economic hotbed but the locals benefited from the trade much less than their visitors. International trade was dominated by Italian expatriates: Genoans, Pisans and Venetians, but above all Florentines, who by 1300 had settled so widely that the pope, Boniface VIII, called them a ‘fifth element’, as ubiquitous as earth, air, water and fire. One of these enterprising economic migrants, the merchant Giovanni Farolfi, set up shop in the Provençal city of Nîmes, establishing several satellite offices in order to trade anything that might turn a profit. To run his office in the small town of Salon-de-Crau, fifty miles to the east, he recruited two fellow Florentines: Bacchera Baldovini, who became chief buyer, and Amatino ‘Matino’ Manucci, who kept the books. This key role demanded financial sophistication, a tidy mind and neat handwriting. Fortunately for Farolfi, and for us, Manucci was the man for the job, and although we only have half of one of his notebooks, that fragment alone shows how trade in the south of France came to be dominated by Italians. The state archives in Florence hold the remains: one folio ledger,* waterdamaged, and missing half of its original 250 pages. Abundant and neat cross references show that Manucci spent his days making entries in at least seven ledgers and notebooks, each with its own carefully defined role in the business. These included the quaderno bianco (‘white book’), which was the preceding year’s general ledger; the libro rosso (‘red book’), a record of Farolfi business in wheat, barley, oats, olive oil, wine, wool and yarn; the quaderno dei panni (‘cloth book’), covering trade in wool cloth; the libro dell’entrata e dell’escita or cash book; and two small quaderni delle spese,

notebooks for the day-to-day expenses that Manucci and Baldovini accrued on their rounds, called the quaderno memoriale and the libro piloso. Was all this paperwork necessary? We can understand why if we consider the variety of figures that they tracked. The leases on two shops and two warehouses had to be paid, and the value of the remaining leases added to the balance sheet. Animals and men needed to be fed and watered; employees needed paying and expected their expenses to be reimbursed. Packhorses were bought and sold, trudging on and off the balance sheet in the process. Freight was paid in advance, whenever grain or olive oil or cloth or lavender or dyestuffs were shipped back to Florence; and import and export duties were payable, in different currencies and at different rates, depending on the goods. Customers like Rostang de Capre, the Archbishop of Arles, sold the Farolfi business produce from his lands, and bought fine cloth; but he also borrowed money from them, at 15 per cent annual interest (an onerous rate that was standard at the time). Many other customers bought and sold cloth, salt and a wealth of other goods, and Amatino carefully monitored the profitability of each commodity. He also calculated the net profit of every shipment, and stock wastage, and pulled the figures together to show the performance of each deal. Buyers and sellers often contracted to buy goods at a fixed price at some point in the year to come, establishing, in effect, a futures market (for instance, a loan would be made one year against the next year’s wool crop). And as if all of this buying and selling wasn’t enough to keep track of, Amatino’s office was also a bureau de change, exchanging French livres tournois* for Florence’s more stable gold florins. Just as any subsidiary does today, the office had to demonstrate its profitability: Bacchera and Matino were set a target annual operating margin of 15 percent. So they periodically totted up, and Manucci went to the Nîmes head office with the cash. Amatino faithfully recorded the constant back-and-forth flow of goods and cash between Salon and Nîmes, so every page of the ledger gives an insight into Baldovini and Matino’s business. On page sixty-two, for instance, we read that they bought cloth to the value of two livres and twenty sols on 5 April 1300. Five days later Amatino exchanged silver in Marseille, realising 443 livres and ten sols but running up expenses of two livres ten sols and four denier. So, despite the complexities of his business, Giovanni Farolfi could assess its health and prospects at a glance. This, and

the fact that we can reconstruct it today in such detail, is a testament to Manucci’s scrupulous bookkeeping. But Manucci wasn’t just making lists and recording transactions. What makes the Farolfi ledger so important is the sophistication and depth of the financial concepts – many of them in their infancy – that he had mastered. Writing in 1977, the economic historian Geoffrey A. Lee teased them out of the tattered, ravaged, volume. The central concept is that of the accounting entity – a body that can own property and incur debts or liabilities, and therefore have a monetary value or net worth. Today, we are comfortable with the idea of a club, a society, a corporation or a partnership striking a deal, but in the medieval era nearly all accounting entities – apart from the church – were individuals. King to commoner, you were your business, and your business was you. Simply viewing the Salon office as a separate entity to the Nîmes head office, and neither of them as Giovanni Farolfi himself, represented a huge conceptual leap. In another major step, the ledger defined an accounting period, turning twelve months into one financial year. Yet another was the concept of algebraic opposition – the relationship between assets and liabilities which Manucci reconciled with his careful credit and debit entries. The use of a single monetary unit seems obvious to us now, but required some work: the business struck deals in several different denominations, but Manucci took care to convert all into livres in his ledger.

Everyday objects: ledgers in use in 1330s Genoa.

Together, these last two concepts could be used to calculate the proprietor’s equity – how much the business was worth – and profit: whether all this exertion was worth the effort Finally, Lee was particularly struck by Manucci’s mastery of depreciation, or writing down, which connects the value of an asset to the period for which it will be useful. These abstract concepts were expressed with new bookkeeping techniques: accounts had two sections, debit and credit, and each transaction was therefore entered twice, once on the debit side, once on the credit; ample cross references connected different customer or commodity accounts; a final financial result was summed out of the combined income; and trial balances gave an accurate picture of the business at any given time. What makes the Farolfi ledger a key document in European history – indeed, world history – is that this wreck of a notebook is the first place

where we see all the abstract concepts of accountancy, and the practical techniques by which they were managed, used at once. For all their sophistication, earlier civilisations – Greeks, Arabs, Chinese – had only kept track of cash and inventory. Here was the first (surviving) example of double-entry bookkeeping, the calculation of profit and loss.

A sign of changing times: the Farolfi ledger captures the arrival of modern business in a few waterdamaged pages.

Manucci applies the rules of this new system with a confidence and consistency that implies long practice. But these abstract and notoriously slippery techniques lay on the cutting edge: outside the Italian merchant community, they were unknown, and even within that community they were not often applied with such rigour. What makes them so important? Crucially, as economic historian Jane Gleeson-White points out, double entry allowed a business to ‘show the individual profit figures for each line

of business or venture’ – be it wool, olive oil or currency exchange – making it better than ‘single entry, which can only show the total profit figure’. This in turn prompted the growth of sophisticated businesses with multiple income streams. Farolfi’s business was only one of hundreds of Florentine trading outposts: the city itself boasted as many as eighty merchant banks with a powerful international reach. Three of them – the Bardi, the Peruzzi and the Acciaiuoli – accrued such wealth that they are known to economists today as the ‘super-companies’. The Peruzzi alone boasted no fewer than fifteen international branches, or filiali, with offices as far east as Rhodes and Cyprus giving them access to lucrative spices, silks and other luxuries. A less alluring branch in London connected them to England’s wool and its impecunious kings, who borrowed huge amounts at high interest to fund their wars on France. Each Peruzzi branch, run by a partner (usually a member of the family) and a team of salaried employees, contracted much greater business than Farolfi’s office in Nîmes, and surviving Peruzzi ledgers show that detailed account-keeping, in carefully carefully organised notebooks, kept the business humming.* Thanks to the movement of all this wool, cloth, silver and gold, Florence was fast becoming one of Europe’s most important cities, and yet it remained a tiny territory, with an insignificant population. Its wool-dyers and weavers were skilled, but had no technological advantages to set them above their competitors elsewhere. Closely hemmed in by rival towns, Florence had no army to speak of, poor farmland and, unlike its main rivals Genoa and Venice, didn’t enjoy direct access to the sea, so couldn’t profit from the shipbuilding and transport opportunities presented by the crusades. With no coast, it had no navy, and therefore no colonial outposts. Even worse, political factionalism made it prone to periodic bouts of civil war. Given all of these obstacles, how did its citizens achieve such commercial dominance? Economic historians have studied this question in detail, pointing out that Florence, time and again, turned seeming disadvantages into positives. The absence of friendly neighbours forced them to create long-distance networks, which ultimately proved more profitable. The fact that the state posed no threat to France, England or the Holy Roman Empire meant that its citizens could roam comparatively freely. Lacking its own arable land, it had to strike trading partnerships with rulers in the south of Italy and Sicily

to feed its industrial population. The absence of a strong hereditary ruler allowed its leading citizens to create a more pluralist political system that respected guild membership and civic activity more than noble birth. The city state had been the first to mint a reliable gold coin, the florin, which came to be accepted across Europe. And, crucially, Florentines ran a longdistance financial network along their trade routes, moving money for the church; this, in turn, gave them access to large sums of capital which could either be invested in wool or lent out at high rates of interest. There had been international trade for thousands of years, but it had been unsophisticated by comparison with the super-companies’ operations: the Vikings traded everywhere from Dublin to Moscow to Constantinople, but no Norse king ever despatched a longship with instructions to make a 10 per cent annual return on his capital investment. By formalising the business of buying and selling, the Florentines (and, in their wake, their rivals from other Italian towns) professionalised and scaled up. When today’s venture capitalists evaluate a potential investment, they ask if it has any ‘unfair advantage’, some killer attribute that gives it the upper hand. Back in 1299, the Tuscans had one such unfair advantage: their bookkeeping. Florence’s merchant banks prospered because they were better at business than anyone else.* And they had one other unfair advantage. For the bookkeeping was in turn enabled by a new piece of information technology, one that Matino Manucci used every day – but was difficult for potential competitors in Paris, Antwerp, Canterbury or Utrecht to lay their hands on. Manucci had notebooks, and – crucially – they were made of paper.

Before paper became easily available in the years after 1244, Italian merchants had used parchment books to record their transactions, but they recognised a superior product when the first paper ledgers arrived. Ink dries on the surface of parchment, but soaks into a paper sheet. This makes it a permanent medium, whereas parchment, which can be scraped clean and written on again, allows records to be revised after the event – opening the door to fraud. Accounts were always bound into ledgers for a similar reason: loose-leaf entries could easily be fabricated, but a ledger with numbered pages became tamper-proof. This in turn meant that merchants

could delegate to subordinates or branch offices without fear of embezzlement, allowing traders to widen the circle of their businesses. Purchases, sales, loans and terms of business were no longer recorded inconsistently on a scrap of easily rewritten parchment: they were carefully entered into a permanent record that, in the event of dispute, was accepted as evidence in a court of law.

Parchment- and paper-making, from a book of trades compiled by the German woodcut printer Jost Amman, 1568.

The new techniques of double entry and cross-reference increased the number of entries that a merchant had to make, meaning that ever more ledgers became necessary. This was only affordable if paper was cheap: and now, for the first time, it was. A pair of German woodcuts from the period when both parchment and paper were in wide use perfectly illustrate why the new material was bound to be cheaper than the old. One shows a parchment-maker scraping dead flesh off a stretched hide: laborious, meticulous piece-work. Behind him,

another hide waits in a bath of urine, where it softened, losing hair and tissue, for about a week. In the background we see more hides stretching and drying, each knotted by about twenty cords to their own wooden frame to ensure a flat, even result. While on these stretchers, the hides were chalked, washed, scraped and polished, and under ideal conditions – hot, windy, dry – would be ready in five days. A skilled parchment-maker working flat out might produce a couple of sheets of parchment, either eight or sixteen pages when trimmed and bound, in a day. And of course, the raw material – an animal hide – was expensive in its own right. In contrast, the corresponding image of a paper-maker reveals an efficient, mechanised mass-manufacturing process. He gently lifts a wire mould from a wooden vat of water, watching the cellulose fibres suspended in it congeal into a sheet as liquid drains away. He’ll squeeze excess water out in the press behind him, many sheets at a time, while a water mill does the preparatory work of mashing linen rags, bought cheap in the form of old clothes, into a pulp. To his side a young boy walks past carrying an implausibly high stack of neatly trimmed sheets. The artist isn’t exaggerating: the paper historian Peter Tschudin estimates that by the sixteenth century, each man at a vat of pulp could produce five or six reams of paper in a day, or between two and three thousand pages. No scraping, no polishing, no stretching, and hundreds of times more finished product. The only downside was that, like the parchmenter’s hides, the papermaker’s linen rags also needed long soaking in vats of human urine. Like many premodern manufacturers, both depended on buckets of piss.

So paper became cheap enough for a minor merchant to have six or seven ledgers with hundreds of pages each. But it was only available, of course, if you had access to a paper mill. Where did the Farolfi ledger come from? Paper was made in Provence, so Farolfi may well have supplied himself locally, and we also know that the island of Mallorca exported it to nearby Marseille. But most Florentine merchants looked to a small town in central Italy, two hundred kilometres to their east, called Fabriano. Sometime in the late 1260s a family of Marche landowners, the Chiavelli, started making paper, and by the end of the century their mills had become a lucrative

success. The Chiavelli’s great innovation was mechanisation: Apennine snowmelt turned waterwheels, which drove hammers, which pounded their nailed heads into vats of linen rags, reducing them by stages into a homogeneous paste. By using water power, rather than pounding by hand as the Islamic paper-makers did, the Fabrianese were able to up the rate of production while driving prices down. Another key innovation also resulted in a higher-quality product: sizing, which refers not to the physical dimensions of a sheet, but to its coating. The papermakers of the Islamic world sized their paper with a thin starchy coating of flour and water. When this dried, it left the paper smoother and less scratchy to write on, but if a book became wet, the sizing turned to glue and pages stuck together.* The Fabriano papermakers discovered that a gelatine size made for a smoother finish than starch, and their paper became easier to write on with a scratchy nib than either eastern paper or parchment. As the gelatine came from stewed animal bones, Fabriano paper’s quality came from coating vegetable fibre with animal protein. Able to make better paper, faster, the Chiavelli well appreciated the value of their new technologies, and guarded them jealously. Their protectionism paid off, and the Fabrianese dominated paper production in Italy for fifty years, exporting to Germany, Flanders and England, replacing Xátivan production as the best regarded on the continent. Their home town still boasts fine buildings constructed on the profits, and a high-end mill there plausibly claims to be the world’s oldest continually operating papermaking company. The arrival of large-scale paper manufacture only a few days’ travel away gave yet another boost to Florence’s economy. Much of Fabriano’s paper passed through the city, creating profitable export opportunities, and high local demand allowed the city to nurture yet another new trade. Cartolai, stationer’s shops, and librai, bookshops, flourished to the point that one street, Via dei Librai, was named for them.* They stocked the raw materials that bookkeepers consumed: ledgers, ink, pens, parchment and loose sheets of paper for the millions of letters that merchants also despatched to each other – for a revolution in correspondence went hand in hand with the revolution in bookkeeping. Proximity to Fabriano provides one more reason for Florence’s commercial dominance, its final unfair advantage.†

Business as we know it dates from this era. If you’ve ever tapped numbers into an Excel grid, created a business plan, or dozed through a corporate powerpoint presentation, you have Manucci and his contemporaries to thank – or blame. For they established the template of the businesses we work for today. The super-companies created branch networks that worked just as banks still do: bills of exchange, carefully recorded in the appropriate ledgers, allowed wealth to move around, so a customer could deposit silver in Palermo and withdraw it in Antwerp without resorting to the hazardous business of filling saddlebags with coin. Nation states – in particular England – came to depend on bankers, as did the multinational church. Historian Jacob Soll makes a powerful claim: ‘Without double-entry accounting, neither modern capitalism nor the modern state could exist.’ When I spoke to another historian of the period, the paper specialist Orietta Da Rold, she needed only two words to evoke this intersection of conceptual innovation, advanced manufacture, information technology, profitable exports and plentiful cash. ‘Silicon Valley.’ Matino Manucci left no other mark on history. We don’t know when he was born or died, and we have no record of his life other than what he noted in the Farolfi ledger. But we know that he enjoyed Florence’s first peak because the city’s merchants, having devised capitalism, also discovered its inevitable cycle of boom and bust. Their long run of growth ended in the 1330s, when wars to north and south halted the wool and grain trades, and the economy collapsed completely in 1348, when the Black Death killed half of Florence’s citizenry. The city’s population would not return to prepandemic levels for five hundred years. The world’s finest accounting practices proved no protection against a flea. Meanwhile, competitors across northern Italy – Venice, Genoa, Pisa – adopted Florentine bookkeeping techniques, and created their own sophisticated businesses. Further afield, the mystery of bookkeeping was viewed as an Italian, rather than a distinctively Florentine, innovation. It would not spread widely for over two hundred years, while Italy dominated European trade. Bookkeeping’s arrival had unexpected consequences. The new science of accountancy demanded notebooks in such a variety of sizes and shapes – giornale, memoriale, quaderni, squartofogli – and in such quantities, that as production boomed, they spilled out into every other sphere of Florentine

life, sparking imaginations and inspiring new uses. Absorbed by the business of making money, the bookkeepers cannot have anticipated what would happen when some ledgers didn’t make it to the counting house, but fell into the hands of truanting schoolboys with restless eyes. * A ‘folio’ book was made from sheets of paper that had been folded once, then gathered and bound into a codex. While the exact size varies, the pages are normally larger than our modern A4. A ‘quarto’ volume’s pages were folded in half one more time, making for a much more portable product. * The livre was itself subdivided. Twelve denier made one sol: twenty sol, one livre. One livre was so high in value that coins were very rarely struck and most currency circulated in denier coins. * A century later, the Medici would create a corporate structure of even greater sophistication, with a holding company in Florence that controlled wool, silk and banking subsidiaries, each of which treated the others as customers, with each preparing their own books. * Once the secrets of credit and debit spread across Italy and then Europe, Florence would enter a period of long relative decline. We think of the fifteenth century – the age of the Medici and the High Renaissance – as Florence’s golden age, but by then Venice had outstripped it commercially and in population. * To this day, many colour books and magazines are printed on paper that is sized with a starch coating, and they suffer from the same problem if they get wet. Most text-only books, and nearly all journals and notebooks, are printed on uncoated stock. * In those pre-printing days, most bookshops did not hold stocks of books which customers could browse. Instead, they took commissions for copying and binding work, supplying books to order and at high cost; most of the businesses on the Via dei Librai were probably cartolai that carried secondhand books. † Naturally enough, the Florentines resented Fabriano’s monopoly, and by 1319 they had broken it, with a group of investors establishing a paper mill at Colle di Val d’Elsa – a much closer town, and, unlike Fabriano, under the city’s political control.

CHAPTER 3

SLIGHT STROKES IN A LITTLE BOOK The sketchbook, Florence 1300–1500 Medieval Florence – now a byword for beauty – shook with noise, and stank. Iron-rimmed cartwheels scraped over rutted roads, clappers struck church bells, hammers rang on iron, and chisels on stone. The woodsmoke of thousands of cooking fires hung in the air, mingling with the reek of tanneries where cow hides soaked in urine. Scores of fulling mills, dyeworks and weavers’ workshops added to the miasma, employing thousands of workers who sweated through the Tuscan summer to turn northern wool into the continent’s finest textiles. Mules, oxen, horses and dogs freely fouled the narrow streets. As the city waxed fat through the thirteenth century, a population of fifty thousand or more lived and worked in an area smaller than London’s Hyde Park. Florence had no sewers.* Small wonder that in the face of this constant assault on their ears and noses, the richer citizens spent heavily to delight their eyes. The silver that flowed into merchants’ coffers rapidly flowed out again, funding imposing buildings, jewelled outfits and pictures. Murals, frescoes, paintings on wooden panels, pictures woven into tapestries: above all, pictures in churches, public arenas where the wealthy competed with each other for status in this world and made down payments on the rapid transfer of their immortal souls to the next. When a new picture was completed, it would be paraded through the streets of the parish to its new home, crowds cheering it, chanting prayers and banging drums. This compulsion to commission ever more impressive paintings of Christ, the saints, the Virgin and the prophets would stimulate Europe’s greatest artistic innovations, and drive creative breakthroughs that change the way we look at the world, even now.

But in the second half of the thirteenth century, Florence didn’t produce its own painters – to get the best work in their churches and palazzi, its wealthy patrons had to ship in artisans from Constantinople. These mostly anonymous Byzantine painters, known as ‘Greeks’, worked in a tradition that had changed little in hundreds of years. They painted symbolic pictures – we would call many of them icons – that represented spiritual truth according to time-honoured convention, but they didn’t attempt to realistically depict the world we live in. A good example is the Madonna painted around the year 1280 by an unknown hand (top left, overpage). Mary is depicted with her eyes alarmingly asymmetrical, her fingers curving grotesquely, holding an infant Christ who looks, disturbingly to modern eyes, more like a shrunken adolescent than a toddler; to either side miniature angels with perfunctory wings lean in. This Byzantine painting reflects the state of religious and secular art across the continent. No-one painted portraits, as we would understand them: subjects identified themselves by their symbolic props, and their size. Kings loomed over their subjects with thrones, crowns and sceptres; knights carried swords, and wore helmets; popes, bishops and monks wore the appropriate uniform. Human figures loom over castles, churches and cities, as neither artist nor viewer thought that scale was particularly important, and no-one understood perspective, or made a serious effort to depict the play of light, the fall of cloth or the anatomy of the human body. For the most part, artists didn’t enjoy fame, or wealth: they were craftsmen or clerics, who toiled in a time-honoured sacred tradition and did not aspire to change it. A chasm separates this tradition from the art that draws millions of modern visitors to the city every year. It had none of the vigour or personality of the work of Michelangelo, Leonardo or Raphael; none of the technical skill, none of the ambition, none of the conceptual or visual depth, that would come to characterise Renaissance painting. We can stand before a Renaissance portrait of a pope and know exactly what he looked like: an impossibility for his medieval predecessors. Something dramatic happened in the last years of the thirteenth century, changing how paintings were made, how they were looked at, and how we see art today. To understand how, we should look at two painters: Cimabue and Giotto.

Cimabue, born in 1240, came from minor rural nobility, and was obsessed by drawing from a young age, playing truant from convent school in order to ‘spend the whole day… drawing, on books and other papers, men, horses, houses, and diverse other things of fancy’ (as Vasari recorded in his Lives of the Artists, published in 1550). Fortunately for this illdisciplined youth, his father accommodated his unusual hobby, and even let him spend days watching Byzantine painters at work. This paid off, and soon he could paint better than they could: ‘exercising himself without ceasing, in a short time nature assisted him so greatly that he surpassed by a long way, both in drawing and in colouring, the manner of the masters who were teaching him’. One wonders what those Greek journeymen, so far from home, made of this indulged youngster, whose reluctance to study at school was matched only by his willingness to practise at their feet. Cimabue found his own commissions, and a look at one of his surviving Madonnas reveals how far he advanced the technique of paint, spurning the rote reproduction of religious imagery. This altarpiece (details opposite – top right and below), was painted in Florence around 1280 for the newlybuilt Basilica of Santa Trinita and is now housed a five-minute walk away in the Uffizi. Its commission would have been routine for the Greek artists who Cimabue had watched at work, but his execution of it opened a world of new possibilities. Cimabue’s audience definitely felt that the work was something special: when it was completed an unusually riotous crowd carried it in procession to the church, ‘with much rejoicing and with trumpets’. What prompted this exceptional ovation? His Mary is not a flat, iconic figure: her chin and hands are given form and life by gentle chiaroscuro, the treatment of light and shade that would be a signature technique of later Florentines. Her hands adopt realistic poses, graceful and expressive, and the drapery of her robes suggests three dimensions. This Mary inhabits a body in a way that her Byzantine relations don’t. She also sits in three-dimensional space, Cimabue making an attempt at perspective in the architecture of her throne. And although Mary, Jesus and the angels have faces that are generically serene, the prophets painted beneath them (as reproduced opposite) have lived-in faces and passionate expressions that suggest faithful portraits, possibly of donors. When Giorgio Vasari came to write his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, the first significant history of the

Renaissance, he assigned Cimabue the most prominent position: first artist, in the first volume. If you want to know where it all started, asserts Vasari, Cimabue’s your man. He also tells us how he did it. Cimabue, he asserts, unlike his precursors, unlike the Greeks, painted people ‘from nature’ – ‘something new in those days’ – on ‘books and papers’.

A move towards realism: a Byzantine Virgin and Child (left) becomes a humanised image (right) in the hands of Cimabue, whose depiction of the prophets (below) also allows for innovative portraiture.

Cimabue was lucky enough to grow up in the 1250s, when, for the first time in Christian Europe, a young artist could find paper to draw on. Vasari,

no mean painter himself, and an avid collector of sketches and drawings, identified drawing from nature – and not the copying of earlier pictures – as the source of Cimabue’s skill: that is why he took care to mention his life drawing, of everyday subjects, ‘on books and other papers’, and credited him with ‘the first beginning to the new method of drawing and painting’. Wandering around the Tuscan countryside with a merchant’s ledger and an ink bottle, young Cimabue invented the sketchbook.

When cheering crowds paraded Cimabue’s work through the city’s streets, the young Giotto must have watched hungrily. A blacksmith’s son from the city streets, he had escaped the hot din of his father’s forge to apprentice himself to Cimabue. Learning to paint under Cimabue’s eye, in the 1280s, proved an excellent start, and before long Giotto was in demand in his own right, not only in Florence, but across Italy. He painted on wood panels or plaster and, like his mentor, inserted lifelike portraits into his religious works – including likenesses of Pope Clement IV, who had ministered to King Jaume, and Pope Boniface VIII, who had remarked on the omnipresence of Florentine merchants. One of Giotto’s Paduan works, Lamentation (Mourning of Christ), perfectly illustrates how much further he had taken the art of painting in a few short years. The first thing that any modern viewer notices is the ‘realism’ of the scene. All the human figures are well proportioned, vividly posed and lifelike. Unlike the characters of Byzantine art, they behave naturally, engaging with each other and reacting to events. Giotto draws the viewer into their midst with an illusion of depth, created by the treatment of light, shade and point of view, making us feel as though we are part of the group at the scene. The composition celebrates originality, not formulaic convention; two figures turn their backs to us, yet Giotto models the drapery of their clothes so well that their poses are still absolutely unambiguous. It is hard to imagine any of the Italo-Byzantine painters, with their distended limbs and angular figures, attempting such a risky move, and impossible to believe that they could have pulled it off. Giotto, one of the greatest innovators of Western art, had given us not just a new way of painting, but a new way of looking at pictures. ‘He could create the illusion’

declared the art historian Ernst Gombrich, ‘as if the sacred story were happening before our very eyes’. His inventions had a profound impact.

Giotto painted scenes the viewer could almost step into. This 1304–6 fresco, Lamentation (Mourning of Christ), was painted for a Paduan banker.

As any artist in training learns, all these new techniques – light and shade, form, mass, the observation of drapery, proportion, perspective, pose, and the capture of likeness and personality – can only be developed in one way: drawing, and lots of it. Vasari called drawing the ‘father of our

arts’, while his contemporary Benedetto Varchi preferred to think of it as ‘the mother of all arts’. Before paper, if you wanted to draw in western Europe, it helped to be born male and then take a vow of chastity, for parchment and ink were most often the preserve of clerics whose duty was to glorify the Word of God, not to waste expensive materials on merely personal impulses. These clerics, and the lay scribes who gathered around the first universities, prized calligraphy above the other visual arts – naturally enough, given the central importance of the biblical word – so the great manuscripts of the so-called Dark Ages, like the Gospels of Lindisfarne or Kells, often juxtapose wonderful letterforms with crude depictions of the human face and body. The church’s insistence on parchment would have slowed our young artist down, as its physical properties make it a frustrating medium for rapid sketching. In 1400, the Florentine Cennino Cennini wrote about drawing on parchment in his how-to volume Il libro dell’arte; each sheet had first to be prepared with burned and powdered chicken bone, and if you wanted to darken the faint line of your stylus (either silverpoint, or an alloy of lead and tin) you had to overpaint it with ink on a brush. Paper, by comparison, could be used without preparation, and held the line of a stylus, a pen, chalk or charcoal, equally well. You could create shade or the illusion of depth with hatched parallel strokes, and Cennini supplied instructions for dying paper green, pink, grey, blue or purple. A ledger’s portability made any scene a viable subject; ‘nature,’ wrote Cennini, ‘is the best of all possible examples’. And, at a tenth of the price of parchment, cheap paper allowed artists to ‘always and without fail draw something every day’. All of these material advantages would have naturally led to the sketchbook’s next great benefit: a step change in the quality of preparation that an artist could put into a work. With the space afforded by a ledger with hundreds of leaves, an artist could not only privately draw from life, but also plan and revise a painting before committing to a final subject, design, composition or execution. Detailed preparation – repeated studies, leading to a final plan or cartoon – would have given Giotto a significant edge over his precursors, one visible in his complex, sophisticated compositions, and in his facility in the unforgiving medium of fresco. The sketchbook also allowed an artist to develop their own style and repertoire, an additional memory bank that collected a body of material to refer to at a later date. As Leonardo da Vinci wrote, a century after Cennini:

And take a note… with slight strokes in a little book that you should always carry with you… preserved with great care; for the forms, and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, wherefore keep these sketches as your guides and masters. Giotto had easy access to this new invention: he was born around 1267, just as the Fabriano mills started production, and he grew up in the commercial hot spot that was their biggest local market. With high-quality paper readily available, he could practise the same skills as Cimabue had, taking them to a virtuosic level, and his sketchbook allowed him to keep a record of inspirations from anywhere he went. We know that he travelled widely in Italy, and some experts suggest that his Florentine frescoes refer so closely to sculptures at Bourges in central France that he must have been there too. With a sketchbook, he could easily have copied and kept hundreds of reference poses or models, allowing for a far wider repertoire than had been possible before. Quite suddenly, artists opened themselves to wide influence in a way that their forerunners couldn’t have imagined. Hundreds of years later, David Hockney would stress, with his characteristic directness, the importance of this process of reception and transmission: In one gallery they actually had a notice which said, ‘No Sketching.’ How obnoxious! I said, ‘How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?’ Hockney’s telling point is that it is not enough merely to look at a work: if an artist wants to learn from it, they need to make their own record of it, and in doing so, come to fathom it better. This is how art lives and grows. Model books, or ‘cornucopia’, which had long been used to share artistic and architectural models, also changed with the arrival of paper. The 1230 collection of the French builder Villard de Honnecourt, for instance, collects thirty-three sheets of Gothic architectural patterns alongside some mechanical designs, and the twelve-page Wolfenbüttel Musterbuch, from the same period, has a few Byzantine figures of Christ and the Gospel writers. But the model books of Renaissance studios contained reference illustrations by the hundred, which apprentices used as models for hands,

feet, nudes, animals, plants, buildings and more, developing skills and building up a repertoire. The variety of drawings in surviving examples (like that from the studio of Benozzo Gozzoli, a fifteenth-century Florentine) suggest that they played a crucial role in moving art away from Byzantine genre painting, and making it open-minded, and open-eyed. The sceptic can be forgiven, at this point, for asking for proof. Giotto transformed art, we can accept: and blank books were everywhere in his home town during his youth. But what do we have, apart from the coincidence of timing, to connect the two? Did Giotto leave a sketchbook, or a cornucopia? Frustratingly, none is to be seen. And Vasari, who asserts that this period saw Florentines drawing in books for the first time, wrote two hundred and fifty years later, and got many facts wrong in his Lives. In trying to explain Giotto’s innovative genius, we have to ask what changed in his environment during his formative years. What was he exposed to that his precursors were not? Florence grew richer in the period, but its culture did not fundamentally change. People lived and prayed in the same way in the 1270s and 1280s as they had fifty years before, when painters delivered the distorted Madonnas and freakish baby Jesuses of Byzantine convention. The most significant difference is technological: born in 1267, Giotto, like his contemporaries Duccio in Siena and Cavalini in Rome, both also highly innovative, was a member of the first Italian generation for whom paper was an everyday material, and notebooks an everyday sight. Because none of Giotto’s sketches and preparatory works survive, it’s impossible to know exactly how he used his sketchbooks, or to watch his development as an artist through their pages. Patrons didn’t collect artists’ sketchbooks: easily pulped, old notebooks were possibly sold back to paper-mills and recycled, after the best pages had been removed. Many drawings that survive as single sheets were removed from sketchbooks in this way, and there is a busy corner of art history devoted to reconnecting far-flung sketches that originally were bound together. Studio model books, meanwhile, were probably used until they fell apart: every studio must have had them, but only a few have come down to us. The earliest sketchbooks to make it through to us intact are those of Pisanello, who was probably born in Pisa – which had close links with Florence – in 1395. Bound up into a single volume called the Codex Vallardi, his strikingly beautiful pages, now resident in the Louvre, show

how essential a sketchbook had become. One page has studies of five flowers, a stockinged leg, and a squid; others have loose botanical sketches, designs for medallions, copies of Roman sculptures, designs for illuminated letterforms, mechanical diagrams and architectural studies. A loose ink sketch of a bosomy woman looking over a balcony has a voyeuristic quality. Caricatured urban worthies with Spitting Image overbites and huge chins jostle with ethereal portrait studies. There are drawings of hands, horses and hairstyles; mice, monkeys, lizards and men-at-arms; bird after bird. It’s not all Pisanello’s own work. The 400-page volume includes stitched-in sections from many sketchbooks, which he, his apprentices, and colleagues – including Leonardo da Vinci – filled according to their own whimsy. But, as a survey of the uses to which a sketchbook can be put, it’s unmatched. The heart breaks to think of the similar wonders that must have been lost over the centuries since Cimabue and Giotto started drawing from life.

Fortunately, attitudes shifted over time, and from the later Renaissance more and more artists’ sketchbooks and preliminary drawings made it through. Collectors became more aware of their value, and private collections, universities and galleries now preserve thousands upon thousands of revealing examples. With them, we can follow artists’ intellectual and technical journeys with remarkable intimacy, and understand the collective practices of artists’ studios. Giotto’s sketchbook gave him a hands-on opportunity to constantly develop his technique, and ways to change the fundamentals of artistic practice. In doing so, it also changed his life in ways that the second son of a blacksmith could scarcely have dreamed of. With a busy studio (and up to forty assistants) he grew wealthy enough to buy up much of the street where his father had fired his forge. He had made himself one of Florence’s leading citizens, celebrated and well-travelled: Dante’s Divine Comedy refers to Giotto’s fame, as do other contemporary accounts, and he enjoyed access to cardinals, popes and princes as well as the financiers of his home city. And on his way up, he developed a visual grammar that has underpinned all Western figurative painting since his time. So many of his innovations became standard practice that, as Gombrich remarked, when

‘the Italians were convinced that an entirely new epoch of art had begun… they were right’. The rest of us also benefit from the existence of artists’ sketchbooks, even if they remain largely unseen. The painting that we admire on a gallery wall is only the tip of an iceberg of studies, sketches, experiments and abandoned blind alleys, while Instagram reveals that the art of amateur sketch-booking is also alive and well, with hashtags like #urbansketch and #dailydrawing corralling the remarkably accomplished contents of a thousand Moleskines for our pleasure. We owe these rich, inspiring joys to a handful of ingenious young Tuscans. Transcending the limitations of Byzantine convention, they innovated again and again: redefining what was possible when a brush picked up paint, and puzzling away at the myriad problems that face anyone who presumes to render three dimensions in two.

The Louvre Museum’s Codex Vallardi, c.1415, includes work by Pisanello and others. Note the hatching on the man’s collar – a fundamental drawing technique that emerged in the fourteenth century.

The raw materials of the commercial revolution had sparked an artistic revolution. It was a happy accident that the sketchbook was invented in the hotbed of central Italy, where ostentatious piety, burgeoning wealth and social one-upmanship created an opportunity for young talents like Cimabue and Giotto, and there is a pleasing resonance to the whole process.* Italian businessmen developed new commercial tools, skills and conceptual frameworks, then spent heavily on artists, who developed their own skills and conceptual frameworks. And everyone was taking notebooks home and coming up with even more uses for them. * A later inhabitant of Florence, Leonardo da Vinci, developed a preference for spiral staircases because ‘the corners of square ones are always fouled’. * It’s revealing that the Peruzzi family, whose surviving ledgers reveal so much about the origins of the corporate, capitalist, mercantilist world in which we live today, are now best remembered for paying for some of Giotto’s greatest work.

CHAPTER 4 RICORDI, RICORDANZI, ZIBALDONI Notebooks in the home, Florence 1300–1500 By letting them manipulate numbers, the notebook proved its worth to Florence’s merchants every day, and, not content with keeping this handy invention in the shop or counting house, they started using it in ever more personal ways. The first was the ricordanze, or home account book. As the city’s businesses expanded, so did the interests of the city’s bourgeoisie: they invested their profits in land and property, and collected rents. They paid taxes, they assembled or collected dowries, they endowed charities, they incurred fines, they employed staff, they gambled, and they lent each other money or stock. All of these activities required record-keeping, and, to the men who were energetically inventing modern business, it seemed natural enough to apply the same techniques at home. Most of them already kept libri segreti, private business ledgers recording any confidential dealings considered too sensitive for the eyes of clerks and bookkeepers. So the Florentine archives hold hundreds of private financial notebooks from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, often running through the generations, keeping track of the ebb and flow of a family’s prosperity and status – and sometimes, in a sign of a changing culture, kept by women. These documents are invaluable for historians (we know more about life in Florence than any other city of the time) but you usually have to read between the lines to get any sense of an individual’s personality or character. The Strozzi family, for instance, specialised in lending money to farmers and peasants who had fallen behind on their taxes: if the borrower defaulted, they lost their property, and so the Strozzi steadily increased both their land holdings and bank balances – although, as large landowners perennially do, they managed to fill their tax returns with tales of liability, bad debts and other woes.

The catastrophe that struck Florence in the 1340s prompted an evolution in the way that Florentines kept their ricordanze: many of them, for the first time, felt the need to fill out the financial record with more personal memoirs, and they stuck with the practice even as the initial shocks of the Black Death faded. Typically, these libri di ricordi (memoirs) or libri di famiglia (family books)* combined family history – usually portrayed as glorious – with the writers’ accounts of their own deeds, in order to educate their descendants in the exploits of their forebears. Foligno di Conte de’ Medici, for instance, sat down in 1374 to recount the story of his family’s lineage, ‘the status acquired by our ancestors, which is great, and was still greater in the past, and began to decline as a result of the lack of valiant men’. At this point the Medici were minor players in the city, and Foligno’s bullish account betrays an anxiety that the clan – two-thirds of whom had died of plague – would lose any sense of its significance. In that, he need not have worried: his cousin Giovanni would soon set the family on the road to greater power and wealth than he could have imagined. A more confident – indeed, swashbuckling – example is the action-packed 1412 ricorda of Buonaccorso Pitti, the adventurous son of a merchant who fought, traded and – most often – gambled his way around Europe from Budapest to London, negotiated with the pope, the emperor and the king of France, occupied many official positions back home in Florence, fathered eleven children, and in general cut something of a dash. Like Medici, Pitti wrote for an audience: he wanted his children and others to marvel at his derring-do. His contemporary Gregorio Dati, on the other hand, tells us that he is writing secretly, his book only to be read ‘after I am gone’, and does not sculpt a narrative from the raw material of his life. He opens with a methodical reference to the libro di famiglia on which he bases his family’s history (‘I was born on 15 April 1362. This is recorded in a list marked with an asterisk on page 85…’) and this sets the tone for what follows, a punctilious chronicle of his business partnerships, civic responsibilities and domestic milestones. Every so often Dati, who made and sold silk cloth, would set down a header – ‘Memoranda, 1393’, ‘Trading Accounts, 1405’ – and underneath briefly summarise what had happened in the period, in business and at home.

Topic headers like ‘Children–1422’ demanded a certain amount of bookkeeping: by then, when he was fifty-six, Dati had been widowed three times and had already fathered twenty children, of whom five survived. He went on to have six more children with his fourth wife, Caterina, and Dati neatly cross-references their births and deaths (three lived) to entries in other account books. He responds to each arrival and departure with pious formulas – ‘May God bless them and grant us the grace to bear their loss with fortitude’, he writes, after losing two children in one day – that only hint at the joy and pain he must have felt. image The typical Ricordanze (left) and Memoriale (right) of Francesco Datini, a fourteenth-century merchant who lived in Prato, near Florence. Dati’s secret notebook, then, is part account book, part memoir, part family record-keeping: an idiosyncratic blend of genres that had become common in his home city and, thanks to its periodic structure, much closer to the modern diary or journal. Occasionally, he strays further into this new territory, for instance this bout of midlife introspection: 1 January 1404 I know that in this wretched life our sins expose us to many tribulations of soul and passions of the body… I also see that since my birth forty years ago, I have given little heed to God’s commandments. Distrusting my own power to reform, but hoping to advance by degrees along the path of virtue, I resolve from this day forward to refrain from going to the shop or conducting business on solemn church holidays… Whenever I make exceptions I promise to distribute alms of one gold florin to God’s poor. I have written this down so that I may remember my promise and be ashamed if I should chance to break it. This, and a handful of other dated entries, distinguishes Dati’s book from most of the thousands of account books, chronicles, ricordi, ricordanzi and libri di famiglia that survive in Tuscany’s archives. By setting down his

emotions in a notebook as he experienced them, and writing with no other reader in mind, Dati was experimenting with a new form, one that we would only start to properly understand six hundred years later. image By the turn of the century, nearly every merchant family in Florence kept ricordanze: indeed, one historian writes: ‘At the end of the Middle Ages, urban Tuscans seemed stricken with a writing fever, a desire to note down everything they saw.’ But they remained a peculiarly local phenomenon: there was something uniquely Florentine (or more accurately ‘Tuscan’ as examples also survive from Siena and Lucca) about them, and it’s not clear why that should be, given increasing literacy, and wide availability of paper, across Europe. Both Genoa and Venice – Florence’s only serious rivals in trade – were home to thousands of merchants, familiar with the arts of bookkeeping and well-supplied with paper and ink; both suffered in the plague; yet in those cities only a handful of such books survive, and there is no reason to believe that they were ever created in significant numbers. Some historians make the point that all three of the writers cited above took care to record the civic offices which they, or their relations, had held. Dati, for instance, served as one of the Five Defenders of the County, which he called ‘an onerous office, in which one may gain merit in the sight of God and acquire contempt for the world’. Pitti was made Podestà of Pistoia, which he enjoyed no more: ‘I was utterly opposed, and spoke against it with all my might.’ Any such office, whether willingly accepted or not, counted as a major career achievement, so it makes sense that Pitti, who wrote a memoir for public use, and Dati, who wrote privately, would take care to note it. Yet this doesn’t explain why Pitti wrote about his perennial gambling, or Dati made his passionately pious outbursts. These men were comfortable with the idea of using notebooks for personal expression, as well as financial management. Not even illiteracy proved a barrier to keeping a ricordanze. In January 1452 the peasant Benedetto del Massarizia, a share-cropper from the village of Marciano, some sixty kilometres from Florence, paid nine lire for the pasturage of his six oxen. We know this because he kept a small

notebook, about 11 by 14 cm in size, detailing all such transactions. It ran for decades (after Benedetto died, other family members maintained it) and covered every kind of transaction: dowries, rents, loans, sales of produce, and purchase of cloth, building materials and feed. It gives a remarkably full picture of peasant life. But Benedetto never wrote in it: instead, when a transaction had to be recorded, he either passed it to a notary or the nearest literate person. The notebook has entries in more than thirty hands. Craftsmen, bankers, friars, priests and school teachers can all be identified, and even a knight of the Order of Jerusalem. As Duccio Balestracci, who has transcribed and edited the Massarizia notebooks, points out, such documents ‘won a victory’ for peasants like Benedetto, for they ‘placed them on an equal level with the landowners’, who otherwise dominated rural life. The transactions reveal the notebook’s owner to have been a canny operator, able to steadily improve his fortunes despite periodic disasters caused by crop failure, disease and rampaging soldiers. And he was not unusual: Balestracci deduces from the notebook that similar books must have been kept by ‘a butcher, five cloth peddlers, a silk spinner, a shoe maker, five bankers and moneylenders, a barrelmaker, two saddlemakers, two clothiers, two woolworkers, a master woodworker, a shopkeeper, a goldsmith, a cloth cutter, and five other people whose trade and status are not established’. By ensuring that transactions were accountable and legally recognised, notebooks protected the poor from the rich, and became instruments of economic improvement and social empowerment. Urban Florentines, meanwhile, were rarely illiterate, and took the education of their children more seriously than did other Europeans. Advanced literacy and numeracy would make a huge difference to one’s life chances: a merchant had to be good with numbers if he was to negotiate the everthickening forest of percentages, interest rates, exchange rates, insurance premiums, and profit shares; and to participate in the city’s civic life, a man had to be able to debate, presenting his arguments with logic, confidence and precedent. Even those whose everyday trade did not demand bookkeeping or political sway – butchers, barrelmakers, smiths – still had to complete an annual casato tax return, and therefore had good reason to make themselves literate and numerate.

So mothers were expected to teach young sons and daughters their letters. The majority of boys then went to elementary school, practising their writing and learning basic Latin. As children reached about eleven, parents who wanted their sons to go into trade – in Florence, a large majority – sent them to a private abaco school to learn commercial arithmetic and read Italian literature. Their fellows destined for the church or the law instead went to a grammar school, where they studied Latin, rhetoric, and such Roman authors whose works had re-entered circulation. For girls, the picture was patchier. Some continued to study at home with their mothers or governesses: a few, often destined for the convent, went to schools with female teachers. But whether at home, at an abaco school, or grammar school, by the time they had completed their schooling, many youths picked up a habit that they would maintain all their lives. They kept zibaldoni. image No-one knows exactly when the gloriously sonorous noun zibaldone appeared, or what it originally meant. The earliest record of the word, in the mid-fourteenth century, refers to it as Florentine slang, without further definition, and we can only infer from context that it means something like ‘mess’ or ‘jumble’. The fifteenth-century merchant and art patron Giovanni Rucellai referred to his own zibaldone as ‘una insalata di più herbe’, a salad of many herbs, which gives an impression of something variegated and wholesome. But by then it had also become firmly attached to the notebook in one of its most enduring applications. For this informal culinary term came to signify a personal anthology, or miscellany. The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook. You could copy out as much or as little as you wanted, neatly or not, and refer to it a little, or as much, as you wanted. The collection could be poetry or prose, fictional or factual, thematic or random, religious or profane, in Latin or Tuscan, or any mixture of any of these components; you could even draw pictures in it. The notebook itself could be large or small, luxurious or utilitarian. Some better-off writers, such as the author Boccaccio (the son of a Bardi banker), had zibaldoni made of expensive

parchment, and paid professional scribes to do the writing for them. Many users illustrated them, or commissioned elaborate initial capitals to open every new excerpt: surviving examples often have gaps where their owners never got round to completing that task. Mostly they were kept by men, but not all were, and we can assume that many wives, sisters and daughters would have had access to the books kept by the men of the house. For zibaldoni, although always idiosyncratic and personal to their owner, were not necessarily private, or intimate: you would share the highlights of your own with your friends, and if you saw something that you liked in theirs, you’d copy it over. You could sell a full zibaldone, or hand it down to your heirs, and in many examples one can see where the father stopped writing and the son took over. Some even caused family disputes. ‘This book was written by Piero di Ser Nicholo di Ser Verdiano, for his own contemplation, and that of his family, etc. in the year of Our Lord 1458’ reads an inscription at the beginning of one notebook, before writing that Piero intends the book to go to Girolamo di Piero Arighi, presumably his son. Beneath this is a crossing-out, and under that another hand writes ‘Note that you are lying through your teeth like the scoundrel you are, and you are a crazy windbag.’ Was that inserted by Girolamo’s brother, Bartolomeo, who elsewhere in the zibaldone claims ownership? image The son of a banker, Boccaccio could afford to pay scribes to compile his zibaldoni. This playful layout has extracts from the Roman poet Flacco. What did people write in their zibaldoni? In a word: everything. Poems in Latin, poems in Tuscan, prayers, excerpts from books, songs, recipes, lists, you name it. Lisa Kaborycha, who has studied them extensively, points to one fifteenth-century example which, entirely typically, contains material as various as ‘remedies and recipes, interpretations of dreams, astrological predictions, advice on the best times for planting, Pseudo-Saint Bernard’s Epistle to Raymond, prayers, poems, ballads and a number of sonnets by Coluccio Salutati, Antonio Pucci, and Dante.’ Armando Petrucci, another

expert, celebrated the zibaldone for preserving ‘gate tolls and currency exchange rates… alongside medical recipes, devotional tracts, lauds, and love lyrics’. Rucellai compiled his zibaldone with his sons in mind: for their benefit, it contained moral precepts, advice on business and civic duties. In his, the sculptor Ghiberti collected translations of Vitruvius and Pliny, drawings of Roman architecture, a history of Florentine and Sienese art, and his own memoirs. Through these he interlaced his own theoretical ideas – on optics, proportion, anatomy – clearly intending the collection to form the basis of a humanist art education. His grandson Bonaccorso, who inherited them along with the family business, left his own notebooks, which quote from his grandfather’s and add numerous diagrams of bells, cannon, cranes and hoists. So no two zibaldoni are the same. image Florentines loved their new hobby. Looking at the zibaldoni in the archives, researchers can track how the notebooks grew in popularity over time, peaking in the fifteenth century as Florence enjoyed its second heyday as the hub of Europe’s intellectual life. Books had now become everyday items, and this had profound effects on how ordinary people enjoyed the written word. Literature, previously only available in monasteries, universities, courts and a few other privileged locations, now moved into the home: the kitchen table and shop counter joined the tilted desk of the scriptorium as a place where a book could be read, or written. People read in a new way in these new locations too. They enjoyed a wave of authors writing in their local tongue – not just Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, but a host of other writers forgotten today – and, unlike a student or a cleric in an institution’s library, they could read privately, even in bed. image Bonaccorso Ghiberti recorded many of the machines that Brunelleschi developed for the construction of the dome of Florence cathedral.

We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts’. You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better. How did this new habit relate to the continuing work of traditional scribes? Historian Ross King has described a thriving culture of high-end manuscript production in Florence, where professional scribes and notaries – and the secretaries of some rich men – produced formal manuscript copies, nearly always on parchment, to order. Such copies could be extremely beautiful, and the booksellers who commissioned them for their wealthy clients took great care about their texts. King relates, for instance, how the great bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–98) would compare multiple extant copies of an ancient book – for instance, Pliny’s Natural History – in order to make sure that his new version was as faithful as possible to its author’s intentions. Scribes moved their pens differently, dropping the baffling vertical strokes of traditional gothic script and adopting the beautifully lucid ‘antique’ or humanist style, recommended by Vespasiano’s contemporary Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) in its place. Funded by wealthy patrons like Cosimo de’ Medici,* and scouring Europe’s monasteries for rare Dark Age survivals of classical texts, Vespasiano, Poggio and their peers kept up a steady supply of beautiful manuscripts filled with fresh translations, rediscoveries and new literary works. The presence of the papal court in Florence for several years also drew scholars to the city, and stimulated a rich intellectual life centred on the new libraries and bookshops where bookworms met to discuss their reading. This high-end literacy undoubtedly had a profound impact on European culture, giving the Renaissance its intellectual heft, and King celebrates its heroes, such as the legendary fourteenth-century scribe who produced one hundred copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy, whose sales contributed to his many daughters’ dowries.

But such painstaking efforts in expensive parchment codices could only ever find an elite audience. For Dante to become widely read, universally celebrated and the foundation of a new literature – in short, for Dante to become Dante – scribal reproduction would not alone suffice. His writings were transmitted to a much larger, more diverse, audience, by thousands of ordinary people copying favourite texts from zibaldone to zibaldone, reading and re-reading them at home, and sharing them with friends and family. And they copied not in the formal gothic or antique scripts that took years to master, but the rapid cursive scripts used by merchants and notaries; people who had to write accurately, but also quickly. image So notebooks democratised literature by giving readers another way to read; but they also gave writers another way to write. Petrarch (1304–74), another favourite of zibaldone keepers, adopted the habits and materials of notaries, the legal professionals who formed a crucial part of the mercantile ecosystem, and today’s scholars can trace his ideas as they progress from notes on loose leaves of paper to rough copies in paper notebooks and finally to completed books in a definitive version on prestigious parchment.* The intermediate stage, in the notebook, was creatively the most important and could last a while: Petrarch worked on the verses in Il Canzoniere for forty years (this was an age before publishers’ deadlines). Such labours definitely paid for themselves: by the time of his death, the poet had been crowned poet laureate in Rome. In the zibaldoni of Petrarch’s friend Boccaccio (1313–75), we can see how the notebook helped writers in other ways, giving them a place to collect influences for future reference and quotation. As a young man, Boccaccio endured a miserable commercial apprenticeship at the Bardi bank, where his father was a partner, before breaking away to write full-time. He left no fewer than three zibaldoni, two written by scribes on parchment, and one rough notebook, known as the Zibaldone Magliabechiano, that he kept himself. Scholars have pored over them to discern his influences and their impact on his work, including the Decameron, and they betray an impressive depth of reading: a life of Mohammed, Euripides, Pliny, letters to and from Petrarch, and so on. In turn, his own work would feature in

many zibaldoni, juxtaposed with – thrown into dialogue with – classical authors like Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca.* image Was Florence unique in all this? Yes and no. Notebook-keepers across Europe also made their own informal personal anthologies: examples survive from Scotland to Poland, and a vast majority of such books must have been lost or pulped many centuries ago. In the late 1300s, Dutch and German adherents of the devotio moderna – ‘modern devotion’ – movement were encouraged to keep rapiaria. The name for these notebooks derives from the Latin rapere, meaning to seize; we might call them ‘grab-bags’. In these devotional notebooks, the pious collected phrases or ideas from their scriptural reading, and added their own spiritual insights; the act of writing led to further rumination, helping the writer benefit from the wise words they copied. The Imitation of Christ – a hugely popular book – started life as the rapiarium of its author, Thomas à Kempis, a monk from Zwolle. Most rapiaria remained private, though, and were often buried with their owners, and the practice died out within a century. But the people of Florence (and its environs) grasped the possibilities faster and more fully than anywhere else. Enriching their lives by ensuring that their favourite literature was always near at hand, they made it possible for a new writer to quickly find a wide audience. Most households had a book or two on a shelf and book-copying and production here outstripped that of every other city in Europe. One study of the period by the scholar Small wonder that Florence made a congenial home for the scholars, who would turn rediscovered classical texts into the keys of Renaissance humanism. In the city’s yeasty literary culture they could find a receptive readership, confident in their vernacular, ready for the translations, glosses and new works that humanists created, for they had already been enjoying the ancients for generations, ‘and knew the value of their wisdom’. Here too, new literary practice developed: authors could easily collect models and inspirations for their own work, could adapt the techniques of lawyers and merchants to help them hone it, and then rapidly find a wide audience

in a well-read population that shared ‘content’ that we would today call viral. Ricordi, ricordanzi and zibaldoni arrived in the thirteenth century as Florence established its commercial pre-eminence, grew in popularity over the course of the fourteenth as the city’s first great writers and painters made their impact, and peaked in the fifteenth, as the Renaissance flowered. In all three genres, and in the innumerable hybrid notebooks that refused to fit neatly into any category, Tuscans rich and poor recorded their place in society and celebrated a burgeoning culture of which they were justly proud.* In the next chapter we change pace to look in detail at an outsider’s notebook, one that challenges our view of the possibilities of medieval life. And we turn our gaze to one of Florence’s great rivals: Venice. * Confusingly, these notebooks are often called diaries, which they are not – although many are written in such detail that they must have drawn on detailed contemporary notes, probably kept in libri di segreti alongside records of financial transactions. Fine distinctions between recordi, ricordanze, libri di famiglia and libri di segreti genres often break down, as the owners of most such notebooks simply wrote as they pleased. * By 1444, when Cosimo opened the new library of San Marco, filling it with manuscripts he also donated, the tribulations that his predecessor Foligno had detailed were far behind. * It is striking to note that notaries were trained to strike through phrases as they transferred them from their working draft (bastardello) to the final version, just as bookkeepers struck through transactions which had been reconciled to debit and credit. Petrarch’s father and grandfather had both been notaries. * There’s more to literature than poetry, of course. Just ten years before Dante started work on the Divine Comedy, Marco Polo was coming up with Europe’s first international narrative non-fiction bestseller. Locked up in a Genoese jail with his amanuensis Rustichello da Pisa, Polo wrote his autobiographical Travels in around 1298. Sadly, we have no autograph

manuscript and know nothing of how they composed the work. Christian Bec shows that in the posthumous inventories of 582 deceased Renaissance Florentines, no fewer than 10,574 books were listed: an average of eighteen each. * Literacy rates are notoriously difficult to prove, but there is strong evidence that they were higher in Florence than nearly everywhere else. Eight out of ten 1427 tax returns, for instance, were written by the taxpayer responsible, indicating a high rate of writing skill among property-holders. The historian Ronald Witt concluded that the city enjoyed rates of literacy ‘not seen again in Europe for another three or four centuries’.

CHAPTER 5

PEPPER IN ALEXANDRIA The Book of Michael of Rhodes, Venice 1434 ‘THE IMPORTANCE AND UNUSUAL NATURE OF THIS MANUSCRIPT CAN SCARCELY BE EXAGGERATED’, shouted the first line of the catalogue entry for Lot 54, and Pam Long, reading it, did not disagree. A sale catalogue had been mailed out by Sotheby’s, the London auctioneers, in late 2000, and it had come to her at MIT’s Dibner Institute of the History of Science. The institute’s curator of rare books, Ben Weiss – who cared for manuscripts by Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin – had alerted Long, a historian of science and technology, to the listing. The longer Long and Weiss looked at the entry – headed ‘Autograph Commonplace Book on Ship-Building, Navigation and Mathematics’ – the more intrigued they became. Four-hundred-page medieval notebooks do not come up for sale every day, and this one, never having been properly examined, had an air of mystery, deepened by the unique variety of its contents. It apparently contained shipbuilding instructions, a navigator’s guide to the European coast, and the regulations of the Venetian fleet; this made it a goldmine of naval history, but it also, unaccountably, included astrology, heraldry, and a hundred pages of mathematical problems. That the notebook’s owner, one Michalli da Ruoda, was an unknown only piqued the pair’s academic curiosity further. Who was this man, what had he written, and why? The notebook had not appeared in public for over thirty years; in 1966 it had changed hands, also at Sotheby’s, for £5,500, to a private collector, and Weiss and Long were afraid that the same thing would happen again. Keen to unlock the manuscript’s secrets, even at the estimate of over £100,000, they gained permission to bid, and excitedly dialled in to the London saleroom while their colleagues in Boston still slept. But within seconds of

the auctioneer opening the bidding, ever-rising numbers had overtopped their budget; as they had dreaded, an anonymous collector had the deepest pockets, paying over £300,000. So as swiftly as the mysterious Michalli had come to the pair’s attention he had vanished. But some months later, out of the blue, the new owner contacted the Dibner: on the strict condition of anonymity, they would open the manuscript for study. Yet Long initially felt reluctant. ‘I didn’t want to do it at all, because I knew it would be enormous.’ Not only was the manuscript handwritten in medieval Venetian, requiring specialist transcription and translation, much of it was about mathematics, an area in which Long had no expertise. Nor did she know much about navigation or astrology. It took a remarkable chance meeting to change her mind. Late one night at San Francisco airport, she bumped into fellow academic Alan Stahl, a long-time curator at the American Numismatic Association. Around midnight, waiting for the red-eye in the departures lounge, she told Stahl about the manuscript, and they realised that Stahl’s unusual skill set might help in unlocking it. An expert on Venetian coinage, he could understand medieval Venetian and had extensive knowledge of the city’s archives. And he had time, having just been made redundant. On her return to New England, Long enlisted David McGee, a director of research at the Dibner, to complete the nucleus of a team to research the manuscript and uncover its secrets. The trio knew that they would need to recruit further specialists, but that seemed feasible. There were two problems. Firstly, says Long, ‘the Dibner Institute was disintegrating’. After losing its backing from MIT, the collection had to find itself a new home, and couldn’t commit to supporting the years of work that their project would take. This lay at the heart of the second, more immediate issue. As Long recalls, ‘we had no money’. Nothing daunted, Long, Stahl and McGee submitted a slew of grant applications while pulling together a team of specialists to support their challenge. To the trio’s amazement, not only did nearly everyone they approached agree to join the team, but the awards flowed in too. Almost half a million dollars were pledged and at that point, despite its existential difficulties, the Dibner Institute became more interested. The owner’s offer was formally accepted. A team this large and far-flung could not all work from one fragile manuscript: they needed a facsimile, or a full set of photos, as a starting

point. Each page was shot by a specialist photographer before being cached in the Dibner’s vault. These images were then scanned, so that McGee could post them on an internet portal, allowing the team to get to work. The text was transcribed by Franco Rossi, then translated into English by Stahl, and as the translations were posted the team found that Sotheby’s description of the notebook scarcely did justice to the story that their reading uncovered: a story of ambition, adventure, and – that most appealing attribute, to a group of academics – life-long learning. They quickly confirmed that the notebook had been written in Michalli’s middle age, mostly in 1434. They also realised that it was a completely idiosyncratic patchwork, reflecting its author’s changing interests and priorities. To start to make sense of it, the reader has to turn not to the beginning, but a hundred and eighty pages in, where Michalli da Ruoda – Michael of Rhodes – lays out the bare bones of his career. image The small fishing town of Manfredonia sits on the south side of the Gargano peninsula, the spur on the boot of the Italian mainland. It owes its distinctively Germanic name to the scion of the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperors who rebuilt it around 1260, but it was still little more than a minor harbour when, on 5 June 1401, a large Venetian military galley sailed into port. This must have been a major event – and for one teenaged boy it was life-changing. At sixteen, Michalli was already far from home. He had grown up on Rhodes, and it is likely that he had rowed the eight hundred miles to Manfredonia, pulling an oar as a slave on a Rhodian ship. image Lot 54: no common-place book, but an ambitious collection of fifteenth-century trade, superstition and mathematical puzzles.

Venetian galleys were propelled not by slaves but by salaried freemen, so Michalli would have eyed this ship with great interest. Its sopracomito, or captain, was Pietro Loredan, a distinguished son of one of Venice’s leading noble families, and it belonged to the Venetian guard fleet, the navy which protected the city’s ships, colonies and precious cargoes. The Mediterranean teemed with rivals: Hungarians, Ottoman Turks and Albanians pressured Venice’s outlying settlements, while Catalan pirates and Genoese fleets

attacked its ships. Every year, Venetian fleets were despatched to criss-cross the Mediterranean and Black Sea, escorting cargoes and attacking enemy vessels. Loredan’s galley was returning from one such mission when it called at Manfredonia. Somehow, the boy was able to secure a place at one of its benches, giving his name as ‘Michalli son of Teodoro in the parish of Castello’. Michael joined Loredan’s crew at the lowest rung of the ladder: as an oarsman, one of around a hundred and fifty, poorly paid, living in the open air, sleeping at his bench, and subject to rigorous discipline and a punitive system of fines. An oarsman’s life was arduous, but not without compensations. Chief among these was free time, for if the winds blew favourably and the galley could make progress under sail, its oarsmen could pass the hours as they wanted. It seems that Michael didn’t fritter away his free time playing dice. The ranks of the ship’s junior officers included enough low-born men to give young Michael hope of stepping up from the oarsman’s bench, and one can imagine him eavesdropping on their conversations, learning the Venetian language. Each year saw a fresh set of nobles assigned to command the guard fleet as merchants from the same small pool of two hundred families bid for the right to place their cargoes in the city state’s merchant vessels. In turn, these freshly appointed admirals and captains would recruit a new set of officers and new crew every year. The hierarchy was rigid, progression competitive, and there was no job security: at the end of the year everyone was laid off and had to find new employment. The Dibner team could follow Michael’s progress through this system in a section of the notebook which is practically unique for its time, because thirty-three years after he first boarded Loredan’s ship, the middle-aged Michael set down a tidy survey of his entire career. Against each year of service he noted his rank, whether he had sailed on a merchant vessel or in the guard fleet, and his commanding officers. He mentioned the battles which he had taken part in, and the ports he had sailed to, ranging from Sluys in today’s Belgium to Tan in Romania and Alexandria in Egypt. These thirteen pages constitute Europe’s earliest surviving professional resumé. A complete biography is almost unknown for a commoner of that period. Indeed, for nearly all of Europe’s low-born, the very concept of ‘career’ would have seemed laughable; born to the land, or to a trade, you remained

tied to it for life. These pages make it clear that Michael wanted nothing more than to break this cycle, and claimed to have done so, seizing the opportunity on the Manfredonia waterfront. All this would mean little, however, if Stahl could find no corroboration of Michael’s story. Happily, he could. Detailed records of ships’ officers’ appointments were buried in a corner of the Venetian state archives, and Stahl could make out the name of Michalli da Ruoda, mentioned again and again as he moved between Venice’s military and trading fleets. These conclusively confirmed the identity of the notebook’s creator. image Since entering Venice’s service, Michael had found the time to make himself fluent in Venetian. A few lines of Rhodian Greek, transliterated into the Latin alphabet, confirm that Greek was Michael’s first language and that he had not learned to write it as a child: he seemed to have come from a humble background. He took care to write respectfully and formally throughout, strongly suggesting that he was writing for potential employers. As the Dibner team correlated the pithily formal entries with Stahl’s archival finds, they could follow Michael’s advancement. He criss-crossed the Eastern Mediterranean for four years before taking his first step up the ranks, but those years were busy enough: in October 1403 his ship was part of the Venetian force sent to Modon (Methoni in the Peloponnese), where it defeated a Genoese fleet and regained the upper hand in the rival city states’ perpetual power struggle. The following year Michael, probably still a teenager, won his first posting aboard one of the merchant vessels that were Venice’s lifeblood. Sailing west for the first time, he made for England and Flanders with a convoy of four galleys carrying cotton and luxuries such as silk and spices. Although a longer voyage in more perilous waters, this represented a step up: not only was Michael at less risk from combat, he also enjoyed portata, the right to bring a chest of cargo to sell en route. At staging points from Sicily to Southampton, the ship’s crew would pile ashore, to sell pepper, ginger, fabrics, weapons and other high-value goods from their sea chests. On the return journey they could invest their profits in local produce to take back to Venice, and would likely have made much more on these dealings than their basic pay of £12 per month.*

On their return to Venice each autumn, sailors disembarked to spend the winter in the city. Michael used this downtime to educate himself, not only learning how to read and write but also discovering his life’s surprising passion – mathematics. image ‘This is weird,’ says McGee, recalling his first encounter with the manuscript. ‘You’d never expect this from a guy who’d worked his way up from the bottom.’ The first one-hundred and eighty pages consisted of nothing but maths problems, of a remarkable sophistication. The Dibner team had to recruit a specialist, Professor Raffaela Franci, to analyse them, and she made her way through the translation with a growing respect for Michael’s skill. Venice, like Florence, had many abaco schools and freelance maths tutors, training the younger generation in the commercial arts that made the city rich. The standard syllabus, which Michael followed, presented every problem in practical terms of immediate relevance, so it did not surprise Franci that the first entries in Michael’s neat hand posed problems of profit and pricing. Four partners make a company. The first one put in 15 ducats on the first day of March. The second put in 25 ducats on the first day of May. The third put in 40 ducats on the first day of October. The fourth put in 80 ducats on the first day of November. And so they have held the company until the last day of the following February and have made a profit of 100 ducats. I ask you what each of them should have. And so on, with scenarios from the marketplace, the dice game, the lawyer’s office, the quayside, the building site. But Franci swiftly realised that Michael did not view his questions simply as practical challenges. Whether the problem was simple or complicated, he showed every step in full, usually following multiple routes to his conclusion. From the notebook’s first pages, a strong interest in arithmetic’s underlying patterns was evident. Algebra fascinated Michael, who admiringly credited its originator – ‘Alzibran, a saracen’ – before

introducing six important classes of algebraic equations. Continuing his deep dive into impractical waters, he then covered radicals – square, cube and higher-power roots – using results like a∛b equalling ∛(a3b), and posing problems like ‘if you wanted to multiply the cube root of 10 by the square root of 6’, to which most merchants would surely have answered, ‘Why would you?’ Michael the mathematician had clearly fallen in love with the field and pushed his knowledge way beyond what was necessary to advance his career. image A fondness for arithmetic and algebra: the first sections of Michael’s notebook is dominated by maths problems.

image After four years, Michael the sailor finally made his first move up the ladder, becoming one of six proderi, or senior bow oarsmen on the guard fleet ship of Marino Caravello. In this role he earned more, and was, crucially, more visible to the ship’s senior officers. Over the next decade, he made steady progress. After two years as proder he rose to the post of nochiero, a junior officer who was expected to fight in battle and not to row. Seven years later he achieved promotion to paron – something like a bosun or ship’s mate. At some point in this period he became secure enough to marry a Venetian woman, Dorotea, thereby formally gaining precious Venetian citizenship. She died, however, in 1415, leaving him with a son and possibly a daughter. By 1416, when Michael was about thirty-one, he had become a distinctive figure in Venice’s maritime community. Not only was he an immigrant, he was an overachiever, one of only a small proportion of galley oarsmen to achieve promotion into the officer classes. But in May of that year he achieved conspicuous honour in a fleet led by Pietro Loredan, the patrician whom he had first rowed for some fifteen years earlier. In putting down a sizeable Turkish fleet which had been harassing Venetian vessels off the city of Gallipoli, the Venetians won a famous victory. When the fighting was over, Loredan – whose face had been pierced by one arrow, and his left hand impaled by another – found himself, at a cost of only twelve dead, in possession of over a thousand prisoners and more enemy vessels than he knew what to do with.

Venice’s dominance of the Aegean had been restored, and Michael’s career seems to have benefited from the part he played in this triumph. His curriculum vitae records another step up in 1417: a voyage to Bruges at the rank of homo de conseio. This senior role, something like today’s second mate, included navigational responsibilities, and these were reflected in the one hundred and sixty pages of Michael’s notebook devoted to portolans. image Before the invention of the sextant and chronometer allowed sailors to locate their positions out of sight of land, the portolan (or a rutter, in English) was Europe’s most important navigational tool. A handbook of tides and directions that used waypoints on land to direct sailors out at sea, and usually used in conjunction with a compass, it allowed a navigator to avoid reefs and rocks and steer a course along the coast or across open water. Here, for example, are Michael’s instructions for approaching Sandwich, an important harbour on England’s south coast: Know when the moon is north-south, high tide. And when you are ready to enter, you will see a forest on the land between the west and the northwest. And steer for this forest keeping off the land to the left, at 2 or more arrows’ distance… you will see three bell towers, and you will steer for that forest as far as the small bell tower… And so on. Similarly detailed instructions were given for Venice, Santander and Sluys, all important harbours with tricky approaches. With a good portolan and a compass any skilled sailor could navigate safely around the entire coastline of Europe. Small wonder that, in an age before print, handwritten examples were jealously guarded. The few that survive from earlier centuries were passed down from sailor to sailor, and it is a mark of their value that they were often written on parchment – tougher than paper, particularly in wet conditions, but, as we have seen, expensive enough to make them a considerable investment. Always happy to give credit where credit is due, Michael credits one Zuan (Giovanni or John) Pires, ‘a pilot of the Flanders sea’, with the instructions in his own portolan. There was one problem, though – or, to be precise, a string of problems. Piero Falchetta, the Dibner team’s cartographer and himself a native

Venetian, checked all of the instructions against modern maps, with alarming results. Either Zuan or Michael, it transpired, had made a series of mistakes that rendered their instructions distinctly untrustworthy: far from being a profitable guide to Europe’s trade routes, Michael’s portolan was in fact a liability, misplacing rocks, getting distances wrong, and directing the user towards dangerous sandbanks. The first hundred pages or so of the notebook suggested that Michael was fascinated by accuracy, so why would he take such pains to so neatly preserve such wayward information? It was perplexing, given that, from 1418 onwards, he was occupying roles on which the preservation of precious ships and cargoes depended. Could he really have gone to sea using this rickety guide? image The notebook revealed another surprising side to Michael’s character: a fondness for drawing and painting. As well as the numerous ropework decorations, and such diagrams as he needed to illustrate mathematical solutions, it contains – nearly three hundred pages in – an extraordinary glimpse into Michael’s self-image. Quite out of context, Michael devises his own coat of arms – the coat of arms that he could never, as a commoner, sport. It takes a conventional form – shield surmounted by helm – but instead of a noble heraldic beast like the lion that supports the Loredan crest, he represents himself with a rat, clutching the bleeding corpse of a cat. Instead of genteel lilies, or the roses that appear on the Loredan shield, a pair of turnips flank the crest. Rarely has class resentment been so elegantly expressed. This impressive image was no doubt prompted by the frustration that Michael felt as he bumped into the glass ceiling imposed by Venice’s aristocracy. As a commoner, Michael could never command a fleet or load his own cargo onto one of the city’s galleys, and the most desirable of each year’s subordinate postings (armiraio and homo de conseio) were not personal appointments, but awarded by election, with as many as seventeen candidates putting themselves forward for a single role. So Michael’s record – eight wins out of forty-six appointments applied for – was very respectable, especially for a man who didn’t have the advantage of Venetian birth.

In 1431 came a turning point. In yet another battle under Pietro Loredan, this time against the Genoese in unfamiliar waters off Portofino, Michael was ferido e vasto (‘injured and broken down’). The following year, having failed to land a scribal job in the public office that regulated the olive oil trade, Michael joined the guard fleet, again under Loredan. This would be his last military voyage: henceforth, he would only sail with merchant vessels. Two years later, Michael bought the blank notebook, and started to fill it. Meanwhile, his career prospects were improving, slightly. Facing the drain of many of its most experienced, non-noble sailors for better-paid positions elsewhere, the Senate forced the investors who profited from the merchant fleets to hire more of them. Recognising that these changes gave him a new opportunity, Michael wound up the mathematics and wrote up his resumé. He added the calendrical tables, the standing orders, and the portolans – all of which would have impressed the interviewing panel, at first glance – and, in a bid to show the breadth of his learning, created twelve full-colour illustrations depicting the signs of the zodiac. These demonstrate enthusiasm more than expertise, but he must have reasoned that they would be enough for his bosses. Demanding employer though the Venetian fleet was, Michael also respected a higher power, and his unquestioning religious faith is reflected through the notebook. At the top of most pages, watching over everything he wrote, he placed Christ’s initials, flanked by a pair of crosses. A short collection of prayers to Saints Sebastian and Sava reflect the variety of Michael’s most urgent concerns: to catch fish, to bring down a fever, not to confess under torture, to repel snakes and survive their bites, to induce labour, for toothache, to staunch a wound, and – finally – to protect from drowning and harm in battle. He also devoted many pages to the calculation of the exact dates of Passover and Easter each year, a complicated calendrical procedure which would have tested his mathematical skill. But in the secular twenty-first century, the academics investigating the notebook found its most touching testament to Michael’s piety to be not written but drawn. Four hundred pages into the notebook, between a maths puzzle and an estimate of the wood needed to build a Flanders galley, sits a full-length illustration of a man carrying a child through water. Any of Michael’s contemporaries would have instantly recognised Saint Christopher carrying

the Christ Child. Uniquely among the saints, Christopher required no prayer to secure his protection. Instead, the mere sight of his image would shield the viewer from harm: just one glance at this every morning and Saint Christopher would be watching over him all day, protecting him from the hazards of travel by land or sea – and in particular, sudden death and melancholy. Which was why, when the team finally had the chance to hold the notebook in their hands, they found this page more worn than any other: well-thumbed, grubby, and softened by turning. Evidently Michael had, indeed, checked in every morning, blessing his endeavours with a sight of the saint. Finally, Michael rounded out the notebook with a long section on fitting out a ship. The impression it gives is of complete professional mastery, but when Mauro Bondioli, the Dibner team’s shipbuilding expert, examined the manuscript he became less and less impressed: as a shipbuilding manual, it was useless; as a guide to fitting out a hull, it was better, but the text was still riddled with mistakes, and the text became harder to puzzle out as the pages progressed. Drawings became sketchier, and Michael even left blanks for captions and other illustrations that he never referred to. image A paradox had emerged at the heart of the notebook. Michael had proven, with his mathematical sections, that he possessed a precise, analytical mind, that he could be patient and painstaking. Yet in the portolans, and in the shipbuilding sections, he exhibited a baffling sloppiness. These sections, surely, were the most important, if he wanted to progress in the Venetian fleets, so why did he not take them seriously? Was it that his mind was on higher things – the date of Easter in fifty years time, for instance, or the sixth root of x? Was it that he had limited access to his models, the portolan of Zuan Pires and the shipbuilding manuals in the Venice Arsenale? Was he in too much of a hurry? image Michael’s idiosyncratic Capricorn and his subversive coat of arms.

We know that Michael started work on his notebook in 1434, and that it must have taken him many long days to fill its hundreds of pages with text and illustrations. He may have completed it in time for the crewing of the

fleets in summer 1435, but it seems more likely to have taken him till the next round of appointments in January 1436. In any case, we can picture him reporting to the Collegio – the committee then in charge of recruitment – with this new notebook, leafing through the pages for the benefit of the Doge and his advisors. ‘Look,’ says Michael, ‘Here is my knowledge, my experience, my expertise, my loyalty, my piety, my trustworthiness. I will not let you down.’ With many candidates to assess, and many ships to crew, the Collegio would probably not have given the pages more than a cursory examination: the portolan and shipbuilding notes could have passed on the nod. With new notebook in hand, Michael enjoyed his most successful election in 1436, and won, for the first time, the coveted role of armiraio on the Flanders merchant fleet. A commoner could attain no higher rank in Venetian service. Michael would make eight more voyages, then in 1445, at around the age of sixty, he was granted ‘the position of the steelyard’. The steelyard was a large set of scales used to weigh merchandise, but the job seems not to have involved much work; it was how Venice pensioned off a select number of sailors who had given the city particularly noteworthy service. Michael had not yet finished with the notebook. He copied chronological calculations, portolans and navigational mathematics into another notebook which he then sold to a younger officer named Pietro di Versi, who stood in the Collegio elections each year, presumably using his copy of Michael’s work as his own calling card – he scratched Michael’s name out of it and wrote in his own over the top. And for the first time, Michael added details of his domestic life to his resumé, with a few lines to mark the deaths of his wives and son. Only when the book had become a private rather than public document did Michael record that he had married three times, and that his son Teodorino – of whom we otherwise know nothing – had died in 1422. image Stahl, by now a seasoned veteran of the Venetian archives, eventually found Michael’s will in a dusty box containing documents drafted in the 1440s by the notary Nicolò Gruato. Drafted in 1441, and amended with a codicil four years later, the will painted a picture of illness, bereavement and encroaching poverty. Michael left small sums of money – a ducat for

the poor, a ducat to the hospice – and did not bother to itemise the rest of his estate, which presumably included the notebook. He had probably already sold it to a younger mariner with ambitions of his own. One last question remained: before they could announce their discoveries to the world, the Dibner team had to decide what to call the manuscript. Although it shared features with ricordanze, and zibaldone, and the merchants’ pratica della mercatura, it was really sui generis. ‘Notebook’ didn’t do justice to such a hefty and richly illustrated compendium. But Michael himself had already supplied the answer in his own inscription, above the handwritten table of contents: In questo libro pono qui per singollo de ttutte raxion, he writes: ‘In this book I set forth one by one all kinds of instructions’. And so, The Book of Michael of Rhodes it became. This confident, unambiguous title suits the book, which expresses Michael’s interior life more honestly and completely than many autobiographies: his intellectual development, his spiritual needs, the career of which he could justly be proud. It testifies to a religious faith which was at once superstitious and painstaking. It embodies the esprit de corps which its owner felt at being part of a world-beating organisation. And if its minimal account of Michael’s domestic life – his three marriages, his children – strikes us as unusual, it may just be a reflection of a man whose priorities lay elsewhere. Taken as a whole, the notebook expresses – or embodies – Michael’s identity, his self-image, his self-consciousness, in a way which was innovative then and still startlingly immediate today. Their work completed, the Dibner team dispersed; their edition of Michael’s book – three sumptuous volumes running to one and a half thousand pages of photography and scholarship – would, after years of labour, make its way into print, winning admiring reviews. And having given up its secrets, the manuscript – frail, aged, unique – went back to its discreet owner, and back into hiding. It will likely make its next public appearance in a Sotheby’s catalogue. * One gold ducat was worth about four and a half libri or pounds. Stahl estimates that it was possible to survive in Venice on roughly one ducat a month: so a sailor’s wage represented a decent living.

CHAPTER 6 WICKED WIVES AND MOUTHS STOPPED WITH WOOL The notebook comes to England, 1372–1517 English readers first learn of Boccaccio when they study Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, six of which draw heavily on stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Chaucer’s Clerk, Franklin, Merchant, Pardoner, Reeve and Shipman all retell stories familiar to the Tuscan’s readers, and the works’ shared structure – tales told by a disparate group thrown temporarily together – is obvious. But in an age before print, how could an Englishman have come to plagiarise a collection of stories written only a few years before in the local dialect of a town a thousand miles from his own? And what can this connection tell us about the way notebooks moved outward from Tuscany, and across Europe? The answer to the first question, as so often in the notebook’s story, lies in the network of trade routes which connected Italy and England. Chaucer served Edward III as a diplomat, and in December 1372, aged about thirty, he was sent from London to Genoa as a trade envoy, charged with growing business between the two cities by agreeing a free port deal so that Genoese merchants could claim a larger share of England’s wool exports. He discharged this official mission successfully, but he also carried a secret brief, the existence of which is confirmed by his expenses claims. After concluding his official business in Genoa, Chaucer continued south to Florence, where he met with the Bardi company, the former employers of Boccaccio’s father, who had, only months before, loaned the king around seven thousand florins.* While these secret meetings progressed, Chaucer had the run of the city, diminished by the ravages of the Black Death, but still at the cutting edge of European visual and literary culture. Early writers on Chaucer speculated that the poet met both Petrarch and Boccaccio on this trip; modern scholars, more constrained by known fact, point out that Petrarch lived in distant Padua at the time, and that Chaucer seems to have been more interested in Dante. He may have been given the

Divine Comedy by his hosts, or he may have ordered a copy from one of Florence’s many cartolai, but he must have picked it up somehow, for The House of Fame, which he wrote soon after his return to London, clearly shows its influence. ‘Italian poetry utterly transformed the kind of poet that Chaucer was,’ writes Chaucer scholar Marion Turner, noting that ‘the poetry of Dante and Boccaccio became Chaucer’s principal inspiration’. Chaucer’s work was influenced from top to bottom: form, genre, technique, plot – even the decasyllabic poetic line (or iambic pentameter) that Shakespeare would later adopt. The Tuscan dialect, fast becoming Italy’s literary language, also gave him a model to which his own Londoner’s speech could aspire. Always ambitious, Chaucer cannot have failed to note how highly regarded the leading Tuscan authors were. Petrarch had become a kind of poetic royalty, honoured in the courts of Rome, Venice and Naples, and Boccaccio, as one of Chaucer’s biographers writes, had become Florence’s ‘cultural spokesman’. He must also have seen how plentiful, and cheap, personal notebooks were. Every meeting would have been attended by clerks referring to detailed ledgers, and if invited into a private home he would have seen zibaldoni, ricordanzi and libri di famiglia. And he must have envied the sheer number of books that even less wealthy Florentines owned. From the long shadow they cast over his work, we can assume that the months he spent in Florence in 1372 and 1373 made a profound impact on the young poet-diplomat. Chaucer’s diplomatic successes paid off on his return: the king (who profited handsomely from the new deal with the Genoese) granted him the unusual benefit of a gallon of wine a day, which John of Gaunt (Edward’s son and Chaucer’s patron) topped up with an annual pension of ten pounds. His next role gave him oversight of London’s exports and imports, for which his Italian connections, fluency in multiple languages and diplomatic skills made him a natural fit. He held the position for twelve years, only travelling occasionally, and using this period of stability to settle into a literary routine which – despite his many professional responsibilities – saw him write more than ever before. In The House of Fame, started soon after his return from Italy, he describes the perversity of leaving the ledgers in his office only to bury himself in volumes back home:

For when thy labour doon al ys,

For when your labour’s all done

And hast mad alle thy rekenynges, And you’ve made all the accounts In stede of reste and newe thynges Instead of rest and other things Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon, You go straight home And, also domb as any stoon,

And as dumb as any stone

Thou sittest at another book

Sit at another book

Tyl fully daswed ys thy look.

Till your eyes are fully dazed

In this verse, ‘another book’ could stand either for a manuscript copy that the author is reading, or the notebook he’s writing in, although the parallel between Chaucer’s work in the office and his labours at home suggests the latter. If those books were made of paper (both paper and parchment were used in English ledgers at the time) then it was probably Italian; the sheets would have arrived in London in the same ships that took away bales of English wool and returned bolts of fine Tuscan cloth. Chaucer’s poetic career in the years after 1372 shows how closely the movement of vernacular literary ideas tracked the Italians’ international trading networks, and his work embodies that trade in ideas, frequently using accountancy – a young, exciting discipline – as a metaphor for moral reckoning. Noting how important those ideas were to Chaucer, his biographer Marion Turner goes so far as to call him ‘the poet of the counting house’.

Chaucer returned to Italy in 1378, on a diplomatic mission to the Duchy of Milan, and was not impressed by the gossipy, envious, court that he found there. But the tyrannical Visconti rulers were unusually generous with the books in their substantial libraries, and Chaucer obtained several manuscripts that would strongly influence his later writing. On his return, he started work on The Canterbury Tales. In ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, the narrator’s much younger fifth husband, Jankyn, keeps a zibaldone (though sadly Chaucer doesn’t use the Tuscan term*), a personal selection of classical and religious tales of ‘wikked wyves’, all with a licentious or misogynist angle, which he loves to read from. He hadde a book that gladly, night and day, For his desport he wolde rede always. Driven to distraction by the misogyny of his selection, The Wife rips three pages out and punches his head: he retaliates by hitting her back. Some modern readers interpret this violent scene as evidence that zibaldoni were already well known in England, although I would argue the opposite. Firstly, if such notebooks or personal anthologies were common, Chaucer wouldn’t have felt the need to explain Jankyn’s habit in detail, as he does; secondly, if many of Chaucer’s contemporaries had kept such notebooks, more would have survived than the scattered handful which do.* In Chaucer’s telling, Alisoun and Jankyn mend their differences after the fight – by throwing his zibaldone onto the fire. image The Wife of Bath, pictured in the Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, c.1405–10. How did Chaucer’s contact with Italian literary culture, and its notebooks, affect how he wrote? He never tells us directly, but we can make some educated guesses. Firstly, he must have continued the Italian practice of using a zibaldone as a storehouse for ideas, references, quotations and whatever random thoughts seemed useful. Secondly, like Petrarch, Chaucer benefited from being able to write multiple drafts: in another poem, he writes of doing so before handing a final version over to his scribe Adam

for the neat copy onto tough, prestigious parchment, and complains of the errors that Adam introduces through his ‘necglygence’. image So Chaucer himself used notebooks, wrote about them, and knew the different ways in which they could be used, but most of his compatriots, far from the Italian paper mills and the well-stocked cartolai of the Via dei Librai, didn’t.* How did this affect his readership? A simple numerical comparison tells the story: fifty-five manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales survive from its first century (along with some thirty-eight short fragments); the equivalent figure for Dante’s Divine Comedy is more than eight hundred (plus too many excerpts for anyone to keep track of). The picture is similar for Chaucer’s contemporaries – William Langland’s Piers Plowman exists in fifty copies, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis in fortynine, and reflects a wider European situation. There were, several reasons for this dramatic disparity, including the public readings that took place in Florence’s piazzas, but one important one must have been that excerpts of Dante’s work were widespread in zibaldoni – for few readers, however well-off, would commission a scribal copy of a 14,000-line poem if they didn’t already know they would enjoy it. In England, literary dissemination, regardless of the quality of the work, took more time to reach fewer people. There was a similar pattern across the rest of Europe: in Spanish, German and Dutch, few medieval works exist in more than forty contemporary copies, and most come down to us in significantly fewer. Even in Paris, where Charles V’s bibliomania and the court’s obsession with poetry guaranteed business for local scribes and booksellers, readerships were modest. Christine de Pizan, the Franco-Venetian court poet (and the first European woman to earn a living as a writer) enjoyed great prominence around the turn of the fifteenth century, but many of her works survive in only a handful of high-end presentation copies. Le Roman de la Rose, one of the continent’s most popular poems for centuries, exists in fewer than one hundred. Even allowing for the loss of most of the copies that were ever made, the picture is clear. No European literary language would catch up with Tuscan before the invention of print. image

Londoners never adopted personal zibaldoni to the extent that their Florentine contemporaries did, but one rare survival is similar in tone. John Colyns, a London mercer (cloth merchant) left behind a notebook, compiled around 1517, that opens a vivid window on life in the capital. Its 332 folio pages are packed with all manner of things that piqued Colyns’ interest: poems, riddles, historical chronicles, quotations, the deeds of kings and princes, the legal notes, instructions for applying gold leaf to parchment, lists of the city’s churches, weather forecasts (‘When the prime falls on a Monday, in that Moon you shall have wetness’), and so on. Just like a zibaldone, Colyns’s book allowed him to express his literary preferences, create an anthology of favourite texts, and proudly mark his place in a thriving, intensely hierarchical society. But it also contains one selection that Colyns would only have shared with his most trusted friends and family: an eighty-line complaint in verse about the waxing power of the king’s chief advisor, Cardinal Wolsey. ‘To see a Churl, a Butcher’s Cur,’ it reads (referring to Wolsey’s humble parentage) ‘rein and rule in such honour’ is too much for an honest Englishman to bear. ‘He blinds your Grace with subtle reason / and undermines you by high treason’, the poet warns the king, then accuses Wolsey of impoverishing the land and silencing the nobility, ‘stopping their mouths with wool’. The public discourse is stifled, he complains, and the poet ‘dare not write under my name for fear’, despite his many protestations of loyalty to the Crown. So Colyns’s notebook didn’t only collect useful information, favourite verse and markers of social status: it was also the place where he went to dissent. image Christine de Pizan, Europe’s first professional woman writer, reading to a group of men – an image created in her Paris scriptorium. Keen notebook-keeping like Colyns’s was not unknown in London, and a few examples of similar books from his period have come down to us, but the practice never caught on as it had in Italy. One can point to many reasons why: lower literacy rates; less innovative commerce; a more stratified society; more expensive paper; and, away from the court, quieter

intellectual networks. There would be few English Jankyns to provoke their wives with indecent reading habits – and there would also be fewer readers to enjoy ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’. Within a century of Colyns’s death London would become a hotbed of innovative notebook-keepers, but the habit arrived slowly, with independently minded individuals using notebooks in personal ways that did not necessarily reflect any wider shifts in English culture. This reflects how personal notebooks spread across Europe in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – not with an overnight surge, but with occasional introspective characters who used notebooks every day at work, looking at a blank sheet of an evening and wondering how they could fill it. * The meetings were presumably to offer the Bardi, who had previously been badly burned by the English exchequer, extra reassurance that their loans would be repaid. * It would have saved much trouble if he had introduced the word to English, which today uses ‘common-place book’, anachronistically and inaccurately, to refer to these and similar personal compilations. * Only four manuscripts contemporary to Chaucer seem to fit the bill: BL MS Harley 4011, Dublin Trinity College MS 432 and MS 516, and Yale Beinecke MS 163. All are personal compilations, but all are neater and more formal than the average Florentine zibaldone, and are written on parchment, not paper. They make a poor show compared to the hundreds of Tuscan equivalents that survive. * At this point parchment remained much more common than paper across the British Isles for all of the uses which in Italy had long adopted the newer material. One statistical illustration: in Cambridge University Library, there are only six English manuscripts on paper dating to the fourteenth century, Chaucer’s lifetime, but well over 100 from the fifteenth.

CHAPTER 7 THE LONG LIFE OF LHD 244 Singing in harmony, Bologna c.1450–1600 The story of Boccaccio’s influence on Chaucer depicts a northbound intellectual traffic, but ideas could flow south, too. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Titian all enthusiastically adopted the oil painting techniques which Dutch artists first mastered, and a tiny notebook, now in a Melbourne library, gives us a unique insight into a similar cultural traffic. It finds itself there thanks to Louise Hanson-Dyer, an Australian-born enthusiast for medieval manuscripts and early printed books, who built up an extraordinary collection while living in France and England in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the humblest items, known by its shelf mark LHD 244, tells a remarkable story. A tiny and battered notebook, just under A6 in size and with 118 paper pages, it was begun in Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century and remained in use for more than a century, annotated by many different hands. The notebook is remarkably made. It includes at least seven different kinds of paper, bound in irregular gatherings ranging from four pages to twentyfour. It shows signs of heavy use, with worn pages, a couple of pasted fixes where pages have come loose, and ancient pagination showing that fortyeight pages have been lost along the way. Intriguingly, two facing pages were at some point glued together, presumably to hide what was written on them. Other pages have been trimmed down to fit in the covers, and holes left by bookbinders suggest that the pages have been stitched together in different configurations at least three times. This mixture of materials is matched by an idiosyncratic variety of scripts, which, depending on how you look at it, make the notebook either a palaeographer’s dream or a nightmare. Gothic textualis semi-rotunda and gothic rotunda, heavy blackletter styles that we associate with illuminated manuscripts on parchment, sit alongside cursive chancery and italic scripts – business-like styles that we more often see on paper. No fewer than ten separate writers have been identified – although only one recorded his surname, Belvederiis. Three others confused matters further by switching

between two styles of script and one of the later writers managed to combine letter forms from all the above styles into his own, highly individual hybrid, writing on pages that were already over a century old when he turned to them and making frequent notes in the margins of his precursor’s work. Battered, incoherent-looking and humble it may be, but LHD 244 is a treasure trove for musicologists. It contains a mixture of musical treatises, copied in full, and notes from other sources: in total, parts of about forty texts, mostly dealing with musical theory, in Latin and Italian. It opens with a forty-page introduction to counterpoint (the art of harmony, then in its infancy), then covers the notation of melody and rhythm using methods that foreshadow today’s system of quavers, crotchets and minims. Passages include an introduction to plainchant, the church’s oldest and simplest music, tips for adding notes above a bass line, and a setting of one of the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah. Occasional pictures and diagrams have practical applications: a striking red and black line drawing of a hand covered with musical symbols is an example of a ‘guidonian hand’, a visualisation that helps unconfident sight-readers, while a schematic diagram shows the pipes of an organ above a familiar black-and-white keyboard. An excerpt of the church laws collated by Pope Boniface VIII reminds the owner of their rights as a member of the church, and other excerpts, including a list of the fasts of Saint Francis and a collection of antiphons (musical settings of psalms) dedicated to Franciscan saints, suggest that the book was owned by friars of that order. Dialect and spelling suggest an origin nearer to Bologna than Florence. image The composers of LHD 244 used drawings to communicate musical ideas. Note that, like all composers before the late eighteenth century, they had to draw their own staves by hand. In its useful informality LHD 244 resembles a zibaldone, but the details of its making suggest something slightly more complicated and considered than a purely recreational anthology. Analysis of the paper, the handwriting and the music, combined with known dates for such texts as existed elsewhere, showed that the book had been started during the second half of

the fifteenth century. But it went on to have an exceptionally long working life, for fresh additions, comments and corrections were still being made as late as 1600. Jason Stoessel, the musicologist who first studied the notebook in detail, concluded that LHD 244 had been a teacher’s handbook to the fundamentals of musical theory, passed down from one owner to the next in a Franciscan foundation. With its assistance, generations of friars had learned how to play and sing. image When Stoessel and his colleagues came to examine the texts in detail, and work out what kind of music the friars had been making, they discovered that LHD 244 bore witness to great changes over the period of its use. It documents the English harmonic innovation known as the gymel, in which two or more voices singing a part in unison suddenly split into polyphonic harmony, producing rich, textured chords before returning to the melody in unison. Gymel demands considerable skill, especially when improvised, as it often was, and English composers and musicians took decades to refine the form over the fourteenth century before it spread to the continent in the fifteenth. From the other end of the notebook’s life, two lists give thirty-three pieces of detailed advice – avvertimenti – for harmonising above a bass line. These tips reflect a new development in music of the early seventeenth century, the basso continuo style, in which one instrument plays a predetermined foundation – supplied by the manuscript – while another adds harmonic colour, creating chords that might be suggested by the sheet music but were often left to the musician to create on the fly. LHD 244’s tips, aimed at players more than composers, show how to add appropriate notes to the bass as it moves up or down the scale, while avoiding accidentally landing on the tritone, an interval so abrasive that it was named diabolus in musica (‘the devil in music’).* When we think of improvisors today, we picture jazz players: LHD 244 shows how church musicians, and organists in particular, learned how to think on the hoof, mastering forms that became ever more sophisticated.†

Many manuscripts of medieval church music survive, some of them spectacular oversized codices with large letters and notation that an entire choir could read from the same lectern. At the other end of the spectrum, Stoessel pointed me to the Liederbuch der Anna von Köln (Songbook of Anna of Cologne), a fascinating little notebook, started around the same time as LHD 244, in which nuns at a convent on the Rhine collected songs in Latin, German and Dutch. At the end of the period, as LHD 244’s owners were mastering basso continuo, John Baldwin of Windsor collected hundreds of motets in a large ledger, and we also have many formal copies of musical treatises. Many zibaldoni collect the words to popular Tuscan songs. But LHD 244 is unique in how it captures an art form evolving over a long period, and shows how it was transmitted from musician to musician. This formal study of musical theory shows us how classical music evolved out of liturgical chanting and towards the harmonic sophistication that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven would master – and, for that matter, Nina Simone and John Coltrane. LHD 244’s terrible condition and the layers of annotation prove that it was a working notebook. Unlike business ledgers, which were closed at the end of the year and only retained for reference, or zibaldoni, which were kept carefully at home, this notebook stayed in constant use for decades, its owners referring daily to its contents as they taught their pupils or created their own compositions. Pages and gatherings fell out, or fell apart; two pages were pasted together when their contents fell out of doctrinal favour and the notebook needed repair and rebinding more than once. Its survival in any condition at all is near miraculous, which in turn throws up a question. Why did none of LHD 244’s many owners ever make a clean copy in a new notebook? For such a small codex, the cost would have been minimal, and the scribal task – in an era when epic poems were routinely copied out in full – easily manageable. Why did they carry on referring to this tiny book, carefully stitching it back together when it fell apart, and constantly adding new material as they came across it? Sentimentality may provide the answer. This tatty, scarred, yet practical notebook must have acquired value as it passed from hand to hand, accreting knowledge and nuance as it went. The constant companion of a succession of childless Franciscans, living and dying together in the

community of their order, perhaps it came to embody the bonds that grew between teachers and students as they worked together to make music to the glory of God. Perhaps it became, in its own way, a relic. If LHD 244’s custodians were indeed residents of Bologna, they must have played and sung for a prominent visitor to the city, a well-travelled fellow Franciscan who taught at the city’s university in 1501. He too understood the value of a notebook, and would play a role in the traffic of ideas around Europe. His specialism was not music, however, but maths. * To conjure the devil, play a C and an F# together, or listen to the intro to Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’. † Gregorian chant, monophonic and lacking dramatic contrast in pitch or volume, had been around for a thousand years. Before the arrival of musical notation around the first millennium, the entire repertoire had to be memorised and a musical apprenticeship lasted ten years: when notation on the stave was standardised by Guido of Arezzo, this came down to a year or two, and church music became significantly more interesting.

CHAPTER 8

‘ALAS, THIS WILL NEVER GET ANYTHING DONE…’ Two notebook-keepers, Italy 1455–1519 The practical skills and conceptual innovations of bookkeeping and accountancy did not spread overnight across the marketplaces of Europe. Merchants applied them in different ways according to their needs, and how firmly they had grasped their principles, and only a minority applied them as rigorously as Amatino Manucci had. Further afield, the picture was even patchier. Bookkeeping’s counter-intuitive ideas and routines demanded specialist training, hence the spread of abaco schools across Italy, and the steady stream of German merchants’ sons who arrived to study in Venice, staying at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Canal. Their contemporaries in Bruges, London and Antwerp did not have access to this educational network, and although wool suppliers and landowners had some idea of what happened on the pages of the ledgers of their Italian customers, few mastered the art of copying transactions from ledger to ledger, simultaneously recording them as both debits and credits, and balancing them in sophisticated ways. When this expertise finally came within their reach, they did not have a merchant or banker to thank, but a nomadic Franciscan friar. Luca Pacioli did not hail from a wealthy or prominent family, but he had two gifts with which he left a considerable stamp on history: for mathematics and for networking. After receiving a conventional abaco education in his small home town of Sansepolcro, midway between Fabriano and Florence, Pacioli moved to Venice in 1464. Still only a teenager, he continued his studies at a school on the Rialto and tutored the three sons of Antonio Rompiasi, a fur merchant, teaching commercial

arithmetic with practical problems like those that Michael of Rhodes had collected a century before. Venice had become one of Europe’s largest cities and one of the most dynamic states in the world, the riches earned by its merchant galleys paying for the churches and palaces that we see today, but the city was also an industrial and intellectual hub, and while Pacioli was tutoring the Rompiasi boys it became home to its first printing press. In 1468 two German brothers from Mainz – where Gutenberg had produced his bible some thirteen years earlier – settled in the city, and one year later started to print books. Their first, an edition of Cicero’s letters, reprinted rapidly, and twelve printers were active in Venice within five years, producing beautiful editions of religious tomes and the classics. Pacioli must have watched this development with curiosity, even if he himself had written nothing worth publishing – and certainly could not afford to buy a printed book himself. Leaving the Rompiasi in 1470, Pacioli moved to Rome, striking up a friendship with Leon Battista Alberti, who, as artist-architectcryptographer-philosopher-poet-athlete, was perhaps the most Renaissance of all Renaissance men.* Forty-three years older than Pacioli, he had worked out the mathematics that underpinned perspective some thirty years before, completing his book De Pictura (‘On Painting’) in 1435. Now, as a secretary in the Papal Chancery, he mentored the younger man, giving him access to the highest ranks of the church (including two successive popes), and, crucially, opening the Vatican’s ever-growing library to him. When Alberti died in 1472, Pacioli went back on the road. He became a Franciscan friar, his Vatican connections securing a special dispensation that released him from the order’s usual obligations of poverty. He didn’t settle in a monastery either; instead, protected by his clerical status, Pacioli was free to wander between Italy’s perpetually bickering states, and spent the next twenty years travelling, studying and teaching, ranging between Rome, Zadar, Perugia, Naples and Urbino, where he taught the city’s young duke. At one point he was forced to move on, when in 1491 he was forbidden from teaching young men in Sansepolcro, presumably for some kind of sexual impropriety. The peripatetic lifestyle helped his research; on his journeys he sought out mathematicians to learn from, and combed monastery libraries for rare manuscripts. When, in early 1494, he returned to Venice, he carried a substantial manuscript in his luggage.

The city was ready for him. Although that initial flurry of luxurious editions of classical works had resulted in a flurry of bankruptcies (nine of those first twelve print shops had gone bust), the nascent publishing industry had bounced back, taking advantage of cheap local paper and discovering a more reliable market in educational books and instructional manuals. Skilled French and German printers had flooded into the city while Pacioli was away, and something like two hundred were in business. Now well connected, Fra Luca found both a patron and a publisher. Securing finance from Marco Sanudo, a scion of one of Venice’s most distinguished noble families, and with a strong interest in mathematics, he passed his huge manuscript to Paganino de Paganini, who printed the book. The master printer, lacking specialist mathematical knowledge, missed plenty of typos, but it scarcely mattered. His year of labour had momentous results. An ambitious synthesis of all the mathematical knowledge he could find, Pacioli’s Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita is a baggy monster of a book. Six hundred and fifteen pages long, nearly half a million words, full folio in size, closely printed on fine paper, it comprehensively sums up the state of European mathematical knowledge, and was intended for a wide audience – Fra Luca wrote informally, in Tuscan, not Latin, making it accessible to anyone with a basic education. The book combines a general treatise on theoretical and practical arithmetic – including the Liber Abaci of the then little-known Fibonacci, which Pacioli had discovered on a monastery bookshelf – with an introduction to algebra, currency conversions, multiplication tables, weights and measures of the Italian states, a summary of Euclidean geometry, and accounts of Archimedes, Euclid and Piero della Francesca. And buried deep inside, Book ix of the Summa presents a concise and surprisingly readable course in double-entry bookkeeping, spelling out exactly how a business should be run – and why the Florentine-Venetian system of double entry was the best way to do it. ‘Without double entry, businessmen would not sleep easily at night’, he writes. ‘Their minds would keep them awake with worry.’ To prevent such sleepless nights, Fra Luca’s lucid instructions, polished over the decades he had spent teaching commercial arithmetic, make the principles and the practices of double-entry bookkeeping absolutely clear. He explains how to use arabic numerals, create a profit and loss account, draft a financial statement, balance the books at year end, and so on.

Amatino Manucci would have felt perfectly at home, and would have appreciated the clarity afforded by Pacioli’s adoption of ‘Venetian’ credit and debit columns, a simple trick of layout which makes it easier to visualise the two sides of the equation, and which had arrived since Manucci’s time. Such techniques had kept Italian business humming for two hundred years, driving multinational companies like the Bardi and Medici and sustaining extensive Genoese, Venetian and Florentine trading networks, but Pacioli now expanded the range of their relevance. He showed how bookkeeping could be used to smooth your dealings with governmental authorities (‘civil servants mean well, but they lack experience’), adjust taxes, define partnerships, manage expenses (‘lost wagers’ should be accounted as ‘extraordinary items’), run a separate business on the side, account for a sales trip, create statements, balance the books and close them at the end of the financial year. In Pacioli’s own words: All commercial occurrences of problems and rules, that is by hundredweights, thousands, pounds, ounces, investments, sales, profits, losses, journeys or transportation of goods, weights, measures, and money from place to place. And calculation of prices, with limitations of profit, loss, tares, gifts, uses, import and export duties in various places, taxes on sales made through brokers, carriage, fares, stabling, and whatever other exactions there may be, such as hiring, rents, household salaries, agents’ fees, and workman’s wages. Appreciation, depreciation, gold silver, copper, lightness and heaviness of all weights, superfluity and scarcity of all measures, lengths, widths, heights, and thicknesses, according to the commercial custom. He supplemented the commercial arithmetic with instruction in good practice in letter-writing, record-keeping, filing – and even that staple of the workplace notebook, the things-to-do list. In short: Book ix of the Summa was the nearest thing to an MBA textbook that the fifteenth century had to offer. And one of the first lessons that its aspirational readers digested was that every business needed at least four blank books – the memoriale, or day book, the giornale, or journal, the quaderno, or general ledger, and a book for correspondence – and maybe even a fifth, the squartofoglia, or

waste book. These had to be properly kept to avoid ‘great trouble and confusion’. Your fortune depended on your notebooks and on how well you used them. Some readers wanted this business book, while others wanted the pure mathematics and geometry, and together these readerships seized on Pacioli’s tome. Paganini sold out the book’s higher-than-average print run of two thousand copies, and – unusually – Pacioli was granted copyright in the work by the Venetian authorities, protecting his work from piracy. He gave public lectures and, in a telling sign that his status had shifted significantly upward, had his portrait painted by Jacopo de’ Barbari, who showed the friar in the act of explaining Euclid’s geometry to a handsome red-headed student. Fra Luca had become Maestro Luca, and Paganini, profiting handsomely from his labours, would reprint the book twice in the following decade. Pacioli’s remarkable achievements in collecting and disseminating the mathematical knowledge of his day make him one of the most important figures in Europe’s intellectual history, despite the fact that he had no significant ideas of his own. He would perhaps be better known today, and more widely celebrated, if he had not been overshadowed by the illustrious company he kept. For in 1496 one of his readers, a fellow Tuscan who had spent 119 lire* on a copy of the Summa, recommended that his patron, Ludovico Sforza, summon Pacioli from Venice to Milan. Pacioli, no doubt happy to have acquired such an illustrious connection, made the journey west, and one of the most stimulating intellectual relationships of history began. For Pacioli’s reader, in whose company he would spend most of the following decade, was Leonardo da Vinci.

Jacopo de’ Barbari’s Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli teaching in Venice. The man behind him is sometimes identified as the artist Albrecht Dürer.

The two men couldn’t have looked more different: Leonardo, with long face, beard and hair, usually dressed in flamboyant pinks and purples from hat to stockings, and Pacioli in austere robes framing a slightly doughy face and tonsured hair. And unlike Pacioli, Leonardo was rarely alone, keeping a busy household of several assistants and a kleptomaniac teenager named Salaí. But those differences aside, the two men, five years apart in age (Leonardo the younger) had much in common. Both had grown up in unremarkable families in small towns in Florence’s orbit; both had a restless streak; both combined a wide-ranging curiosity with a particular fascination

with geometry; both enjoyed games, magic tricks and mathematical puzzles; and both had survived scrapes with authority, occasioned, we now assume, by their homosexuality. Leonardo, a close reader of the work of Alberti, must have been intrigued by Pacioli’s earlier intimacy with the Roman polymath; and Pacioli was very likely bowled over – as most people were – by the charming and gregarious star who shone at the heart of the Sforza court. Trade was of the very few phenomena never to interest Leonardo, and we know from a things-to-do list that he wanted to learn ‘multiplication from the [square] root from Maestro Luca’, not bookkeeping. He had already worked through the Summa’s sections on multiples, fractions and magic squares. Unlike Pacioli’s other readers, Leonardo did not need to be told to keep a notebook; he carried one wherever he went, and had filled stacks of them already. Before looking into them, we should ask where that regular habit came from. From his earliest days, Leonardo lived among people employing blank books in useful and creative ways. Growing up in the small town of Vinci, the boy received a basic abaco school education in commercial arithmetic, and learned the importance of conscientious bookkeeping. His father (who lived and worked in Florence) and grandfather (with whom the illegitimate Leonardo lived), both notaries, used small notebooks for drafting deeds and contracts, and kept household accounts in libri di segreti. Sadly, we don’t have a zibaldone from either household, but this was their Florentine heyday and Leonardo certainly knew all about them, for as a teenager he had intimate ties to the local economy of zibaldoni. The successful artist to whom he was apprenticed in Florence, Andrea del Verrocchio, ran a bookmaking workshop out of his house on Via Ghibellina, just off the street of bookshops, where the cartolai clustered. Here, Verrocchio – whose main business was creating sculpture for the Medici – also arranged the production of zibaldoni to order. At least three survive, identifiable by close similarities in the selection of works and by the illustrations (which are not of a high standard and certainly have nothing to do with Leonardo’s hand). In one of them, the first owner proudly records its origin and price: ‘This whole book is paid for: it cost 10 lire.’ There must have been other blank books to hand: Verrocchio’s own sketchbooks and model books for his employees and apprentices to refer to. So it should not come as a surprise that Leonardo started keeping his own notebooks.

But their sheer scale, scope and quality sets them apart. Of the thousands of Florentines who kept zibaldoni, of all the Italian artists or engineers who kept sketchbooks, only one did with them what Leonardo did. In order to understand them better, I spoke to Professor Martin Kemp, one of the leading authorities on Leonardo, who has closely studied them for the past fifty years. ‘There isn’t really a parallel,’ he says, when I ask if we can see Leonardo’s in a wider context of contemporary notebooks. ‘The closest thing you have are the engineering notebooks and treatises from Florence, Siena and Germany, but the pages look very different.’ Nor do the books fit in with zibaldoni like Ghiberti’s or Rucellai’s, or to artists’ model books like Jacopo Bellini’s. ‘They were peculiar things,’ concludes Kemp ‘A contemporary wouldn’t make head or tail of them.’ So when Pacioli saw Leonardo’s notebooks in late 1496, he must have been as surprised as we are today, whether we catch rare glimpses of them in dimly -lit display cases or click through the marvellous digitised versions which we are now lucky enough to have access to. He would have been impressed first by their sheer bulk. Over six thousand leaves (which is to say, thirteen thousand pages) survive, and experts estimate that this represents about a quarter of the original total. This implies that Leonardo filled his notebooks at the rate of about a thousand pages a year, all obsessively covered with drawings, diagrams and idiosyncratic mirror handwriting. ‘I worked out at one point that he must have written about fifty academic-length books, if you put them all together,’ says Kemp. ‘He was never at rest.’ Leonardo, like a Florentine bookkeeper, kept different formats of notebook for different purposes. They vary enormously, from big, formal folios to the little pocket books which he kept on his belt, ready for whatever thought or observation sprang to mind. When compiling a more considered treatise, Leonardo collected gatherings of folded sheets, binding them together so that notes on one subject were in one place. He must have spent hours a day writing and drawing in his notebooks, a habit that Pacioli cannot have missed. What did he see over Leonardo’s shoulder? Obsessive repetition and variation: when Leonardo developed an interest, he would gnaw away at it for years whether it seemed useful or not. So Pacioli might have seen two hundred pictures of convex mirrors; thousands of geometrical diagrams; five hundred illustrations of flying machines, insects, and birds; a hundred-odd plans for devices that could

divert, lift or pump water. This persistence was one of Leonardo’s most vital attributes, and it could be playful too – how else to explain the scores of sketches of old men with distinctive ‘nutcracker’ profiles, their chins approaching their noses, who pop up at regular intervals? These seem to have been recreational drawings, Leonardo having fun on the page.

Leonardo knew that the best way to look at something analytically is to draw it. Water fascinated him, so he drew thousands of waves, whirlpools, eddies, bubbles, rivulets, currents and vortices. So did the human body. He measured more than forty living men to record their proportions; opening thirty or so cadavers, he drew skeletons, vertebrae, hand and feet bones. He layered muscles and tendons, the better to understand their sophisticated interactions and pictured the skull in cutaway, the eye in its socket, the foetus in the womb. He analysed the flow of blood around the heart, making the world’s first post-mortem diagnosis of arteriosclerosis, and worked out how the aortic valve manages the turbulence of rushing blood. He squinted at the minuscule muscles of the lips and tongue, and the even tinier fovea, at the back of the eyeball. One anatomical treatise alone consists of two hundred and forty virtuosic drawings and thirteen thousand words, and he covered much of the same ground with horses too. He conducted a detailed study of the moon’s surface, and a description of the way light bounced off it. He analysed colour, carefully recording the way leaves change in tone as the sun moves, and describing how landscapes fade into the pale distance.

In the Codex Trivulzanus, Leonardo listed prestigious Latinate words. The playful ‘nutcracker’ profile is a recurring image in his notebooks.

This habit of drawing engaged one of his most important analytical tools: analogy. Drawing from nature in detail forces the artist to understand both underlying structure and surface detail, and this close examination led Leonardo to make surprising connections, noting the resemblances between the curls of hair and the movement of water, a sprouting seed and the vessels around the human heart, ropes and levers and tendons and bones. These connections would prove distracting – ‘lateral thinking at a pathological level’, as Kemp puts it – but the result was that ‘he could always see further possibilities’. But Pacioli would have seen words as well as lines, for Leonardo wrote compulsively too: most of his drawings are accompanied by some kind of text, written left-handed and right-to-left in the unmistakable script which he used to avoid smudges. ‘They’re difficult to read, not so much because they’re back to front, it’s just an absolutely horrible late-medieval hand,’ Kemp says. ‘How someone could have such wonderful control of the pen and such God-awful handwriting I never understood.’ Leonardo turned visual observation into verbal expression: in one eight-page section of a notebook, he lists 730 observations on the ways in which water moves, and 67 words to describe them. He collected travellers’ tales, using conversations with merchants to fabricate a convincing tale of a journey round the Levant. He made notes of what he learned from experts, and from books that he read. Pacioli might have come across copyings from his own Summa alongside Alberti’s De Pictura, and Leonardo owned and annotated the treatise on architecture by Francesco di Giorgio. And some staples of zibaldone crept in, including excerpts from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Pacioli would immediately have understood that Leonardo was externalising, putting his thoughts down on paper the better to manipulate them. But here he could watch it elevated to an altogether higher level. For once Leonardo had made his observations he would start the imaginative, creative work which dazzles us to this day. His designs could address the most mundane of his employers’ needs: canals, locks, mills and moats, and the earth-moving machines, dredging machines and diggers necessary to build them; pumps, pipes, valves, siphons, and fountains; and lifts, hoists, presses, furnaces, grinders and mills. He designed cannon to hurl metal across the battlefield – which were not made – and cannon for the stage – which threw fireworks, and were.

Letting his imagination play without constraint, he designed twelve flying machines, and compiled twenty-eight pages of perpetual motion devices, before concluding that – thanks to friction – none would work. Kemp describes much of this work as ‘visual boasting’, meant to impress potential employers without necessarily being practical.

Spring-driven mechanisms in the Codex Atlanticus.

Leonardo’s skill at drawing reflected the quality of the artistic training he had received in Verrocchio’s studio, but his scientific observations allowed him to outdo his precursors just as Giotto had outdone his. Comparing what was in the notebooks to Leonardo’s public commissions, Pacioli would immediately have understood how the paintings expressed the scientific, mathematical and anatomical knowledge that their creator had acquired. When they first met, Leonardo was painting the Last Supper. When they parted, about twelve years later, he had started the Mona Lisa, and in the meantime had worked on, if not completed, a dozen other major works, including a colossal sculpture of a horse (requiring something like 80 tons of bronze), numerous decorative murals for the Sforza castle, and paintings that evoke wonder to this day. La Belle Ferronière, The Virgin and Child with St Anne, the Madonna of the Yarnwinder – every picture displays a host of connections to the notebooks. The fall of light on skin, the growth of a flower through rock, the point of a finger, the curl of a hair, the drop of a cloak, the turbulence of a cataract: every detail, every effect can be matched to studies on the notebooks’ pages. Then there were the more mundane notes that arose from the business of simply being Leonardo: lists of items and clothes for travel with, tools to paint with, and vocabulary from Latin, a language he never mastered. He kept track of his employees’ wages, and the costs incurred by his mother’s funeral. He drew a family tree, possibly to illustrate the disputatious relations that developed between him and his half-siblings. He drafted letters to his friends and patrons, speeches for debates held at court, and a rant about the unruly penis that reads like a script for late-night stand-up. He listed his own unfinished works, the areas that he intended to study, the experts he wanted to consult. In the same list that mentioned Maestro Luca, he planned to ‘draw Milan’ and ‘learn how to repair a lock, canal and mill’. But there is one intriguing absence. ‘One of the most extraordinary things about the notebooks is that there’s almost nothing personal in them’, remarks Kemp. The lack of introspection makes a dramatic contrast with Leonardo’s usually unstoppable inquisitiveness, and even applies at the most emotional moments – Kemp points to the way Leonardo records the death of his father as if he’s a notary writing it up in the libro dei morti. On other occasions – when Salai is causing trouble, or the authorities are

interfering with his post-mortem dissections – Leonardo does betray some irritation, but these are minor and few and far between. More commonly, he expresses annoyance at his own distractibility or perceived lack of progress. ‘Alas, this will never get anything done’ is a theme that recurs in several notebooks. Asked about the experience of looking at the ‘spine-tingling’ notebooks, Kemp employs strikingly kinetic language. ‘As material objects, they have an extraordinary intensity, little notebooks with this pretty tiny writing, done at great speed, great urgency, a kind of desperate intensity, when something else crowds in he has to jot it down, he goes back to the original thought, he gets diverted, he comes back to that page and will write some more… it’s a very manic business.’ And in the midst of this flow of ideas, finer drawings with ‘a visual intensity and fineness of observation, from diagrammatic things to naturalistic images’ provide dramatic contrast.

Leonardo and Pacioli seem to have become close friends; certainly, they settled into an intense intellectual relationship and stayed in each other’s company through several relocations. In Milan, Mantua, and Florence, they each enlarged their own expertise and exchanged knowledge. Leonardo mined Pacioli’s mathematical learning, studying proportion, symmetry, mathematical perspective and phenomena like Fibonacci’s series and the golden ratio, and returned the favour by producing a series of wonderful illustrations for Pacioli’s next book. In February 1498, Maestro Luca completed De Divina Proportione, which was illustrated by ‘the gracious left hand’ of his new friend, as Leonardo showed off his mastery of perspective and geometry with a set of precise, fenestrated illustrations of the six Platonic solids, from the four-faced tetrahedron to the twenty-sided icosahedron. Like Leonardo’s notebooks, page after page of Pacioli’s new book had margins filled with circles, triangles and squares clarifying geometric concepts. This time, Maestro Luca did not rush to print. Instead he circulated the book in manuscript copy form, trading a wide readership for a prestigious one. A couple of years later, when the pair had relocated to Mantua to escape the French occupation of Milan, Pacioli composed a book of chess problems, De Ludo Schaccorum (‘On the game of chess’), which he neither

printed nor circulated in a final version. The only surviving draft was dedicated, as a schifanoia or ‘boredom buster’, to Isabella d’Este, Countess of Mantua and one of the Renaissance’s most important patrons. This small notebook was rediscovered in 2006 in a palazzo library in Gorizia, on Italy’s border with Slovenia. Intriguingly, the captions to the puzzles are each crossed through with a single stroke, in the same way as a bookkeeper indicated that a transaction had been moved from the journal to the ledger, or a notary showed that a clause had been moved from a draft to a final document for signature. This raises the possibility that the manuscript was at some point copied out of this notebook by a professional scribe, or that Pacioli himself worked back through the text, re-checking each puzzle and crossing it off as he went. Some are keen to attribute the crudely drawn diagrams to Leonardo, but there is no reason either to suppose that he drew them, or that the shapes of the chessmen embody the ‘golden ratio’. He did, though, draw Isabella, and committed to painting her portrait. Pacioli completed another equally playful book at about the same time: De Viribus Quantitatis (‘On the powers of numbers’), which compiles number games, card tricks, riddles and reasoning problems. It makes frequent mention of Leonardo, and much of the content overlaps with puzzles that can be found in the notebooks. The preponderance of puzzles in their work indicates that he or Leonardo were bored by Mantua, and in March 1500 they left for Florence, Leonardo paying a flying visit to Venice on the way. Both now busy and well-paid, the men don’t seem to have been as close in Florence as they had been in Milan or Mantua. Leonardo, as ever, occupied himself with a varied portfolio, designing military machines and fortifications, planning the canalisation of the Arno, starting the Mona Lisa, and putting off the agents that Isabella d’Este sent to check on the progress of her own portrait. He carried out one of his most important dissections – that of a centenarian who had died of arteriosclerosis – and continued to fill page after page of notebooks, including the codex On the Flight of Birds, a remarkable synthesis of geometry, physics, anatomy and mechanics, and a diagram for an odometer, probably inspired by his many journeys along the Italy’s dusty roads.

Pacioli’s notebook of chess problems – crossed through, perhaps after they had been checked.

Pacioli, meanwhile, took up a post teaching Euclid at the university for one hundred florins a year, arranged for De Divinia Proportione to be copied for a local noble, and produced a set of educational geometric solids for the Florentine authorities. There doesn’t seem to have been any kind of falling out, but by 1508 the two men were each ready to move on yet again, this time in separate directions, and with radically different purposes.

Leonardo had acquired a new patron, richer and more powerful than any before: Louis XII, the king of France. Supported by generous pensions, he shuttled between Milan, Rome, Florence and Bologna, always pursuing the same idiosyncratic paths of painting, drawing, writing and researching that he had for decades. Pacioli, meanwhile, returned to Venice’s printing presses and in a busy year published no fewer than three books: De Divinia Proportione (whose Leonardo drawings suffered somewhat from the transfer to woodblock print), an annotated translation of Euclid, and a reprint of the mighty Summa. All proved successful. Having secured his legacy, he taught in Perugia and Rome for a few years before retiring to his home town of Sansepolcro, where he died in 1517 at the age of seventy.

After Fra Luca’s death and the expiry of his copyrights, the short practical chapters of the Summa could be excavated from the mass of geometry and pure mathematics in which they were buried. This must have been something of a relief to readers who were more interested in making money than wrangling with Fibonacci or Euclid: of the six hundred pages of the Summa, only twenty-seven covered bookkeeping. In 1540 a Venetian printer named Domenico Manzoni excerpted them, without attribution (Pacioli himself had acknowledged most, but not all, of his sources) but usefully adding hundreds of worked examples which illustrated Pacioli’s points. Tellingly, Manzoni retitled the work Quaderno Doppio, ‘the double ledger’. Selling even better than Maestro Luca’s original, it went through six or seven editions and prompted a wave of adaptations and translations. The Dutch writer Jan Ympyn Christoffels made the first, and his version swiftly appeared in French and English – so, after three centuries of supplying the wool and loan interest that paid for Florence’s golden years, English readers could finally understand the financial operations that they had been party to. Then the Summa appeared in German. But this was just the beginning. Historian Jane Gleeson-White shows how Pacioli’s version of Florentine-Venetian methods spread, influencing ‘more than one hundred and fifty works… published across Europe by 1800, from Sweden (1646) to Denmark (1673), Portugal (1758), Norway (1775) and Russia (1783)’. The Florentine-Venetian techniques that Pacioli had pulled together (known

across Europe as ‘the Italian method’) became the foundation not only of mercantile practice but of the entire European economy. In Antwerp, a merchant’s clerk named Simon Stevin learned double entry in the 1570s. By the 1590s, he had become tutor to the young Prince Maurice of Orange, teaching him bookkeeping ‘after the Italian manner’ and thereby ensuring that the Netherlands would become the first European nation to enjoy proper governmental accounting. The Dutch prospered, and their neighbours, over time, followed their lead. Today, just as every corporation works out its balance sheet and profit and loss according to rules devised in Florence in the thirteenth century, every capitalist country is, in theory at least, run along similar rational, well-organised lines. Pacioli’s Summa proved to be one of the most consequential books of all time.

What of Leonardo’s notebooks while that was happening? The great man, his genius recognised by all, died two years after Pacioli, far away from Florence, in a château in the Loire valley. To the end, he kept adding to his notebooks. One of the last entries was a plan for prefabricated mobile homes which the French court could stay in on hunting trips, and his enduring preoccupation with the movement of water expressed itself in a series of apocalyptic drawings of destructive floods and giant waves. On 23 April 1519 he signed a will, leaving all his books, paintings and ‘instruments’ to his young assistant, Francisco Melzi: ten days later, he was dead. Melzi wrote movingly to Leonardo’s younger half-brothers, mourning the loss of a father figure, and took possession of the notebooks. ‘Melzi cherished them as memorials to the great man,’ Kemp tells me, and it is thanks to him that the notebooks survive at all, while the sketchbooks of nearly all of Leonardo’s peers have disappeared. He catalogued them and ensured that one substantial part of Leonardo’s writings was read by those outside his immediate circle. He compiled, from many source notebooks, the Codex Urbinas, or Treatise on Painting, which circulated in the studios of Italian and French artists. Digesting Leonardo’s thoughts on topics like composition, light and anatomy, the treatise was the fruit of years of research, and inspired a whole school of art – Leonardismo – that flourished in the 1500s. Vasari, who interviewed Melzi in the 1550s,

intriguingly mentions a failed attempt to publish more by an unnamed Milanese painter. Nothing came of it. Leonardo’s lifetime of continuous, obsessive labour – observation, drawing, writing, note-taking, list-making, observing, speculating, designing, theorising, fantasising – remained in just one copy, preserved in the atrocious handwriting that only Melzi could decipher. The notebooks went through many hands, often passing from owners who treasured them to owners who scarcely cared. Francesco Melzi was in the former camp: he held on to the notebooks and papers for fifty years. His son Orazio was in the latter. On inheriting them, he dumped the whole lot in the attic of the family seat, the Villa Vaprio, which sits above the river Adda twenty kilometres west of Milan. In 1587 a family tutor called Lelio Gavardi stole thirteen of the notebooks, intending to sell them, but then lost his nerve, and arranged for their return to Orazio via an intermediary, the architect Giovanni Magenta. Melzi, failing to understand their value yet again, let Magenta keep them, and thus began the dispersal of the collection. The most determined buyer was the Spanish sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who, in an act of confidently creative vandalism, broke up several manuscripts in order to rebind them according to his preferred logic. He seems to have sold some in Milan. Fourteen, via several other owners, eventually made their way into the collections of the Ambrosiana Library there. On Leoni’s death in 1608, in Spain, his heir Polidoro Calchi auctioned the remainder. Some remained there, as part of royal collections, and others, purchased by Charles I, are now hidden away in Windsor Castle. Charles’s agent, the Duke of Arundel, picked up one notebook for himself. His grandson inherited it, and having (according to his contemporary, the diarist John Evelyn) ‘little inclination to books’ was persuaded to donate it to the Royal Society, whence it later arrived at the British Museum. And so on. We can be certain that many, possibly most, of the notebooks – probably those with more words than drawings – were lost in forever. In a further blow to the collection’s integrity, when Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Milan, he stole the Ambrosiana notebooks and papers for relocation to Paris, and not all of them were returned after Waterloo. On their way, the notebooks picked up the names that we know them by today – the Madrid Codex, the Leicester Codex, the Codex Atlanticus – which Leonardo never used, and which bear no relation to their contents.

Spanish, French, British or Italian, none of the notebooks’ owners had any clue as to the real value of the ideas buried within them. In 1644, Wenceslaus Hollar printed a series of etchings based on faces in the Codex Arundel, but those thirty-seven etchings represented only a tiny fraction of Leonardo’s output and gave no hint of the variety of his interests. So, although visual thinkers like Goethe and Walter Pater would write at length about the paintings, and the cult of Leonardo the artist would steadily grow, Leonardo the scientist and engineer, which is to say, how he considered himself and made much of his living, would remain obscure for centuries. Why did Leonardo not go to Venice to publish when Pacioli did? Had he tidied up the texts in his notebooks, he would have had no difficulty finding a patron and printer, and could have seen several books into print at the same time as his friend. A treatise on fossils, casting doubt on the biblical story of the flood, might have been a riskily heretical proposition; but the anatomical studies, his expert writings on the practice of painting and drawing, his guide to human proportion, his treatise on shadows, On the Flight of Birds, and the Paragone, Leonardo’s contribution to a 1492 public debate on painting against sculpture, would all have found a readership – if he had been prepared to put the work in. Used to writing and reading in mirror image, he would have had something in common with the typesetters, and he would no doubt have enjoyed designing a better printing press, as well as inspecting the city’s canals. But the notebooks, copious as they were, had little that was ready for print. ‘We get runs of pages which, by his standards, are fairly coherent’, says Kemp, but ‘none of it is really publishable’. Melzi’s posthumous edition of the Treatise on Painting, for instance, would require collation from no fewer than eighteen notebooks. A different problem attended the visual works, particularly the anatomical studies. Leonardo thought about publishing these, but decided that the transfer to woodcut or (more expensive) copper engraving would compromise the quality of the image to an unacceptable degree. For a scientist who believed that every detail mattered, this was too risky. And it’s impossible to imagine Leonardo hanging around a print shop for a solid year – as Pacioli had – when there were machines to imagine, cadavers to dissect, unfinished paintings to dab at, and lucrative civil engineering consultancies to charge for. ‘He only seems to live from day to day,’ wrote the cleric who had been assigned the unenviable task of chasing

up Isabella d’Este’s portrait, complaining of Leonardo’s ‘haphazard and extremely unpredictable’ routine. This frustrating restlessness was, of course, integral to the obsessive creativity. Pacioli had been able to draw a line under a piece of work and consider it done, but for Leonardo this represented a mental hurdle that he frequently failed to clear. He left paintings unfinished for decades – Lisa del Giocondo sat for the Mona Lisa when she was in her early twenties, and was thirty-nine when Leonardo died, still working on it – and he evidently felt similarly about his manuscripts and notebooks. How much this cost us we can only guess at, but now, when many of the problems that preoccupied Leonardo have been solved, we can see how far ahead of their time the observations, hypotheses and deductions of the notebooks were. Looking at the human body, he puzzled out the mysterious workings of the vital aortic valve, four hundred years before anyone else; he was the first person to objectively describe the roots of the teeth; and he was the only person before Frederik Ruysch, two hundred years later, to make casts of organs. His experiments on the nervous system of frogs and dogs would not be repeated before Alexander Stuart in 1739, and his analysis of muscle groups in the 1490s foreshadows the twentieth-century science of ergonomics. Looking at whale-bone fossils emerging from Tuscan hillsides, he more or less invented the science of ichnology, which would not be pursued again before the 1820s, and his correct deduction that those hillsides had once been sea bed anticipated James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, published in 1785. His description of impetus strikes us with its similarity to Newton’s first law of motion, published in 1687. One hundred and fifty years before Christiaan Huygens, he demonstrated the diffraction of waves passing through an aperture: he had deduced, as Huygens would, that light travelled in waves. His experimental discovery that the friction between two surfaces is independent of the area of contact matched the laws of friction worked out by Guillaume Amontons in 1699. Ball bearings matching his design would not come into use until the 1800s. He came up with an anti-friction metallic alloy strikingly similar to the first to be patented, Isaac Babbitt’s of 1839. He pursued aerodynamics, fluid dynamics and mechanics at levels that would not be matched for a hundred years or more. And although he definitely didn’t ‘invent the helicopter’, he did

design machines, probably for the theatre, which would have generated some lift.* In the face of this – incomplete – list of Leonardo’s discoveries, Melzi’s careful custodianship of the notebooks can be seen as a missed opportunity. Who might have read them, if Melzi had taken them to Venice, or a university library, or even to Florence’s cartolai? Galileo, no mean notebook-keeper himself, was teaching at Florence, Pisa and Padua while the notebooks sat in Orazio Melzi’s attic, and would surely have found much to interest him. What intellectual flowers might have bloomed if Leonardo’s insights had been available to the readers, students and professors – the intellectual networks – of the sixteenth century? The shaded afterlife of Leonardo’s notebooks – ‘without parallel in the intellectual history of word and image’, as Kemp describes them – stands in sharp relief when we light it with the long, powerful burn of Pacioli’s posthumous – albeit near-anonymous – career. There’s no doubt that Leonardo was the greater thinker, but his creative achievements made scarcely any impression compared to the impact of the universal adoption of his friend’s Summa. Commercial, industrial and then colonial empires, humming with the movement of cash and credit according to ‘the Italian method’, would dominate first Europe and then the world, while Leonardo’s notebooks silently sat unread, first in an attic outside Milan, then in the libraries of royal seats and stately homes. And everywhere Pacioli’s work went, it spurred demand for memoriali, giornali, quaderni and squartofogli: a market for notebooks. * Alberti’s notebooks must have been fabulous but, alas, have not survived. * The book was expensive. This probably represented about one-tenth of the well-paid Leonardo’s savings, or about a week’s total pay for a university teacher of Pacioli’s standing. * So varied and copious were Leonardo’s creations that when, in the 1970s, an unscrupulous scholar added a few lines to a pair of his circles and claimed that the great man had invented the bicycle, many unquestioningly believed him.

CHAPTER 9

O THE PAINS AND LABOUR TO RECORD WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE SAID! Common-place books, 1512–present Luca Pacioli could never have anticipated how profound an impact he would have on the course of European history. But he did get to enjoy some local fame and in August 1508 gave a public lecture in the Venetian church of San Bartolomeo to an audience of five hundred. Among them was Erasmus of Rotterdam, who would later scornfully complain of mathematicians who enjoyed baffling their audience with geometrical shapes ‘piled on top of each other and intertwined like a maze’ and algebraic notation ‘deployed hither and thither in order to throw dust in the eyes’. They create artificial problems, he complained, only so that they can impress the gullible by then solving them. Neither man knew it, but they had something in common, for Erasmus was second only to Pacioli in the impact he would have on the European use of notebooks. Like Pacioli, Erasmus had taken holy orders, first as an Augustinian monk in Holland – where he saw rapiaria, the religious zibaldoni of the devotio moderna movement – and later as a priest. And, like Pacioli, he taught, studied, networked, travelled and above all published, translating the Church Fathers, and collecting classical proverbs and adages. His schoolbooks and religious handbooks sold in huge numbers – perhaps one in ten of all books printed in the 1530s. One of his top sellers was 1512’s De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia (‘On the Foundations of the Abundant Style’), now usually known as De Copia – in which he gave his readers a guide to composition and rhetoric.

Writing for teachers and their pupils, he showed how to create convincing arguments using the arts of copia, or abundance. This had two essential components: variety of expression and variety of subject matter. The former included techniques like metaphor, allegory, hyperbole and onomatopoeia, the latter depended on ‘the copious accumulation of proofs and arguments’ from a variety of sources. Students were to gather written examples of all kinds, which would help them to present their argument – whether in debate, from the pulpit or in a courtroom – in novel and persuasive ways. A range of knowledge was also desirable in its own right. A man could only be called learned, Erasmus wrote, if he mastered ‘every kind of author’. So he encouraged students to read, and collect: stories, fables, proverbs, opinions, parallels or comparisons, similitudes, analogies, and anything else of the same sort… things done or said in the past, or derived from the customs of various nations… from historians, poets, philosophers, or the books of the Bible… early times, recent history, and things in our own lives… military or civil actions, examples of clemency or bravery or wisdom (and so on ad infinitum, for there is no end to this list)… people are most impressed, however, by examples that are ancient, splendid, national and domestic. It was up to each reader to assemble their ‘mass of material’ according to their needs, and to logically arrange each selection, by topic, in ‘common places’. Although De Copia didn’t give any more practical instruction than that, its readers knew what to do. In their thousands, they picked up notebooks, and started noting excerpts and quotations as they read. De Copia’s sales put even Pacioli’s Summa in the shade. Erasmus personally issued three revised editions over the following two decades, and more than eighty more were produced by others in his lifetime. Developing the basic idea, humanist scholars like Juan Luis Vives, Philip Melanchthon and Francis Bacon also published books that explained in practical detail how to keep common-place books using headwords and indexes to organise the raw material.

The collection of quotations was not Erasmus’s invention: Pliny the Younger, fourteen hundred years earlier, had written that his uncle, Pliny the Elder, ‘never read without taking extracts, and used to say that there never was a book so bad that it was not good in some passage or another’. This constant note-taking had left the younger Pliny with a legacy of 160 commentarios ‘written on both sides of the scrolls, and in a very small handwriting’. Literate Romans referred to this skill as the ars excerpendi, the art of excerpting, but with the collapse in written culture that followed the fall of Rome, it had more or less vanished. A book was usually copied at length or not at all, and few scholars had the luxury of their own private codex to write in. The arrival of paper notebooks and zibaldoni changed that, but they were, as we have seen, mostly recreational in nature, and very few had any organising principle beyond what their owner happened to enjoy. In systematising the arrangement of information, Erasmus’s common-place – just as merchants’ ledgers had revolutionised finance – turned the notebook into information technology, a piece of hardware in which data could be stored, categorised and retrieved as necessary. To understand the implications, I spoke to Professor Angus Vine, an expert in early modern note-taking. ‘By the end of the sixteenth century,’ he told me, ‘anybody who went to a grammar school or university would have been instructed in how to take and keep their notes. But common-placing is never an end in itself. It’s always about producing something afterwards, or preparing you for public life.’ Common-placing’s advocates pointed to the intellectual benefits which made it more than just a way to frame a more convincing oration. Firstly, any reader tasked with making a selection from a given text would read it with greater concentration. The selection of a passage to excerpt required the exercise of judgement, a benefit summarised by Justus Lipsius, another Dutch scholar, in the Latin tag Non colligo, sed seligo (‘I don’t collect, I select’). Selecting the appropriate common place (or locus, under a headword) for a given excerpt demanded still deeper engagement with its ideas, and once an excerpt was in place, juxtaposition with what had already been written tended to generate further shades of meaning. The physical labour of copying by hand also fixed the quotation more firmly in the mind. As yet another scholarly excerpter, the Jesuit Jeremias Drexel, put it, Notae propriae, notae optimae: ‘your own notes are the best notes’.

Finally, the well-arranged common-place functioned as a kind of externalised memory, which, as historian Ann Blair notes, ‘liberated the reader from the task of memorising the selected passages’. This in turn ‘freed up mental capacity for… reasoning and reflection’ and was particularly useful in an age when the rate of arrival of new books far outstripped anyone’s ability to master their contents.

In the wake of De Copia’s success, the common-place book rapidly became a fixture of the European schoolroom. A story of two sixteenthcentury teachers illustrates its impact. Born in Cheshire in 1540, four years after Erasmus’s death, the young John Brownsword attended school in Witton, where he was taught by John Brechtgirdle according to a syllabus which, as Brownsword recorded, included De Copia and other writings by Erasmus, as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Horace, Virgil and many other Latin writers. In 1560 Brechtgirdle left Witton to become a vicar in the Midlands and, five years after that, recruited his former pupil to teach in his local grammar school. Brownsword taught there for a few years before returning to Cheshire; he was replaced by one Simon Hunt, who taught a boy that Brechtgirdle had baptised in 1564, a glove-maker’s son named William Shakespeare. The curriculum that Brownsword left behind gives us a clear idea of what Shakespeare learned at school and how he learned it, and commonplacing played a key role.* The habit stood the young poet in good stead. Nearly every play adapts existing source material such as Holinshed’s Chronicles, Plutarch’s Lives and Boccaccio’s Decameron, using their plots, characters and imagery in fresh ways – ‘a style that mixes multiple sources and transforms them’, as Vine puts it. Shakespeare’s peers – Jonson, Marlowe and Webster among them – all worked in similar ways. As another contemporary, the polymath Francis Bacon, put it, ‘there can hardly be anything more useful’ than a common-place to supply ‘matter to invention’. Without Erasmus’s invention, London’s theatres would have offered much poorer fare. Vine points to another literary genre that emerged from the commonplace book: the essay. Assembling examples and counter-examples under headwords allowed the French aristocrat Michel de Montaigne to explore

and examine subjects as varied as Fear, Age, Cannibalism and Posting Letters. In each of his 107 essays he tested ideas and precedents, piling anecdotes, folk wisdom and references from the classics into short pieces that examined every topic from multiple angles. First published in Paris in 1580, they became hugely popular and sparked imitators across Europe – including Francis Bacon. Common-place books were important to the Jacobean dramatists, but none of theirs survive. Fortunately, we can see John Milton’s notebook, now in the British Library, which collects a wide variety of materials, in five languages, under headings like Rex, Respublica and De Divortio – King, Republic, and Divorce. Later in the century the philosopher John Locke would write an entire book devoted to his personal system of alphabetic and thematic common-placing, which, it is fair to say, overcomplicates a method that at its heart has an elegant utility. Forty years later Jonathan Swift wrote, in his Advice to a Young Poet, that ‘a commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without’, for ‘poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories’.

Milton’s common-place book features quotes from Chaucer, Dante and Machiavelli, along with notes for Paradise Lost and his political pamphlets.

A century after that, the London publisher R. Pitkeathley, who simplified Locke’s method, pointed out another benefit, describing a ‘man of letters’ who ‘treasures passages most replete with humour, elegance, wit or satire, and circulates them… at the social evening party’. The process became somewhat circular. Vine told me that people took their common-place books to the theatre and to church, to ‘preserve the best lines’, and writers started to selfconsciously create quotable texts with common-placing readers in mind – seventeenth-century soundbites. In due course, any such truism became known as a ‘commonplace’, and the word quickly came to mean ‘ordinary’ or ‘unremarkable’.

The copious style had its effect on prose: much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writing strikes us as being ponderously overwritten, and it’s tempting to blame Erasmus. He had praised brevity as a technique, but only briefly: in De Copia, as the name implies, more is more. Speeches and sermons usually ran on at lengths that we would today find intolerable, as their authors crammed in as many quotations, citations and precedents as they could. Only occasional voices dissented. One London contemporary of Swift’s, Henry Felton, called common-placing ‘a Stupid Undertaking’, exclaiming ‘What Heaps of this Rubbish have I seen! O the Pains and Labour to record what other People have said, that is taken by those, who have nothing to say themselves!’

Many printed common-place anthologies emerged around this time, bearing titles such as The Well of Wisdome, A Scole of Wise Conceytes and The Pithythy and Moost Notable sayings of Al Scripture. They were early exemplars of advertising’s most powerful promise: that of benefit acquired without effort. Erasmus, Drexel and the pioneering chemist Robert Boyle would have found this attitude anathema. For them, the work of selection and copying was the very point, as it taught discrimination and trained the mind. But these books addressed a demand – and, as Vine notes, the models of common-placing set out by Erasmus’s followers were hard to emulate. Common-placing might have been a sweat, if you took it seriously, but at least the act of writing was becoming easier, as paper became steadily finer, smoother and cheaper. Italy, southern Germany and France had long made the best paper, but in the century after Erasmus, the industry spread north and east, and towns from Dartford to Lviv gained commercially successful paper mills. This process accelerated during the Thirty Years’ War, which forced many German papermakers to relocate, dispersing their expertise across the continent. Ever-rising demand for paper pushed up the price of linen rags and old clothes, which the mills graded prior to pounding, the coarsest and oldest cloth making cheap papers for printing books. Printers realised that they could get away with a rougher, more absorbent surface, and the quality of book paper (as measured by folding endurance) started a long decline. Writing paper, though, was made of better raw materials, and became ever finer, stronger and smoother. In a telling inversion of historical

trends, the seventeenth century even saw paper exported from Silesia to Persia. Europe was now in the ascendant. Erasmus’s educational ideas may have been hugely influential, but in other ways his views were decidedly retrograde – in De Copia women are filed alongside children, barbarians and slaves. But that didn’t stop women from keeping their own commonplace books. Several examples – most of them intensely religious – survive from the early seventeenth century. Mary and Elizabeth, the two daughters of Sir Thomas Browne (yet another bestselling author, thanks to his Religio Medici), shared one, and on occasion wrote in their father’s for him. These notebooks testify to a close family where learning was enjoyed with an unusual inclusivity. In one of Elizabeth’s notebooks, Sir Thomas lists the books she has read aloud to him at nights, a wide-ranging collection, including many historical and travel titles, that the profoundly misogynistic Erasmus would have considered unsuitable.

At about the time Elizabeth Browne began her common-place book, a serial entrepreneur called John Bell opened a bookshop on London’s Strand, the centre of a city with a fast-growing literate population. Bell saw an opportunity – just as Allen Lane would with Penguin Books in the 1930s. Between 1777 and 1783 he issued one hundred and nine volumes of the Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill at a price of just six shillings each. He followed this with British Theatre (in twenty illustrated volumes), the Works of Shakespeare, a gossipy newspaper called The World, and La Belle Assemblée, an innovative ladies’ magazine which carried politics, science and book reviews alongside colour plate illustrations of the latest fashions.

Elizabeth Browne’s common-place book, begun in the 1770s, includes a list of the books that she read to her father at night.

But Bell’s biggest earner was his Common-Place Book, first issued in 1770 and aimed at those aspiring souls who knew they ought to keep a common-place book but didn’t know how to go about it. Bell’s CommonPlace Book Form’d generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised By Mr Locke condensed Locke’s method of excerpting into a few pages, then offered examples for both ‘a student, or man of reading’ and ‘the traveller, or man of observation’. (Despite La Belle Assemblée, Bell didn’t perceive a female market for the book.) The simple invention sold briskly, and Bell must have enjoyed a decent profit: his two-hundred-and-fifty page Common-Place Book, in which all but the first few pages were blank, went for one pound and five shillings, four times the price of a volume of the Poets of Great Britain, and needing

little typesetting or printing. He smartly followed up with a pocket edition, in which nearly four hundred blank pages followed even briefer instructions, and this also a proved a success. Several examples of each format, completed by their owners, survive in the British Library. To page through them is to build up a peculiarly incomplete picture of the writer: you find out plenty about their preoccupations, but very little about the person themselves. One example includes cut-out newspaper stories, poems in Latin and English, Suffolk gravestone inscriptions, comic verse, snippets of East Anglian local history, letters from family, a long account of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, and so unpredictably on. There are repeated references to the business of brewing stout, and even a recipe for the ‘Irish Method of Boiling Potatoes’ (‘a little salt thrown in during the boiling is a great improvement’). But we know nothing of the actual common placer. In the later pages, the handwriting, once so crisp and legible, goes to pot. Ink splodges bleed through the pages; cures for kidney stones, asthma, shortness of breath, the ague, rotten teeth, lost voice, colic, consumption, gout and toothache all appear. A recipe for laudanum is scratched across the page, pain imbued in every stroke of the pen. The writer never tells us that he (it’s clearly a man) is ageing, painfully – he doesn’t have to. But who was he? We know that the book was started no earlier than 1782, and completed in 1795. The writer seems to have lived in East Anglia. A letter from Calais, copied into the book, was written by a man with the initials T. T.

Two of the pages from the anonymous Norfolk common-place book – one a list of breweries, the other with a rather elegant eel margin.

Beer enthusiasts set me on track, the official record confirmed their lead, and an ancestry website filled in the gaps. The Allen Brewery, now defunct, for centuries produced beer in nearby Norwich. One Timothy Tompson is recorded as the proprietor in 1811, but he lived until 1819 and therefore doesn’t make a convincing candidate, as the common-placer evidently suffered from declining health in the 1780s. A better bet might be his father, Stackhouse Thomson. In 1782 he was sixty-three, already widowed, and no doubt stepping back from the family business – giving him the leisure to visit country churchyards, travel across to Bristol and fashionable Bath, and attend 1784’s Bartholomew Fair (which is recorded at length in the common-place). Stackhouse died in 1799, four years after the notebook’s last entry. He is our man, it seems. What does his notebook have to tell us today? Unlike Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, even Michael of Rhodes, its author

had no connection to great discoveries, affairs of state, or international relations. Stackhouse was no poet, no artist, and his literary tastes were unsophisticated. But he wrote for himself, not posterity, and he valued the notebook enough to fill more than three hundred pages, and to invite friends and family to make their notes in it too. His observations might be of consequence to no-one but himself, but isn’t it a happy thought that such documents can survive for centuries, intimate memorials to their owners’ preoccupations – unremarkable, hardly read, yet every one unique?

Common-place books gradually fell out of favour in the nineteenth century, as the diary and sketchbook became more popular. By the middle of the twentieth century, the phrase had ceased to mean much to anyone apart from publishers of unremarkable miscellanies. Bucking this trend, W.H. Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book, published in 1970, is a magnificent throwback, spanning four hundred pages from Accidie (‘tedium or perturbation of the heart’) through to Writing, and is a rare thing indeed, a classical humanist common-place that you can read from start to finish while retaining the will to live. The actor Alec Guinness’s Commonplace Book was gathered from two exercise books he left at his death in August 2000. This is a modern(ish) gem of a zibaldone, with quotations from favourite books, anecdotes from the theatre, and remarks overheard on the street. Contemporary writers, too, occasionally admit to the habit. The novelist Nicholson Baker essays entertainingly about his own ‘copybooks’. Copying, he says, ‘can calm and steady your state, not to mention improve it, for while the transcribing may appear to be a form of close and exclusive concentration, it has an equally important element of peaceable meditative mindlessness as well, like playing with a paper clip’. And John Bell, who loved sales above all else, would be cheered by the gift book sections of a Waterstones or a Barnes & Noble, where publishers are still trying that trick of selling blank books with an inspirational promise to entice the reader. Confidently typeset covers tell you what kind of notebook you’re looking at – Journal, Diary, Notebook, Planner – while others suggest the content that you are supposed to supply: My Personal Assistant, Space for Thoughts, Bright Ideas, Notes and Dreams, and so on.

As with Bell, a vague notion of self-improvement remains the best selling point: and when titles are more concrete – Reader’s Journal, Wine Notes, My Recipes, A Mindful Walking Log – the notebook’s infinite possibilities feel somehow diminished. In its heyday, common-placing changed the way people navigated the modern era: ‘They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns’, writes the cultural historian Robert Darnton, of seventeenthcentury readers. ‘They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it.’ As Europeans explored further, published more books, traded more goods, generated more paperwork, and in general made life more complicated for themselves, sorting information into manageable chunks enabled them to understand their world. Up to a point. Erasmus had confidently written as though his concerns were universal, and that the subjects he covered represented everything that the civilised man needed to master to live a full intellectual and moral life. He referred his students to historians, philosophers, poets, playwrights and theologians; he recommended that they read writers from every age and every land. But he didn’t consider medicine, or any of the nascent sciences, and his ideal of the humanist education didn’t include any mathematics beyond the most functional arithmetic. Humanist common-place books reflected this, the headwords serving to limit the writer’s scope in a way that a zibaldone never had. Perhaps Erasmus’s readers would have benefited from a more rounded syllabus if he had enjoyed Pacioli’s show a little more on that hot day in Venice. * As did another technique that Erasmus recommended, the performance of Latin debates or colloquies – for instance, a scripted argument over the respective importance of philosophy and cookery.

CHAPTER 10

FROM ONE MOUTH TO THE OTHER RUNS EAST AND WEST The world ocean, 1519–1522 So many of the notebook’s early applications relate to seafaring that one would expect ships’ logs to take a prominent place in its history. We have seen how merchants – notebooks’ earliest adopters – carried them around Europe, and how sailors and other travellers used their own personal notebooks in all kinds of inventive and practical ways. So it comes as a surprise to learn that most ships did not keep a formal log for hundreds of years after the notebook’s invention, and that only a tiny number survive from the period before 1600. Columbus’s own journals, for instance, had disappeared within twenty years of his epochal voyages. One that made it, however, sheds an intriguing light on one of the most famous voyages of all time. The science of navigation had jumped ahead in leaps and bounds in the century after the death of Michael of Rhodes, whom we met back in Chapter Five. For medieval Venetian sailors, the only accurate way to reckon their position at sea was by referring to fixed points on land. But by the sixteenth century a competent navigator could make a reasonable estimate of latitude by measuring the height of the sun and correcting for the seasonal tilt of the earth in relation to it, while the magnetic compass, newly arrived from China, allowed for better direction finding. These factors, and the stupendous financial proceeds of Columbus’s voyages, encouraged adventurers to attempt ‘blue water’ voyages beyond the sight of land, and so the age of long-distance European exploration began.

In 1519, a Spanish officer named Francisco Albo (or possibly Alba, or Albana) signed up to join the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan. Portuguese by birth but now one of Spain’s most prominent mariners, Magellan had been charged by Charles I of Spain* with finding a new westerly route to the Spice Islands of the East Indies (now Indonesia’s Maluku Islands). He was given a fleet of five ships – the Trinidad, Concepción, San Antonio, Santiago and Victoria – and 270 men, including Malay-speaking slave Enrique de Malacca, whom Magellan had abducted ten years earlier. Albo, who hailed from the Greek island of Hios, joined the Trinidad as navigator. On 20 September, the fleet sailed from Seville, entering the Atlantic Ocean at Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The record Albo kept, in an informal and easily read cursive hand, now rests in an archive in Seville, and it shows that he felt no pressure to make a particularly thorough or systematic record of the voyage. Indeed, for the five-thousand-mile first leg – the relatively simple transatlantic run down to what is now Rio de Janeiro – he didn’t keep any record at all. But as the fleet continued south he started to record landmarks and to use the position of the sun to estimate how far south the expedition had progressed. A typical entry reads: Sunday 1st January of the year 1520, I took the sun in 84°, and it had 21°23’ declination; and the altitude from the pole came to be 27°29’; and on the days after the first day we went to south-west, and the next to west, and on the fourth day to south west ¼ south. Albo’s readings of latitude are reliable enough for us to be able to recreate the voyage’s progress down the coast of Brazil, but apart from that there’s little useful information: few descriptions of the coastline, and no record of tides, weather or currents. Ten days later, the fleet finds the coastline cutting sharply to the west. This, perhaps, is the passage through the American continent which they have been sent to find. The fleet splits, with two ships striking out southwest into the open sea and the remainder exploring locally. On reconvening, and tasting the water, they are disappointed to realise that they have not discovered a tranquil route through the American landmass, but the huge

estuary of what we now call the Rio Plate. So south-west they continue until, as winter draws in, they rest up for a few months in a bay at San Julian. Here Albo writes at greater length, though not much, considering that the fleet was at anchor for months. ‘Many Indians came there’, he records, ‘who go covered with skins of antas, which are like camels without humps, and they carry some bows of canes very like the Turkish, and the arrows are like theirs, and at the point they have a flint tip for iron, and they are very swift runners, and well made men, and well fashioned’. After five months in that bay, and another six weeks in an estuary some miles to the south (now Santa Cruz), waiting out the winter, the fleet continues until, on 21 October 1520, they find another channel. Albo’s description becomes increasingly breathless : On the 21st of the said month, I took the sun in exactly 52°, at five leagues from the land, and there we saw an opening like a bay, and it has at the entrance, on the right hand a very long spit of sand, and the cape which we discovered before this spit is called the Cape of the Virgins and the spit of sand is in 52° latitude, and 52½° longitude, and from the spit of sand to the other part there may be a matter of five leagues, and within this bay we found a strait which may be a league in width, and from this mouth to the spit you look East and West, and on the left-hand side of the bay there is a great elbow, within which are many shoals, but when you enter the strait, take care of some shallows less than three leagues from the entrance of the straits, and after them you will find two inlets of sand, and then you will find the channel open, proceed in it at your pleasure without hesitation; and passing this strait we found another small bay, and then we found another strait of the same kind as the first and from one mouth to the other runs East and West.

Albo’s log from the Trinidad showing the passage quoted above (sailing through what became known as the Straits of Magellan).

Mission accomplished, in other words. You can sense Albo’s elation as detail of the momentous discovery runs on, over a page and a half of the logbook.

Magellan’s ships spent over a month exploring the straits before exiting on the far side and becoming the first European fleet to sail up the Pacific coast of the Americas. The point of the voyage being to find a passage to the East Indies, rather than explore the Americas, Magellan soon directs the fleet out into the open Pacific, where the nature of Albo’s entries changes once again. Here there is no scenery to describe, but he dutifully records the daily latitude and the ship’s progress across the seemingly infinite blue, firstly north-west towards the more hospitable waters of the equator, and then west. ‘On the 3rd we went NW and found ourselves in 46° 30’, reads the first entry of a monotonous list which runs on in identical format – date,

heading, latitude – for over ninety days, with only a couple of sightings of uninhabited islands, before the ships finally make contact with humans, at Guam. That encounter did not go well. The islands’ inhabitants and the explorers had no common language: on the first day, the locals came aboard and stole ‘whatever they could’, including the flagship’s skiff; on the second day, a raiding party went ashore and stole it back. Six days later, on 16 March, the fleet reached Samar in what is now the Philippines. A few days after that they met locals with whom the interpreter Enrique could communicate – proof that the longed-for circumnavigation had been achieved. What Albo felt about that, we don’t know: as usual, his journal remains devoid of emotion. But over the following pages his account changes yet again, becoming a rough and ready gazetteer to the new islands that Magellan’s fleet now wove between. He lists dozens of names: Subu, Bohol, Panilongo, Cuagayan, Poluan, and Borney. He gives their positions, and advises which islands can supply which commodities (cloves, gold, ginger, cinnamon, sandalwood), which are friendly, which not, where the fleet resupplied, where they bought cargo, where they found Arab traders, and so on. Finally they set sail across the Indian Ocean, making for home with full holds. In May 1522 they round the Cape of Good Hope, re-entering the Atlantic Ocean after an absence of nearly two years. Two months later, they reach hospitable territory, in the form of the Cape Verde Islands. Here, Albo is alarmed to discover that he has at some point made a mistake in his record-keeping: ‘they received us very well,’ he writes, ‘and gave us what provisions we wanted; and this day was Wednesday, and they reckoned this day was Thursday, and so I believe that we had made a mistake of a day’. No-one present realised that by circumnavigating to the west, in the same direction as the sun, the fleet had lost a day, just as Jules Vernes’ fictional Phineas Fogg would later gain a day by pointing himself east. Then suddenly their hosts become less friendly, threatening to send Albo and his shipmates back to Spain as prisoners in another vessel. ‘We said we would make another tack, and would wait,’ writes Albo, in a rare flash of narrative flair, ‘and so we took another tack, and made all sail, and went away.’

Seven weeks later they made it home, with Albo bearing his record of the voyage and its priceless information about the new passage. But the journal also throws up questions about what Albo leaves out – which is quite a lot. Five ships left Seville; only one, the Victoria, returned. Two hundred and seventy men sailed out; twenty-two came back. And – in the most surprising omission of all – Albo had failed to note the fact that Magellan himself, the expedition’s leader, was one of the missing two hundred and forty-eight. What had happened to these lost ships and lost souls? What disasters had befallen them which Albo had decided not to record?

Fortunately, Albo’s account is not the only one to come down to us – although it is the only surviving original notebook from the voyage. One of the few other survivors, an Italian named Antonio Pigafetta, also kept a journal, which was swiftly transcribed into presentation volumes (illuminated manuscripts on parchment), one of which was given to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. Though less useful from a navigational point of view, Pigafetta’s record nevertheless fills in the gaps. Unlike Albo’s account, Pigafetta’s reveals that the voyage had endured calamity after calamity. Storms struck in the Atlantic as they headed south for Brazil, and the crew constantly feared pursuit by hostile Portuguese vessels. One sailor was executed for sodomy; the young boy with whom he had been caught also died, going overboard in mysterious circumstances. That affair was followed by an attempted mutiny, when Juan de Cartagena, captain of the San Antonio, attempted to take control and re-route the fleet. Magellan curbed him, sparing his life at the urging of two other captains. The crew had enjoyed a refreshing pause at Rio, but the long overwintering that followed prompted another vicious bout of infighting. Cartagena and his two allies, Luis Mendoza and Gaspar de Quesada, took over three of the ships. Magellan launched an audacious sneak attack to recover one, another surrendered, and the third was returned when its crew saw which way the wind was blowing and rediscovered their sense of loyalty. In the aftermath, Mendoza was stabbed to death, Quesada was hung, drawn and quartered, and Cartagena marooned on a barren island. Other conspirators were tortured, abandoned ashore, or assigned punishment duties.

Albo says nothing about the whole bloody sequence. He also, with remarkable forgetfulness, fails to note that the Santiago was wrecked on a sandbar off the Santa Cruz river, and his epic sentence describing their passage through the straits omits the crucial detail that the San Antonio vanished there, so only three ships of the original five made it through to the Pacific Ocean. Albo’s repetitive record of their journey along the equator captures the monotony but doesn’t mention the loss of nineteen men to hunger, nor that Magellan had confidently predicted this threemonth leg would take three or four days, nor that – when the seal meat which they had stocked up on went rancid – the crew had been reduced to eating sawdust, rats and strips of leather pulled out of their vessels’ ropes.

An illuminated copy of Pigafetta’s journal – translated into French for Charles I as part of the campaign to restore Magellan’s reputation.

Albo’s account of the islands they finally reached contains many similar omissions, most notably the fate of Magellan himself, who was killed in a skirmish on the island of Cebu – a name which doesn’t appear in Albo’s gazetteer. He does mention that the Concepcion had to be abandoned, but he fails to bring up encounters with Portuguese vessels, an attack on a Chinese junk, two changes of admiral, encounters with Spanish-speaking Muslims, and the loss of the Trinidad. The twenty men who died of starvation as the Victoria crossed the Indian Ocean alone also go unremarked. There are two possible explanations for Albo’s remarkable oversights. Some scholars suggest that he avoided making any written note of the various intrigues and mutinies because they might later compromise him. And Albo must have known that Pigafetta was keeping his own record. He may well have read it, and decided to keep a purely navigational log to complement Pigafetta’s account – which has turned out to be the case. Our own knowledge of the voyage’s route derives from Albo’s journal, and of events largely from Pigafetta’s.* Pigafetta had to devote some energy to restoring Magellan’s tarnished name. It transpired that the San Antonio, last seen at the Straits, had in fact returned to Spain, and just as Magellan was dying on Cebu, its crew started assassinating his character back home in Seville, accusing him of torture and tyrannical behaviour. Magellan’s wife and son were placed under house arrest, and the sole sailor who had remained loyal to him was imprisoned. It took a concerted campaign – including those magnificently illuminated manuscripts – for Pigafetta to rehabilitate his commanding officer and ensure that his name, rather than that of Elcano, the officer who captained the Victoria home, comes down to us as the leader of the world’s first successful circumnavigation, and discoverer of the crucial straits connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific. Pigafetta lived for another nine years, dying back home in Italy. What happened to the exhausted Albo is not known. Frustratingly, Pigafetta’s original notebooks do not survive, but the way that he used them to restore Magellan’s reputation is an object lesson in the power of a first-hand contemporaneous record, well deployed. Albo’s notebook – apart from reliably confirming Magellan and Elcano’s routes – tells us something different: that, even as they extended their reach to the planet’s most distant corners, and even as their masters invested fortunes in ships, cargoes, cannons and crew, European sailors had still not realised

how useful a systematic logbook could be. We shall see in a later chapter how this changed, and what that change means for us today. * He was also titled Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire – and corresponded with Erasmus. * There was one other incomplete, much shorter, journal, which was separated from the fleet in the Far East and eventually made it back to Spain by a different route. The oral testimonies of some other survivors also exist, but none are as full as Albo’s and Pigafetta’s records.

CHAPTER 11

KING OF THE HERRING Fishbook, The Netherlands 1570 This story has returned time and again to the trading routes of the Mediterranean, but that was not Europe’s only thriving waterway. The North and Baltic seas, a thousand kilometres to the north, had their own merchants and commodities, and this northern business, indirectly, gave us one of the most intriguing and revealing notebooks of the time. We have herring to thank. These small fish, with oily flesh and fine bones, can be found all round the British Isles, with huge populations in the North Sea and North Atlantic. They had been pursued for centuries by all of the nationalities of northern Europe, but by the 1570s the Dutch had made themselves the unchallenged masters of the trade. Every year, hundreds of their specially designed boats, called herring busses, would set sail for the rich deep-water fishing grounds off the Shetland Islands, Scotland and Iceland; shoals of herring, kilometres across and billions strong, awaited them there, and each boat could net tons without difficulty. But a hold full of dead fish is no good if you are weeks away from a fish market; herring, like any other seafood, spoils rapidly. The ingenious Dutch developed techniques that solved the problem. The morning after a crew had drawn in a netful of fish, they would set to work gutting them, drawing out most of the intestines but leaving one small part, the pyloric caeca, in place. They then packed the herring in large casks of salt, where brine prevented the fish from decaying, and trypsin, a digestive enzyme secreted by the pyloric caeca, would soften the flesh and make it more palatable. And then the crew would return to their nets and repeat the process until the hold was full. The numbers were spectacular. A skilled fisherman could gut a fish in a few seconds, packing up to two thousand an hour. A large herring-boat

could bring home a sixty-ton cargo. Each year, the Dutch fleet of around five hundred haringbuisen despatched, gutted and cured something like two hundred million fish. This was far too many for the population of the Netherlands to consume, so most of the catch was exported to the Baltic markets of Germany, Poland and Russia. Dutch traders carried timber and grain back, making handsome profits in both directions, while to the south, a similar traffic took place in French and Spanish sea salt for curing. This business was one of the main drivers of the Dutch economy, the success story of the era, and everyone understood its importance. The lucrative fishing fleets sailed in convoy from fortified harbours, and Dutch shipwrights were forbidden from building haringbuisen for foreigners. Thanks to the trypsin – other nationalities hadn’t discovered the trick – cured Dutch herring was a premium product, and the authorities carefully monitored the quality of exports, branding each approved cask with a hot iron as a seal of quality. A successful fish merchant, therefore, enjoyed both a good income and a prominent place in the community. And in the 1570s one of the most prosperous and most prominent was Adriaen Coenen, who left us a gloriously distinctive notebook.

The son of a fisherman, Coenen lived in Scheveningen, on the North Sea coast, where boats had been drawn up on the wide sandy beach for centuries. The auctioneer at the official fish market in the town, and a licensed beachcomber, he had been in constant contact with marine life for all of his sixty-three years. His Visboek – which is pronounced, and means, ‘fishbook’ – collects his knowledge into a handwritten compendium that shines a light not only on the business of fish but on the Coenen era’s everincreasing appetite for understanding and order. To find out more about the Visboek, I speak to Jeroen Vandommele, a curator of manuscripts at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague, an easy walk from the beach where Coenen saw so many boats unloaded. Vandommele, one of the few people allowed to handle the book, occasionally gets to show it off to visitors, and betrays a wide-eyed affection for it. ‘Fishermen from all over Holland would come to sell their fish at Scheveningen,’ he tells me. ‘Normal fish like herring, but also strange ones, and Coenen would collect all that he encountered in his

notebook.’ He noted what the fishermen had to say, recording the dates and places of their more curious by-catch, then afterwards followed up in the published authorities – most often Pliny and the Swedish priest Olaus Magnus. The significant improvement that Coenen made to those earlier sources was to add accurate illustrations. The works of Pliny have none, and Olaus Magnus few, so the many drawings that Coenen made transformed how this knowledge could be transmitted and interpreted. Naturally enough, the precious herring looms large in his scheme. Coenen devotes a section to it – not only where to catch it, and how to cure it, but also to fisherman’s stories about it. One page, for instance, refers to the King of the Herring, a particularly delicious fish that very occasionally comes up in the same net as the main catch. He seems to mean gurnard, and dignifies the subject with a watercolour of a lonely specimen sporting a jaunty golden crown. After collecting his notes in decorative text boxes, Coenen filled the pages with sombre watercolour washes, against which framed panels of text and pictures stand out, sometimes carrying his name and monogram. The long section on the majestic herring also includes a map of their fishing grounds, showing where in the North Sea herring – and other species, including whales – were to be found. The English catch herring off the Thames estuary, we learn, but – unlike their happy Dutch counterparts – are taxed on it.

The main image is Coenen’s map of the herring grounds. The pictures above show fish labelled in Latin, German, Dutch and French.

This is how Coenen saw the oceans: busy, productive, teeming with life, industry and stories. You might well say the same about his book, which, at over eight hundred pages, each one packed with words and drawings, defeats any attempt at brief summary. Fortunately, you can see the whole thing online. The original is not in a good condition, so early in the 2000s its fragile pages, coming loose in many places, were rebound from beginning to end, and digitised so that they may be studied without being disturbed. Looking at them now, one is taken aback time and again by the scope of Coenen’s project and the breadth of his sources. Here’s a hammerhead shark drawn with real flair by a man who barely left the Netherlands, and certainly never approached the tropical waters where it hunts. Coenen writes that one was once landed at Scheveningen in a poor state, smelly and no good to eat, but he bought the carcass to preserve and hang in front of his house. Whoever supplied it fared better than the unlucky fisherman who, Coenen tells us, was once hanged in England for the offence of having sold such an unpalatable catch. He devoted many pages to the flatfish of the North Sea – less lucrative than the herring, but also good eating. Sections like this are devoted to all manner of sea life: octopuses, squid, eels, scallops, shrimp, sardines, cod, salmon, trout, turtles… if it swam, dived, or drifted, Coenen wanted to know. The international fish business faced a problem of nomenclature. ‘These fish didn’t have proper names yet,’ Vandommele tells me, ‘so he’s just calling them what he called them at Scheveningen.’ Evidently, Coenen didn’t enjoy this imprecision: one page shows him attempting to remedy it by showing seldom-seen foreign species in a kind of visual glossary, collecting their various Latin, German, Dutch and French names. Coenen cast his net as wide as he could in search of knowledge. ‘He’s not that critical about the sources that he uses’, cautions Vandommele, so alongside the fish we see plenty of mermaids, sea monks, strange scaly dogs and monsters which don’t even have names. One page opens with a striking image and description of a sea monster, both of which Coenen culled from the works of Sebastian Münster, a German writer whose 1544

Cosmographia had collated all that was known about the geography of the world at that point. A shocking sight, but Coenen cautions us that the monster which Münster describes was probably, in reality, more similar to the dogfish he drew below it – a fish whose spines, when plated in silver, make excellent toothpicks. Coenen also enjoyed a fascination, common for the time, with whales, and had occasional opportunities to examine them when they beached themselves on the Dutch coast. One shows a deceased sperm whale, unmistakably male, that had perished in July 1577, in the inhospitable shallows of the Scheldt estuary near Antwerp. Coenen may have visited it there, but more likely copied the illustration from an engraving in a pamphlet recording the event. Finally, Coenen collected interesting facts about seagoing humans, such as a depiction of Inuit life, which he copied from the German account of Martin Frobisher’s 1578 voyage to Greenland.

Coenen dated the pages as he worked on them, and we know that it took him years to compile the Visboek from his earlier notes. Why did he go to such trouble? He enjoyed a successful career, growing steadily wealthier on the back of the public appointments he won. Perhaps this book played a part, by showing off his knowledge to potential patrons; we know that Coenen presented a similar volume, now lost, to the Prince of Orange. Coenen definitely enjoyed showing the book off in humbler circles too. He obtained a licence to exhibit at the fair in Leiden, where for one shilling curious pleasure-seekers could inspect his large collection of stuffed fish, and for two the book as well. One imagines he did plenty of business, turning the Visboek’s pages, pointing out its surprises, and turning his erudition into a show. Vandommele describes the notebook as a ‘paper Wunderkammer of the aquatic world’, and in that sense it was absolutely of its time. Wunderkammers, chambers of curiosities, were then starting to appear across Germany and the Low Countries. In these eye-popping rooms, collections of peculiar items – fossils, seashells, antiques, coins, curios of all kinds – jostled for the viewer’s attention. Like Coenen’s book, the Wunderkammer would juxtapose the scientific with the fanciful (narwhal

tusks often posed as unicorn horns), but they also expressed their owner’s genuine delight in knowledge and curiosity about the natural world, which the students and professors of the new university at Leiden no doubt shared. Coenen could never have gathered the raw materials for the Visboek without years of research and note-taking. As Vandommele observes, ‘It shows a moment when scholars, and amateur scholars, tried not to base their knowledge just on what was written in ancient times, but also on their empiricism.’ Yes, we see monsters and mermaids in his book, but they are far outnumbered by the unglamorous likes of the plaice, the sole, the turbot and the dab. And I would take this further: for the accompanying illustrations, objectively drawn from life, make the Visboek one of the most useful works of specialist naturalism that Europe had seen up to that point.

Coenen’s sperm whale, beached in 1577 and clearly the male of the species.

There’s something characteristically Dutch about the notebook too. Vandommele points out that European academia communicated mainly in Latin or Greek, but in the Netherlands a ‘vernacular knowledge network’

also thrived, ‘composed mainly of amateurs, who don’t have a scholarly life, but who are interested, and have something to say, and share it with the rest of the world’. The Visboek, with its matter-of-fact language, embodies this democratisation of knowledge, being as accessible to a curious citizen at Leiden fair as it was to a professor at the university or a prince. Looking at the Visboek’s heavily decorated pages, and its huge size, one may well ask if it is actually still a notebook. Doesn’t Coenen’s flamboyant layout elevate it in some way, making it more a presentation manuscript than a ‘pure’ notebook? Perhaps. I would argue that underneath all the paint and scrollwork lies Coenen’s personal miscellany, collected by his own hand. If his enthusiasm drove him to turn that very practical working notebook into a decorated display item, that doesn’t diminish the underlying form. Rather – just as Michael of Rhodes’ notebook does – it reminds us that an object may do two things at once, with a functional private purpose and an ostentatious public one acting in harmony. Vandommele is as generous with his time and expertise as any of the people I spoke to for this book, but finally the time comes to wind up. ‘Wait,’ he says, almost in passing. ‘You are writing about the alba amicorum, aren’t you?’ We are coming to them now.

CHAPTER 12

A DULL DUTCH FASHION Friendship books, northern Europe 1645 On 17 March 1535, Peter Beskendorf, a pious German barber of previously good character, picked up a bread knife and stabbed his son-inlaw to death at the dinner table. His motive remains obscure; possibly he felt a drunken desire to prove his martial prowess against Dietrich Freyenhagen, who had been a mercenary before marrying his daughter Anne only a couple of years before. Or he may have been, as his defence later suggested, temporarily possessed by the devil. In any case, as his victim bled out, Beskendorf found himself in trouble. Fortunately, though, he could call upon influential friends. Martin Luther knew the killer well. Both lived in Wittenberg, on the low banks of the Elbe, where Luther taught theology; Beskendorf had studied under him before taking up the razor. The younger man cut the older’s hair, and as he did so they would speak about God and faith. Over the years, they became close, and Luther even dedicated a book to his friend, a practical guide to prayer which is still read today. So when Beskendorf, facing a murder charge, appealed for help, Luther obliged, and he did so by coopting a fashion that had recently spread through the students of the town. Luther was not just a professor at Wittenberg, but the city’s major celebrity. In the years after his 1521 excommunication from the Roman Catholic church, he had become the Reformation’s leading light, teaching, translating the Bible, preaching to rapt congregations, and – with his collaborator Philip Melancthon – working towards a new theological order. The university’s students, exclusively male, held him in awe, and their hero had grown accustomed to signing autographs for them, usually adding a moral in the form of a biblical verse, either on the pages of their Bibles and

prayerbooks, or in small notebooks, called Stammbücher, which they carried for the purpose. When Beskendorf was arraigned for trial that summer, Luther submitted a notebook which he, Melancthon, and a host of other worthies had filled with character references and pleas for mercy. Luther’s inscription, naturally, quoted the Bible: John 8:44, where Jesus refers to the devil as a murderer. Beskendorf’s advocate presented the notebook to the judge, stressed that the crime had been committed in drink, and secured for his client a manslaughter conviction punishable by banishment, not death. And so Beskendorf relocated to Dessau, only a day’s ride away.

To find out how Stammbücher changed over time, I again spoke to Jeroen Vandommele. As the notebooks became part of university life, he told me, conventions duly developed around their use. A certain ceremony attended signings, which often took place on high days and holidays; students would not only ask their professors, and other local worthies, for their signatures, but their friends, too. Entries normally occupied a page, with an autograph, the date, a moral motto or epigram, and a personal expression of friendship or admiration. The student Valentin Winsheim’s was unusual in that a woman – just one – was invited to sign it, for the Stammbuch’s pages, like the university itself, were an exclusively male space. That sexism aside, there’s something rather likeable about the habit. Over time, a book’s unique collection of connections would solidify its owner’s position in a social network based on education and shared piety. It would become a precious keepsake as an embodiment of formative relationships. Melancthon himself is said to have recommended Stammbücher for that reason: when his students grew old, they would find the pages triggering a flood of memories of the vera amicitia – the true friendships – of youth.

The tiny Stammbuch, just 9 cm by 7 cm, owned by a theology student, Valentin Winsheim, and signed by Luther’s collaborator, Melancthon.

Professors recommended that their charges should travel as part of their education, and students naturally took their notebooks with them. In France or Italy, Vandommele says, a young man could ‘meet eminent scholars, learn languages, enjoy art, make valuable connections, and experiment with love’, and the Stammbuch complemented all of these activities beautifully. A wandering student could turn up at a new university and present it to establish his credentials. In due course, his new professors and other prominent locals would be asked to sign it too, burnishing his credentials still further. When the student returned home, the Stammbuch would demonstrate the quality of its owner’s education: the signature of a Luther or a Melancthon would impress anyone who saw it, particularly any parent who happened to be unconvinced of the value of their son’s exploits. But it wasn’t just an occupation for the young. Many owners never stopped seeking fresh entries as they made new friends later in life, and as German students grew up, becoming professors, merchants or clergymen

themselves, they spread the habit ever more widely. The Netherlands gained its first university at Leiden in 1575 and students there enthusiastically adopted the Stammbuch, renaming it in Latin the album amicorum, literally ‘the album of friends’. The books became bigger and better as their owners took more pleasure in their keeping. A writer would usually draw their family’s heraldic arms and each contribution committed the ‘spiritual bond of two like-minded individuals’ to the page. As people competed to make the most distinctive entries in each others’ alba amicorum, all kinds of contribution appeared, with poetry, songs, sketches, portraits and landscapes jostling alongside the traditional Bible verses. This impulse to collect ‘cultural snippets’ characterises other notebooks, particularly common-place books, from the same era, but nowhere else is it quite so joyfully indulged. ‘Quotes, images, sayings, notes and songs,’ Vandommele has written, ‘migrated within a broad culture of collecting, cutting, pasting and adjusting’, so even the humblest album from an otherwise unknown citizen opens a window onto the time. Many owners punctuated the personal pages with illustrations of places they visited, or commissioned professional artists to produce such scenes with greater skill than they possessed themselves. Publishers, as ever, saw an opportunity, printing purpose-made notebooks whose pages had floral borders or classical porticos, within which your message would gain a certain beauty, or dignity: you could even buy alba with blank templates for coats of arms, so the artistically challenged could add their own without having to learn to draw scrollwork or helmets. The austere Luther would probably have found such developments somewhat beneath him, and would surely not have approved the fact that in the Netherlands women started to keep their own alba, shedding a light on relationships that would otherwise be obscure to us. Juliana de Roussel, who died in 1669, left an album amicorum in which she records her likes – art, poetry, social status – alongside carefully painted dedications and sketches from her female friends, like the allegory of suitors (see above). A few pages on, de Roussel is painted by a male friend, Alexander von Burgckstorff, with a flattering couplet alluding to happy times spent together: Bon vin, belle Dames et bonne viande, Pendu soyt il qui plus demande (‘Good wine, fair ladies and good meat: hang the man who asks

for more’). Perhaps the flirtatious von Burgckstorff was one of the suitors de Jiaukama painted.

Juliana de Roussel’s alba amicorum includes this painting by a friend, Juliana de Jiaukama, which depicts men searching for fruit in a tree bearing the Roussel family arms – her suitors, in other words.

Many alba were handed down by their original owner to a son, brother or nephew: there are examples carrying dedications inscribed by multiple generations. The notebook became a family totem, toasted with a glass of wine as it was brought out to be signed with due ceremony. Curiously, despite strong connections between European academics, the album amicorum never caught on in Britain, France or the Mediterranean. Indeed, in Britain they were habitually mocked: the prominent English writer Thomas Fuller sneered at ‘but a dull Dutch fashion, their albus [sic] amicorum to make a dictionary of their friends’ names’, and in one Restoration comedy a German character tells an English audience that his album is ‘of the utmost use to us in our drinking bouts’. But thousands of

alba survive from the Dutch golden age – Vandommele cares for seven hundred in the Hague alone. The most precious example is that of Jacobus Heyblocq, who decided in 1645 that his album would not only collect ‘the brilliant contributions’ of ‘the greatest thinkers… and high-ranking royalty’ but also preserve them long after their death. Becoming the rector of the Latin school at Amsterdam, Heyblocq used his position at the heart of the city’s intellectual elite to collect hundreds of entries. Rembrandt sketched Simeon in the Temple for him and the book also has a charming prelude to a chess game by Jan de Bray, in which the artist looks out at Heyblocq, inviting him to play, with a text lamenting that, without a friend, a chess set is useless. One of the album’s best-known pages features lines from Jacob Cats, one of the great names of Dutch poetry, next to a sketch from Joannes Cool of a woman in a cap. The polymath Anna Maria van Schurman – one of the first women to attend a European university – contributed a somewhat intimidating page in Arabic and ancient Greek, two of the fourteen languages she knew: ‘A day is better for the scholar than a lifetime for the ignorant’, the Arabic translates. Below, in Greek, Schurman adds the motto that she chose for herself, and with which she deterred a number of suitors: ‘My love has been crucified’. The book is bound to match Heyblocq’s lofty aspirations, in black leather stamped with fine gold. As Vandommele cheerfully acknowledges, it’s a stupendous exercise in social climbing – but aren’t we lucky that Heyblocq strove so assiduously to record his place in such an illustrious firmament?

Jacob Cats’s verse and Joannes Cool’s sketch, from the most famous album amicorum – compiled by Jacobus Heyblocq.

Particularly in Germany, the album amicorum persisted through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Beethoven kept one, as did Mozart (although he only collected eleven dedications), and Goethe. Composers made a habit of leaving musical sketches in Stammbücher. Hadyn, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Schubert all wrote out snatches of music for their friends, and some of Liszt’s autographs for his adoring female fans filled whole pages of musical manuscript.

Having originated among male nobility in the sixteenth century, and become a middle-class practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the nineteenth the album amicorum was seen as thoroughly bourgeois, and a largely female pursuit. Vandommele speculates that, by formalising social approaches, while allowing for statements of admiration, affection and esteem to be offered, it served a useful purpose for young women who had to avoid the slightest hint of impropriety in their contacts with the opposite sex. In the twentieth century, as society relaxed, such caution became unnecessary, and the album amicorum once again evolved,

becoming first an adolescent girl’s friendship book, then the poesie album of verses sometimes kept by younger Dutch and Belgian children. One immediate descendant, the autograph book, enjoyed its own heyday in the middle years of the twentieth century. Like the alba, such books were normally landscape in format and meant for collecting signatures, but the resemblance ends there. For your autograph book, thrust into stars’ hands at stage doors, isn’t really a record of who you know, but who you don’t. The acquaintanceships that it memorialises begin and end in the few seconds it takes to scrawl a name. The alba amicorum, signed with some ceremony and often with great labour, record something enduring and meaningful. For today’s unselfconscious statements of enduring friendship or inspiring statements, we must turn to our online social networks, which, like the alba amicorum, first proliferated between university students, semiformally locking in friendships and making their social capital visible to all, before spreading into the wider population. And just as friends used to seal their fellowship with an inspiring quotation and a sketch, so today some strengthen their bonds by exchanging motivational statements set against majestic landscapes or cat pictures. In Wittenberg and Amsterdam, they had blank books; today we have Facebook and LinkedIn, which, despite their many advantages, are less substantial than their hard-copy precursor in its heyday. After all, no-one has yet plea-bargained their way from murder to manslaughter by presenting the judge with a list of their Facebook friends.

CHAPTER 13

SEVERAL GEMS Industrial observations, Germany and Italy 1598 The late-medieval era saw a boom in European inventiveness. Eyeglasses were created in Pisa in the 1280s and reached Venice by 1301. Soon after came mechanical and striking clocks, with ingenious mechanisms (Paris got its first in 1370) and ever more powerful and complex mills, ships, pumps, guns, cannons and lifting machines. Such progress, of course, was accompanied by a growth in technical drawing. Most of the surviving examples are final drawings – frustratingly anonymous – but one set of notebooks does survive (from a slightly later period), giving an insight into both the creative process and how technology travelled, transforming Europe’s cities, culture and economy. In January 1598 Heinrich Schickhardt set out on a trip around the industrial towns of northern Italy. He had spent his working life in Stuttgart and Mömpelgard (now Montbéliard in France), the principal cities of the Duchy of Württemberg, as Duke Friedrich’s master builder: architect, town planner, engineer and all-purpose industrial problem-solver. This role made him prominent, and comfortably off, and yet something made him trade the comforts of home for the midwinter snows of the Alpine passes. To find out why, I spoke to Professor Markus Popplow, a historian at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie. ‘There were no engineering schools, or architectural schools, at the time,’ he told me. ‘Travelling was more or less obligatory.’ To pick up new ideas, in particular from the industrial hot spots of Italy and the Netherlands, you had to go and see them with your own eyes. The duke knew that his realm would benefit from the ideas that Schickhardt would bring back, so he despatched him (in winter, when his building projects were on hold). He had a wide brief: to keep an eye open for anything which might be useful for canals, salt mines, bridges, castles,

mills and towns. Schickhardt was ready for it – he had won his position by being a skilled generalist* – and in this innocent era, predating patents, copyrights and licence agreements, such a mission was not viewed as industrial espionage. Schickhardt braved the icy roads, riding south-west and carrying quires of paper, roughly A5 in size, folded into handy gatherings, in which he would sketch, keep a diary, and make diagrams of the machines that he encountered along the way. Their pages give a vivid impression of a curious, expert mind on a mission.

Schickhardt’s diary opens with an itinerary, describing the route from Stuttgart to Venice, via Ulm, Augsburg, Innsbruck, the Brenner pass, Trento and Verona, a journey that took him over a month. He began taking notes as soon as he saw anything unfamiliar, or useful, so the first drawing comes from Ulm, a thriving commercial centre, only two days’ ride from Stuttgart. Here he details two water displacement machines (the first of many he records). One is an ingenious waterwheel-powered pump, driving five pistons via a crankshaft; the other a scoop, driven by a horse, which lifts water into a raised channel. It’s a schematic drawing rather than a blueprint, but in the accompanying notes Schickhardt carefully records the size of each component, so a mechanic would be able to reconstruct the whole engine. He estimates how much water each machine pumps when at work (‘196 Ulm buckets’ an hour) and, conscientiously, the name of their maker, Jerg Buohmiller.

Schickhardt’s curious eye captures a device for deepening canals, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa – slightly exaggerating the lean.

At Landsberg, west of Munich, Schickhardt spots an interesting design for a roofed bridge, and drafts more carefully, producing a technical drawing that any builder could work with. But it is over the Alps, at Trento, that he gets busy, discovering much to admire, and much to record. First he shows another facet of his drawing skill, with a sketch of the Castello di Buon Consiglio that, in the cold open air, must sorely have tested his fingertips. Then he produces a sketch and a plan of Santa Maria Maggiore which would, again, allow for it to be faithfully replicated back home. The slightly shaky perspective doesn’t matter in the least. In Padua – back down at sea level – he paid for a boat to take him to Venice, making schematic drawings of the lock gates in its harbour, a horse-drawn winch for lifting boats out of the water, and an ingenious street lantern. Once in Venice, Schickhardt produces a loving technical drawing of a machine for deepening canals without draining them: it ingeniously employs worm gears, cogwheels, and rack-and-pinion cage gears to make a grabber that can be lowered, closed, raised and emptied without getting the

operators’ feet wet. He also captured some of the city’s most notable buildings – the Rialto Bridge, St Mark’s Campanile. But Venice didn’t detain him for long. He had too many other places to see. Back on the road again, he stops briefly in Milan, but is more interested by the small town of Casale Monferrato, eighty kilometres beyond, which had just been refortified by its ruler, Louis Gonzaga, the Duke of Nevers. The fortress’s innovative hexagonal ground plan fascinated Schickhardt and he took extensive notes about its construction: the materials, the labour, the cost, the time it had taken, the depth and width of the moat. Then he recorded the size of the garrison, and its command structure, before speculating that the Duke might have been better advised to spend less on fortifications and more on soldiery. And there the first of Schickhardt’s four travel journals ends. He returned to Stuttgart, no doubt inspired by the technology and architecture that he’d seen in his short trip. The Duke debriefed him, and must have seen much of interest in the notebook, for he was a forward-thinking ruler, who well understood the potential value of bridges, pumps, mills, moats and ramparts.

When, the following year, Friedrich set out on a diplomatic mission to Rome, he took Schickhardt along with him. Schickhardt’s journal of this second journey survives in much better shape than that of the first. It opens in Milan, and briefly revisits the fortifications at Casale before continuing south to Genoa. There the party pauses for a while and Schickhardt finds much to write about, and draw, including the Palazzo Tursi, which he rendered in a 45° isometric drawing with delicate ink washes, bringing out the detail of the relief. Floorplans and drawings of the palazzo’s ornament follow: perhaps this building caught Friedrich’s eye as a potential model? Once again, Schickhardt notes not only details of construction, but the cost – eighty thousand crowns. Presently the party continues southward, and at Pisa encounters a building which piques Schickhardt’s curiosity – and needs no introduction. Schickhardt’s sketch of its tower doesn’t quite play fair – he doubles the angle of the lean – but his notes betray a great interest in this marvel of physics and architecture.

The party proceeds to Rome, where Friedrich occupies himself with diplomacy and Schickhardt draws St Peter’s and the Palazzo del Quirinale – the latter with a surreal, dreamlike air. However, his Rome notebook contains more writing than drawing. He visits church after church, describing each assiduously, showing much more interest in contemporary buildings than in the ancient Roman survivals that dotted the city. As ever, he keeps his eyes open for mechanical curiosities: a wheelchair, for instance, belonging to Pope Clement VIII, who was afflicted by gout: Schickhardt describes its steering and braking, operated by the handles on the armrests. A floating water mill on the Tiber is depicted in an easy-tounderstand cutaway. After Friedrich’s mission was completed, the party returned home by a circuitous route taking in Ancona, Bologna, Florence and Mantua. All the way, Schickhardt carried on drawing: page after page of fortifications, coaches, mill gears, fountains, statues, facades and floor plans. A stop at the Medici pleasure gardens of Pratolino seems to have delighted him, and he hastily captured the mechanisms of its automated pipe organ, powered entirely by water. In Ferrara he drew a church, a palazzo, a lime kiln, a machine for spinning silk, a plan of the city’s fortifications and an olive oil press. In Mantua, a plan for a coach with suspension. One imagines, after hundreds of miles of travel over the Alps and around Italy, Friedrich’s party would have seen the value in a comfortable ride.

Plan for a coach with suspension.

By May 1600 Schickhardt was back home, and his first task was to organise the notes and drawings that he had made. He gathered up the small quires of paper that he had been using as notebooks on the road, and bound them up into volumes which he labelled A to D. Paginating all four notebooks, he created a dramatic title page for C, with the heading ‘Several gems that I, Heinrich Schickhardt, loved on my Italian travels’. Although the sheets were rebound in the nineteenth century (so we do not see the notebooks exactly as Schickhardt made them), the tattered, stained pages record not only their creation in the field in Italy, but heavy use back home. And what use he put them to.

Despite the absence of flights of fancy, Schickhardt’s notebooks resemble Leonardo’s in their curiosity and open-mindedness, the surprising areas of interest, and the combination of written notes and observational drawings. Both men shared a fascination with gears, ratchets, levers and cogs. But they differ in the outcomes. Leonardo’s notebooks, as we have

seen, became a dead end for incredible ideas, locked away from view. But Schickhardt, generously funded by Friedrich and his heirs, went on a building spree. In the twenty years before his trip he had completed about sixteen projects. In the thirty-odd years after, there were more than fifty. In Mömpelgard, in Popplow’s words, he ‘devised a whole industrial quarter’, with a paper mill, a fulling mill, water supplies and drainage. He imported new Renaissance styles as he built and rebuilt castles and churches. He built tunnels, gardens, fountains, mills and houses, and two whole towns from the ground up, rebuilding Oppenau, which had burned down in 1615, and planning Freudenstadt, a walled new town with hundreds of buildings on streets arranged around a central square – to this day the very epitome of practical, comfortable small-town living. Schickhardt’s notebooks were also pressed into use to develop local industry. He turned his rough sketches into fine technical drawings, on loose sheets so they could easily be shared with the artisans involved. One drawing of a pump, for example, is shaded, coloured and detailed so that metalworker, stonemason and carpenter could work together to build an operational version: wheel, crankshaft, levers, water level and pipework are all perfectly clear. We rarely consider the Renaissance in terms of its technological advances but the era’s engineers made much more of a difference to the lives of ordinary people than the great painters or humanist thinkers. Homes were now built with fireplaces and glazed windows; cities with water supplies. New pump designs allowed mines to be sunk, and salt, coal and metal ores to be extracted; new mill designs allowed water and wind power to be harnessed to drain marshes, press olives, or saw planks; new industries – not least, paper manufacture – spread across the continent. As Peter Frankopan noted in The Silk Roads, ‘the roots of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century lay in the industrious revolution of the post-plague world’. Historians of technology recognise Schickhardt as a major figure in the spread of mechanical and industrial design – even though, as Popplow is at pains to point out, ‘he didn’t actually invent anything’, and the machines which he made all succumbed to rust and woodworm long ago. What was he like? ‘We know that he was organised, a good communicator, open to ideas, but it’s hard to get a sense of his personality or character otherwise,’ Popplow admits. But in one respect we can see that he was remarkable: ‘He

recorded everything. We have an inventory of everything he owned, his library, drawings of his houses, lists of things people gave him, diagrams, sketchbooks.’ The miraculous survival of these papers gives us a unique insight into the workings of a Europe on the cusp of the industrial age. The thirty years after Schickhardt’s return from Italy were blighted by war. Württemberg lost about one-third of its territory in 1629, and after a Protestant force was defeated at Nördlingen five years later, imperial armies entered Stuttgart with vengeance in mind. Schickhardt, then seventy-six years old, is said to have been killed while protecting a relative from being raped by a soldier. It would not have comforted him to know that these armies depended on notebooks as much as he had. Paybooks, muster rolls and provisioning ledgers were now crucial parts of an army’s equipment; every company had a Musterschreiber, and every regiment a secretary. The violence of the Thirty Years’ War also spilled out into northern Italy. Spanish armies besieged the fort at Casale Monferrato for seven months in 1628, and another eighteen from 1629 to 1630. Both times the garrison held out; those expensive fortifications, which had so fascinated Schickhardt, proved their worth. * As were nearly all engineers at this time. The exception to the rule was gunnery, which had become a specialised profession, reserved for those who knew both metallurgy and chemistry and were willing risk the consequences of getting either wrong.

CHAPTER 14

‘LET HIM NOT STAY LONG’ Travellers and their notebooks, 1470–present In his mid-forties, surveying his many ‘paper books’, the English polymath Francis Bacon found that he had no fewer than twenty-eight in use at once, including a common-place book, a zibaldonestyle collection of excerpts, nine notebooks for different areas of the law, and others for his household accounts and philosophical and scientific inquiries. He encouraged his readers to make use of similar notebooks, and in his 1587 essay On Travel he offered note-taking advice to young men heading overseas: It is a strange thing, that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen, but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land-travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered, than observation. Let diaries, therefore, be brought in use. Having travelled widely in Europe, Bacon was well qualified to make this suggestion, but in truth it was hardly necessary, for although the word ‘diary’ itself was a fresh coinage, travellers had been recording their travels in notebooks for hundreds of years. William Worcester, the secretary of the respected soldier Sir John Fastolf (the historical model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff), had done so in the 1470s, as he embarked on a series of journeys around southern England, from St Michael’s Mount to Great Yarmouth. A man who found interest in nearly everything he saw, Worcester made copious notes in a distinctive but highly practical format. At this time, ready-made notebooks were hard to find in England, so Worcester improvised. He took folio-sized sheets of paper (similar to our

A4) and folded several of them double so the longer edges met. This gave him a tall booklet which offered two advantages. Firstly, the stiff and narrow gathering would hold its shape as the writer held it in one hand while wielding their pen with the other. Secondly, it could be slipped into a sleeve or pouch – which gives this format its name: ‘holster book’.* Worcester kept the completed gatherings, and after his final journey he had them sewn and bound into a single thick volume of 332 pages now known as his Itineraria. Modern readers find the pages hard to decipher, for Worcester mostly wrote in ungrammatical Latin, with frequent English and French interpolations, in the crabbed hand that palaeographers call Anglicana. But when transcribed and translated, his notes give us fascinating insights into his world, and in particular life in Bristol, the town where he had grown up. In August 1480, for instance, Worcester returned to see his recently widowed sister and, perhaps with time hanging heavy on his hands, proceeded to survey the city. He paced out every street and many of the buildings; he detailed shops, marketplaces, churches and houses; he glossed them with childhood memories, local history, and folk tales, and created a portrait of urban life which historians have found invaluable ever since its rediscovery in a Cambridge college library.* He also went out of town to survey the surrounding country. On one page he visits Castleton, present-day Clifton: The hill-fort upon the high ground not a quarter of a mile distant from Ghyston Cliff, as it is called by the common people, was founded there before the time of William the Conqueror by the Saracens or Jews, by a certain Ghyst, a giant portrayed on the ground. And because so great a hill-fort was probably built in ancient times, it remains to this day as a large circle of great stones piled up, and small ones scattered around, most remarkable to see; the said stones lying thus, in an orderly ring and great circle. Sadly, the stone circle so evocatively described (and fancifully credited) has since vanished, presumably recycled into some sturdy Georgian building. But William’s 126-page record of the city makes him one of the first urban topographers, and illustrates a common paradox – that historians often learn

more about a place from notes made by visitors than from records left by residents. Outsiders tend to be more acute observers than natives. William vividly ties history and myth to the landscape he crosses. Caves, hills, rivers and cliffs all come with their own legends; the landscape prompts histories of battle, saints’ lives and the doings of noble warriors. Fords, bridges, inns and ferries are detailed for the traveller’s convenience, and he assiduously records his expenditure: two Spanish onions for a penny, biscuit cakes for a penny, two cucumbers for five pence. After a month in Bristol, Worcester evidently decided that he had offered his sister enough filial support and rode back home to Norwich, where he bound his holster books up into a single. collated volume. A year later he died, at about sixty-seven, leaving it unread for centuries.

They may have been neglected but Worcester’s holster books stand out for their survival: if they come down to us at all, travellers’ notes and journals usually do so through neat copies or published editions rather than the version written on the spot. To give one famous example, the Abbasid ambassador Ibn Fadlan travelled through what is now Russia in the early tenth century, but his invaluable account comes down to us thanks to a single remaining copy, made three hundred years later. The roads of Europe grew steadily busier through the sixteenth century, but remained perilous. Travellers’ accounts frequently tell of banditry and theft, with well-built gallows a great source of civic pride. Thomas Coryat, an English contemporary of Bacon (and Schickhardt), wrote of ‘more gallowes and wheels betwitxt Mainz and Cologne than ever I saw’, with the bones of criminals ‘miserably broken asunder’. Only the brave would set out without an armed escort, and few journeyed for pleasure. One who did was Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona, who left Rome to take an extensive sweep through Europe in 1517–18, employing an Italian cleric called Antonio de Beatis to keep a journal of their adventures. A cousin of Isabella d’Este, the Mantuan countess whose portrait Leonardo had never got round to painting, d’Aragona was well connected enough to have been made cardinal at the age of nineteen. Now in his forties, he had both a love of art and a strong desire to mix with royalty, and was happy to go far to indulge them. His party travelled in a huge loop, over the Alps to Bavaria,

taking in a string of Austrian and German cities before criss-crossing the Low Countries, northern France, the Loire, Provence and the Ligurian coast. De Beatis’s journal details every stop. In Innsbruck they admired the city’s distinctive water supplies, at Augsburg they marvelled at the luxuriously decorated seat of the Fugger family, Germany’s leading bankers. In Brussels they watched Raphael’s tapestries being woven, and marvelled at the ‘bizarre things’ in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. They met the French king François, and at Amboise visited Leonardo da Vinci, inspecting what was to be his last painting, the mysterious Saint John the Baptist. In the French Alps they saw a mysterious shroud, which apparently showed a ghostly image of Christ (it was later moved to Turin), then at Marseilles they admired the impressive warships of the Corsairs. It was the trip of a lifetime, both rewarding and exhausting. Shortly after his return, the cardinal took to his bed, immobilised by gout. A year later he was dead, and the unemployed de Beatis was reduced to making copies of his Itineraries for sale. De Beatis’s contemporary, Albrecht Dürer travelled widely in Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands, keeping a journal on the last trip and making hundreds of sketches. His original Tagebuch is unfortunately long lost, but two copies made after his death reveal how much Dürer paid for food and lodging, which artworks he visited, which artists he met, and how much he lost gambling. In Brussels he writes with passion of looted Aztec gold – ‘I have never in my life seen anything that gave my heart such delight as these things, for I saw amongst them marvellously skilful objects and was amazed at the subtle ingeniousness of people in foreign lands’ – and in Ghent he climbed the tower of St Bavo’s to glory in the view and reflect on his own fame.

Dürer’s sketch of two lions encountered in a zoo in Ghent.

As printing spread, booksellers realised that travellers’ tales would find a wide market. Readers had always shown an interest in faraway lands – many Florentine zibaldoni included excerpts from Il milione, the book of Marco Polo’s travels, written in a Genoese prison in 1300, just as paper notebooks became widely available. Now, they could enjoy more substantial stories of explorers, merchants, sailors and adventurers. Bacon would have known many, Thomas Coryat for one, whose Coryat’s Crudities (‘hastily gobbled up in five months travels in France, Savoy, Italy, Helvetia alias Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands’) competed with George Sandys’s Relation of a Journey and William Lithgow’s Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations. All of them presented day-by-day accounts derived directly from their journals (none of the originals survive) emphasising the dangers of the road, and the strangeness of what they saw and who they met.

As well as this vicarious fascination, such narratives had immediate economic relevance in an age of colonisation. Richard Hakluyt collected as many as he could in anthologies conceived to encourage exploitation of the New World. Shakespeare’s Tempest drew on such accounts, and the everincreasing importance of international travel ensured that a steady stream appeared over the course of the seventeenth century. Some took the form of a day-by-day diary, others were rewritten as a continuous narrative, but all originated in battered but practical notebooks filled with on-the-spot detail. Their readership in turn helped establish a new literary genre. A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, the 1712 memoir of a privateer named Edward Cooke, evoked sea battles, new lands and strange beasts. One episode, about a marooned Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk, gave a debt-stricken London writer the germ of something more inventive: the title page of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which first came out in 1719, gives no hint that the story within is fiction, and the abundant detail with which Defoe packs his tale – drawing on accounts of more shipwrecks than Selkirk’s alone – convinced many readers of its veracity. Its ingenious structure, in which Crusoe’s early years on the island are written in diary form, added to its credibility.

Edward Cooke’s journal of his voyage to the South Seas was the prime inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe.

Only when one of Defoe’s local rivals responded with satire did readers know for sure that Robinson Crusoe had been made up: in Charles Gildon’s Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D—De F–, of London, the author is surprised at midnight by his protagonists Crusoe and Friday and forced to eat two volumes of his own works as a punishment for his poor characterisations. From this point the travel journal became inextricably entwined with the story of the novel. And as it did, happily, more of the original notebooks start to survive.

Herman Melville – unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne – kept no daily diary when at home, but travelling was a different matter, and his detailed journals of a three-year trip to the South Seas resulted in a pair of successful non-fiction books, Typee and Omoo. Sadly, those originals have been lost, but his journals of later trips, made when he was struggling to keep his literary career going, survive. Melville kept a small notebook in his pocket at all times, and wrote up a more formal journal each night. An entry made when he visited Oxford in 1849 reveals not only the familiar awe of the American tourist, but also a restless analysis and search for underlying meaning: Learning in Oxford lodged like a baron. Garden to every college. Lands for centuries never violated by sordid labor – profane hand of enterprise – sacred to beauty & tranquility… Every college has dining halls & chapel – soul & body equally provided for. Grass smooth as green baize of a billiard table. I know nothing more fitted by a mild & beautiful rebuke to chastise the sophomorean pride of America. Even in this short extract, you can hear the intellectual cogs whirring: the observation of telling detail, the application of the revealing simile, the connection of the concrete to the abstract. At the time of his visit, Melville was planning another work which would not only draw on his earlier travel journals, but also locate itself firmly in the practice of common-placing recommended by Erasmus. Moby-Dick does not, as is often claimed, open with the immortal line ‘Call me Ishmael’, but with eighteen pages of etymology and extracts drawn from all kinds of dictionaries, encyclopedias, histories, scripture, memoirs, poems, speeches and letters. Purportedly ‘supplied by a sub-sub librarian’, these pages reveal Melville (or perhaps Ishmael) to be an enthusiastic common-placer, extracting from the Book of Genesis up to Darwin’s recent account of the Beagle’s voyage, in a boldly experimental opening which hints at the main narrative’s divisive juxtaposition of reportage and epic. For Ishmael frequently interrupts his story – Ahab’s quest for the White Whale – to digress on the gory realities of whalehunting in journalistic detail. Many reviewers found this mingling of fiction

and non-fiction hard to digest, and Moby-Dick sold slowly. Before its rediscovery and re-evaluation in the 1920s, Melville’s innovation would inspire few if any imitators. Far more commerically successful than Melville, Mark Twain carried notebooks everywhere too, having got into the habit while training to become the ‘cub’ pilot of a Mississippi steamboat. One stressful night, his chief, one Horace Bixby, tested young Samuel Clemens – Twain’s real name – on the stopping points above New Orleans. When the boy failed to recall any, Bixby offered the advice which Clemens subsequently lived by. ‘My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.’ Soon Clemens ‘had a note-book that fairly bristled with the names of towns, “points”, bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc’, and was well on his way to qualifying as a pilot himself. As Mark Twain, he stayed in the habit, keeping notes of everything, including, as they occurred to him, the pithy asides which made him one of the era’s most popular authors. He experimented with different formats, including a custom-made model whose pages had small protrusions: on completing the page, he would rip the tab off, making it easy to find his place again next time.

One of Mark Twain’s tabbed notebooks. Here, the author is toying with character names – ‘Siphillis Briggs’ seems to have been rejected.

On a trip to England in 1872, he experimented with another ingenious system known as ‘Francis’ Highly Improved Manifold Writer’. These notebooks used interleaved sheets of double-sided carbon paper to allow the user to write in duplicate or triplicate ‘with more ease and greater facility than a single letter with an ordinary pen and Ink’. Aimed at the ‘Mercantile, Professional, and Traveling part of the Community’ rather than the creative, the Manifold Writer allowed Twain to make two copies of his notes in the same notebook and, when it was completed, he pulled out every other page and sent them back to his wife, so that both had a full account of his travels.

Through the twentieth century, travel writers celebrated or mythologised their notebooks. In November 1956 the American writer A.

E. Hotchner lunched at the Paris Ritz with Charley Ritz, its owner, and a friend, Ernest, who had spent time there before the war. Much later, he remembered the occasion: Charley asked if Ernest was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room, left there in 1930. Ernest did not remember storing the trunk but he did recall that in the 1920s Louis Vuitton had made a special trunk for him. Ernest had wondered what had become of it. Charley had the trunk brought up to his office, and after lunch Ernest opened it. It was filled with a ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence and, on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: ‘The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!’ There were two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren in Paris when he lived there in the ’20s. Ernest had filled them with his careful handwriting while sitting in his favorite café, nursing a café crème. The notebooks described the places, the people, the events of his penurious life. Ernest Hemingway then spent four years mining those rediscovered notebooks for his memoir, A Moveable Feast, wherein he drew a vivid picture of them in use: The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. This would be the last book Hemingway finished: he committed suicide in April 1961.

The travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor also wrote his notebooks into the story. As a restless eighteen-year-old he had walked across Europe, carrying a backpack with just a few clothes – and pencils, drawing pads, notebooks, The Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace. All

the way from Rotterdam to Istanbul (which he always called Constantinople) he wrote and drew, but the backpack, notebook included, was stolen in Munich in January 1934. ‘I started a fresh lot immediately,’ he later wrote, ‘in thick German stiff-covered notebooks and drawing pads.’ With them, he captured his vivid impressions; describing himself as ‘unboreable’ he found interest in everything he came across – people, buildings, clothes, songs, words, customs, mythology, religion and history. All the way, he depended on the hospitality of strangers, moving across the continent as a guest, begging introductions from one host to another down the road, and repaying them with boyish charm and the sheer novelty of his presence. In Athens, in 1937, he struck up a love affair with a Moldavian princess, twelve years older, called Balaşa Cantacuzène. Living with her in Greece and then at her rural manor in Romania, he started to turn his notes into a book, but on the outbreak of war decided to return to Britain – leaving behind one notebook, ‘the Green Diary’, bought in Bratislava in March 1934, which recorded his travels from there to Greece.War, and then the descent of the Iron Curtain, separated him from Cantacuzène for decades: the lovers would not meet again until 1965, by which time Leigh Fermor, settled in Kardamyli, in Greece, had established himself as a celebrated prose stylist. Cantacuzène had fared less well. Her home confiscated, she had been relocated to a flat in Bucharest – but in the frantic quarter-hour she had been given to collect her belongings, she had packed the Green Diary.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s lost and found Green Diary, from 1934, with Hungarian vocabulary and a sketch of an Orthodox priest.

With this pre-war relic miraculously back in hand, Leigh Fermor returned to his youthful footslog and – eventually – produced two memoirs of it, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, which brilliantly evoke a Europe at once more violent and more civilised than its post-war incarnation. They clearly drew on the Green Diary and notes that Leigh Fermor had made from other journals. However, the books owe even more to the pains that he took at his desk, drafting, redrafting, reworking, and adding adjectives until his work attained a seductive poetic density. Nonetheless the Green Diary, now in the National Library of Scotland (and digitised online), tells us a great deal about the power of the notebook as a physical object. Broken covers, held crudely together by fat straps of silver packing tape, sandwich more than five hundred yellowing pages. The cloth binding has retreated at the corners, and the diary lives in a slipcase, also held together with silver tape, bearing on the front a warning in fat red marker pen – VITAL DIARY KEEP IN 2ND LEFT HAND DRAWER. Evidently this notebook had become a trophy, or a treasure, over the years – never untouchable, but sacred for the experience and memories that it embodied.

One spread towards the end evokes the journey better than any single passage of prose. Like many diarists, Leigh Fermor would compose daily entries in the front of the notebook and use the pages at the back for notes, lists, doodles, addresses, reminders and so on. On the two-hundred-andfifty-third spread we find a list of ‘Books to get at home’ – histories of Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia – and a rapid sketch of an Orthodox monk met at Daphni, a Byzantine monastery near Athens. Opposite them is a list of useful words in Hungarian – or, at least, the words which Leigh Fermor found useful when passing through. Cat, horse, dog, terrible, wonderful, hospitality, freedom, youth, age, young, old, king, queen, prince, count, baron, sleepy, thirsty, hungry all have their translations supplied, a list that efficiently evokes the conversations he must have struck up as he paid for hospitality in the currency of conversation.

In 1970, while working on A Time of Gifts, Leigh Fermor met Bruce Chatwin for the first time. A generation younger, but similarly endowed with charm, curiosity and striking looks, Chatwin was then wrestling with the manuscript of a book called The Nomadic Alternative, in which he explored the origins of wanderlust, contrasting a natural nomadic lifestyle with the tension and violence of settled civilisations. Despite (or because of) Chatwin’s many research trips, wide reading and personal passion for the subject, the manuscript sat painfully, as Chatwin later said, ‘in a nebulous no-man’s land between scientific theory and autobiography’. In 1972, when he submitted the manuscript, both his agent and publisher found it unreadable. The book was spiked. But that visit became the first of many, and Leigh Fermor and Chatwin struck up a deep friendship as they walked in the hills around Kardamyli, discussing, according to Leigh Fermor, ‘abstruse art-forms and movements of thought, history, geology, anthropology and all their kindred sciences… John Donne or Rimbaud… paleontological riddles… the earliest whereabouts of Mankind’. Chatwin would write as they talked. As his wife Elizabeth later remembered: ‘It was a disaster if he lost a notebook. Because everything went into them, what he was reading, remember to call so-and-so, telephone numbers, recipes, names of trees or flowers. Very small drawings, more like etchings or engravings.’ Retreating to a borrowed

room with his notebooks, Chatwin then used the larger pages of yellow legal pads to write the drafts of his books and articles before typing them up. Early in his career, according to Elizabeth, Chatwin had used ‘any old notebooks, school quaderni, that kind of thing’, before finding that ‘the French made better notebooks. The English ones were mean, were very thin, the French ones were fat, like this kind called Éléphant which I always got. He discovered the Moleskines and he never bought another thing. He had to go to Paris for them, but that was good, because he always wanted to go to Paris.’ In those agreeably sourced notebooks Chatwin made the field notes for a host of articles and three books, much more modest in scope than the epic he had discussed with Leigh Fermor: In Patagonia (a travel book with fictional elements), The Viceroy of Ouidah (a history with fictional elements) and On the Black Hill (a novel). With each his reputation grew, but he could not get the themes of his early failure out of his head. Inspiring trips to South Africa and Australia in 1983 and 1984 finally opened a possible way forward, a book which would pitch the big ideas of The Nomadic Alternative in some kind of narrative, but Chatwin knew that this risked the worst of both worlds, jamming bad anthropology into an unreadable novel. Worse yet, he had a presentiment that he was running short of time, for he was suffering from mysterious illnesses: bronchitis that wouldn’t be shaken off, and a virus that manifested itself in spots on his face. He had written, and torn up, two drafts before the solution arrived. It came by phone to Kardamyli, where Chatwin had retreated to work and recuperate in the sun. Elisabeth Sifton, his American editor, had realised what he should do. ‘He had a powerful argument he wanted to make about the origins of human culture,’ she later told Chatwin’s biographer Nicholas Shakespeare. ‘But whenever he tried to make it, the result read like a pseudo-academic ex-poet who wished to be a social scientist… I thought it ought to be intuitive and poetic rather than logical. I said: “Instead of considering the notebooks as a problem, why not consider them as part of the solution? Why don’t you just use them?’’’

Travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin – the man who turned notebooks into principal characters, and gave us all Moleskines.

Chatwin had already written himself into the first-person narrative as an English writer named Bruce, but Sifton’s solution meant that he had to write the notebooks in too. And so the fictional Bruce travels with a copy of Theodor Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia in hand, just as Chatwin had, and stays in a borrowed caravan, just as Chatwin had. Once he’s installed there, the book moves into its most distinctive phase: I put my pencils in a tumbler and a Swiss Army knife beside them. I unpacked some exercise pads and, with the obsessive neatness that

goes with the beginning of a project, I made three neat stacks of my ‘Paris’ notebooks… Context thus established, Chatwin presents the second half of the novel, From the Notebooks, as a seemingly informal collection of notes and excerpts that at first sight resembles a humanist commonplace. Any given page may contain a Bible verse, an archaeological reference, a quotation from an academic, a description of an encounter from Chatwin’s travels, and so on. But Chatwin – with Sifton, who spent a week with him going through the text line-byline – artfully sequenced the notes to suit his argument, steering the reader towards the conclusions that he had reached over decades of travelling, thinking and writing. Excerpts from anthropologists and philosophers sit next to Chatwin’s wild hypotheses, and when the sequence threatens to become too heavy, Chatwin drops in an ironic anecdote to prick the balloon. By turns erudite and gossipy, the notebooks not only dramatise Chatwin’s thought processes, but assert their own character before the book returns to the framing narrative for its moving finale. By framing his theories in a novel, Chatwin freed himself from the factchecking responsibilities of the academic, and by employing the novelist’s techniques, he could sell those theories more convincingly to his reader. This sleight-of-hand makes The Songlines one of the most ambitious combinations of fiction and non-fiction since Moby-Dick. But where most reviewers of Melville’s novel had been irritated by this juxtaposition, Chatwin’s readers mostly responded with praise, acknowledging the gaps in his argument but admiring the artistry with which he presented it. Rave reviews led to the book hitting the bestseller charts around the world on publication in 1987, sparking as it did a global interest in Aboriginal culture and beliefs. But in Alice Springs, where many of the originals of Chatwin’s characters still lived, people reacted differently. He had spoken to them like a reporter, but had written them into a novel – which none of them knew anything about, until it hit the bookshops. They felt misrepresented at best, and in a couple of cases, where Chatwin had taken against people he met, his thinly veiled portrayals verged on the libellous. Whether they had been painted favourably or not, everyone agreed that, of all the book’s characters, the fictional Bruce bore the least resemblance to reality: intrepid when the

real Chatwin had been timid, charming when Chatwin had been rude, a welcome guest when Chatwin had in reality gatecrashed. Many of Bruce’s insights should, they said, have been credited to others, who had worked in the outback for somewhat longer than the nine weeks he had managed. But all acknowledged that Chatwin had at least attempted to describe the Aboriginal songlines, that he had sympathetically evoked the local clash of cultures for his international audience, and that the subsequent worldwide exposure of Aboriginal artists and culture owed much to his book. In any case, Chatwin was barely aware of the ill feeling. His health failing badly, he filled his last months with a final novel, the lapidary Utz, before dying of AIDS-related illness in January 1989 at only forty-eight. His contemporaries mourned not just the man but the books that he would not now write. With the Leigh Fermors, Elizabeth buried his ashes under an olive tree beside a Byzantine chapel in the hills above Kardamyli. His papers, including forty-one Parisian moleskines and five other notebooks, are now held by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University – a small irony, given that Chatwin, completely unsuited to formal study, never completed a degree. More associated with notebooks than any other English-language writer, Chatwin used them in the same ways that authors had for centuries. Like Boccaccio, he had kept zibaldoni of his wide-ranging reading, laying down seams of knowledge that could be mined years later. Like Petrarch, he had developed a practice of revision and redrafting that enabled him to hone his work. Like William Worcester, he had connected a landscape’s physical reality with the stories that the locals told of it. Like Defoe, he had used notebook entries to add interest to a first-person narrative. Like Melville and Twain and Leigh Fermor and a host of others, he had used notebooks to capture encounters, record impressions and train himself to pick the right words on the spot. But by giving his notebooks so prominent a role in the finished work he had done something new: he made them totems of the free-spirited creative. Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin’s biographer, rightly points to his becoming, posthumously, ‘an icon of the backpacker’, ‘the promotable ideal of the literate traveller’, someone who ‘set free other writers and encouraged them not to be tamed by conventional boundaries’. Playing each of these roles, he carries the notebook as an essential prop. And,

knowingly or not, when he went to Alice Springs he had followed Francis Bacon’s advice, four centuries old, to the letter: Then he must have such a servant, or tutor, as knoweth the country…. Let him carry with him also, some card or book, describing the country where he travelleth; which will be a good key to his inquiry. Let him keep also a diary. Let him not stay long. * The paper historian Orietta da Rold persuasively argues that this became a common format in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. * William’s assiduous note-taking, a habit formed in the years spent managing Fastolf’s business, also extended to his intellectual life. In other notebooks he recorded both the course of his reading – Chaucer, Boccaccio, Cicero and many others – and the sources of his books. We know who he borrowed or bought them from, who he lent them to, and what he thought of them. Such detailed accounting of facts and ideas would not have stood out in Florence; in England, it made him exceptional.

CHAPTER 15 THE WASTE BOOK Mathematics, Lincolnshire 1612 By 1612, a century after Erasmus had recommended that a student should ‘provide oneself with an enormous and very varied supply of illustrations… ready for use at a moment’s notice’, commonplacing had become not just an educational tool (and a rhetorical resource for the verbose), but also a route to self-improvement for the pious. It was understood that if you took the trouble to observe, copy and order the wisdom of scripture, or of worthy theologians, your soul would benefit from the exercise. So when a thirty-year-old Lincolnshire rector named Barnabas Smith opened his hefty new notebook for the first time, and started to fill it, he probably had two intentions. Firstly, it would help him organise his weekly sermons; secondly, it would better him, morally, and thereby improve his chances in the afterlife. Smith served as the rector of the parish of St Mary’s in North Witham, a tiny village overlooked by the distinctive pointed tower of its Norman church. With few parishioners, no children and a comfortable living, he had ample time to devote to his project, and plenty of raw material; his library consisted of around two hundred volumes of scripture and commentary. All that was required was a willingness to put the hours into transcribing line after line of improving prose, much of it in Latin. Such a serious project demanded a substantial home, and the notebook that Smith procured for it was accordingly huge. Almost a thousand pages in extent, with folio leaves a foot high, this massive block of paper might have cost as much as a pound – no small sum at the time, although well within Smith’s means. He ruled margins down the left side of each page, a long job, and every few pages added the headwords under which he planned to gather the wisdom of the ancients that would edify him and his parishioners. Deus took first place, then about three hundred and seventy more followed in alphabetical order. Smith’s common-place would run from from Absolutio (acquittal) to Zelus (jealousy), by way of such glum

categories as Adiaphora, Lachrymae, Proditor and Vadimonium (indifference, tears, traitor and bail money). One typical entry shows the scale of the task Smith had set himself, and perhaps also gives us a clue to his personality. At the top of one page, ready for the fruits of a lifetime’s reading, sits the header, Amicitias – friendship. What subject could be more positive: under what headword could you expect to find happier excerpts? But Smith finds only one, and it runs only halfway across the huge page: Ecclesiasticus 6:7: If thou gettest a friend, prove him, etc. No paean to the joys or consolations of companionship, this rather cynical line instead counsels a lack of trust – and the way Smith breaks his note off suggests that he was well familiar with the line before he came to note it down, and could confidently end it with a perfunctory etc. Smith worked inconsistently on his common-place. Some headwords get a few lines, but more often they sit in glorious solitude at the top of the page, waiting for entries that never came. When we look at the book today, in the collections of Cambridge University, we can see how Smith radically overestimated the space his project needed, and underestimated the hours that it would require. And although the headwords suggest a coherent, complete scheme of self-improvement, the entries beneath them betray Smith’s biases and preoccupations. Terrena (Earthly), for instance, is densely packed with reproachful Latin, leavened with the odd English quotation about digging one’s way to Hell. Smith collects plenty on the subject of Amor, and, of all the sins, devotes most space to Adulteria. After noting King David’s immoderate lusts, the modesty of virgins and the excellence of piety, Smith winds up with a line copied inaccurately from the Book of Proverbs: ‘The lips of strong women’ should be avoided, for they will consume a man ‘flesh and body, and make him mourn at the end’. The punchy last line reads like Smith’s final word on the subject: ‘Whores prey on fooles’. One feels for his parishioners, especially the women, for the sermons they had to sit through. But Barnabas Smith eventually gave up on the grunt work of poring through millennium-old texts in search of insight. Having collected some forty-five thousand words of wisdom – enough to fill only one-twentieth of

the huge tome’s pages – he returned the intimidating block of paper to the shelf, where it sat, unused. In June 1644, thirty-two years after he had started work on his commonplace book, Smith was widowed, at the age of sixty-three. He was not, however, ready for a solitary existence and when a parishioner suggested to him that a widow from the nearby hamlet of Woolsthorpe might be amenable to a union, Smith made an approach. Hannah Ayscough Newton seemed an excellent prospect: about thirty years of age, with some wealth to add to Smith’s own, and the two entered negotiations. The only obstacle was her three-year-old son, whom Smith did not want to accommodate, but a deal was finally struck. He settled some of his land on the infant child, she in turn arranged for him to stay with his grandparents, and early in 1645 the now unencumbered couple married. Their union, unlike Smith’s first marriage, proved fruitful, and Hannah gave birth to one son and two daughters in the seven years before Barnabas Smith died, leaving her widowed once again. Now Hannah’s oldest son could live with his mother and his infant halfsiblings, in the family home, with the late Smith’s large spiritual library and gargantuan unfinished common-place book. Never accepted by Smith, and probably traumatised by his mother’s abandonment, the boy bore both the forename and surname of his late father, the illiterate yeoman he had never known: Isaac Newton. image Unlike his barely lettered mother and grim stepfather, Isaac grew up to become an enthusiastic keeper of notebooks, and filled many over the course of a long and storied career. The earliest we have captures him as he completed grammar school in nearby Grantham, where he had learned Latin, risen to the top of his class and earned a reputation for unsociability and a quick, violent temper.* At sixteen or seventeen, he paid two pence for a tiny blank notebook which is now one of the most prized possessions of New York’s Morgan Library and Museum. Only five inches by three, and containing a hundred and sixteen pages within soft covers, this is as cheap and utilitarian as any notebook could be. And Newton, unlike Smith,

wasted no space: ink fills the pages. This notebook was heavily used, and reading it gives us a priceless insight into the young Newton’s mind. He started writing into it from both ends at once, flipping it as he did so, so the second half of the book appears upside down. A common practice of the time, Newton uses it to separate practical ideas from a collection of linguistic titbits. For the first half Newton draws heavily on a recently published book by John Bate, an engineer who collected a variety of machines, inventions and experiments into a glorious compendium entitled The Mysteries of Nature and Art. Newton raided it first for painting and drawing advice, copying down recipes for mixing paints as well as how-to advice (‘To shaddow sweetly & rowndly withall is a far greater cunning than to shaddow hard & darke; for it best to shaddow as if it were not shaddowed’). It’s easy to see these as early signs of his later obsessions with light and colour, and a trick for enlarging a picture using a grid would probably appeal to his mathematical side. image ‘Certain tricks’ in Newton’s schoolboy notebook include a formula for ‘turning water into wine’. But the notebook wouldn’t become an artist’s handbook: within a few pages, Newton is adding more recondite information. ‘To make birds drunk,’ he notes, as if this was the most normal pastime, ‘Take such meat as they love as wheat, barley &c. steepe it in lees of wine or in the juice of Hemlock, & sprincle it wher birds use to haunt.’ We learn how to engrave on flint – ‘Take a flint & write on it what you will with the tallow of an ox, afterward lay the flint in Vinegar 4 days’ – and a few pages later how to cut a glass – ‘Take a plaine Glasse, hold it up side downeward over a candle till it bee pritty hott then take a match of rope, & blowing it all the while run it ouer the Glasse as you would have it cut.’ Foreshadowing his later ocular experiments, young Isaac tells you what is bad for the eyes – ‘Garlick Onion & Leeks, over much Lettice… Hot wynes. Cold ayre. Drunknes.’ – and good for them – ‘Measurable sleepe. red roses. ffennell… to look on any greene or pleasant colours’. Then, after a series of magic tricks,

Newton plunges us into scientific observation. On the left-hand page, he locates the stars in their courses – from ‘Aldebaran, buck’s eye’ to the ‘Girdle of Andromeda’ – and on the right, charts the angle of the sun throughout the year (the young Newton was obsessed by sundials). These tiny figures, remarkably clear and accurate considering the materials he was working with, are Newton’s first surviving scientific notes. He doesn’t stare at the heavens for long. A few pages later, we’re back to how to preserve roasted meat (by drowning it in as much butter and fat ‘as will cover the meate & fill up all its intervalls to keepe out the air’) and, alarmingly, a cure for the plague that consists of ivy berry juice – only slightly poisonous – mixed with a liquid made from horse dung steeped in ale. Shortly after this improbable concoction, Newton arrives at Cambridge and starts studying mathematics. Here we find the first of many geometrical diagrams in his notes, and the first strings of algebraic equations ‘on the Resolution of straight lined triangles’. But perhaps the most immediate passage is in the last five pages of the notebook, where Newton scientifically analyses the phenomenon of speech. Describing how and where in the mouth we form consonants and vowels, he notes that ‘The filling of a very deepe flaggon with a constant streame of beere or water sounds the vowells in this order w, u, ω, o, a, e, i, y’, and then collects rhyming words for each vowel sound. In this section, he lets us hear his own voice: one page consists of the same short letter, written twice: once conventionally, and once in the distinctive mishmash of English, Greek and Hebrew characters that he used as a phonemic alphabet. By the weight of the ink one can see that Newton had to take care with this second version, writing each word slowly as he sounded it out to himself. Loving ffreind, It is commonly reported that you are sick. Truly I am sorry for that. But I am much more sorry that you got your sicknesse (for that they say too) by drinking too much. I ernestly desire you first to repent of your haveing beene drunk & then to seeke to recover

your health. And if it pleas God that you ever bee well againe then have a care to live heathfully & soberly for time to come. This will bee very well pleasing to all your freinds & especially to Your very loving friend Try reading this aloud, and enjoy the roll of Newton’s vowels: Luvin ffrend It iz komonloy ripωωrted ðat yw ar sik. Triuli Oy am sori for ðat. But Oy am mut‫ ש‬mωωr sori ðat yw got {yur} siknes (for that ðee see tu) boy dri‫צ‬kin tu mut‫ש‬. Oy ernestloy dizoir yw furst tω ripent of yur hevi‫ צ‬byn dru‫צ‬k and ðen tω syk tω rikover yur helθ. And if it plijz God that yw iver by well egeen ðen heev ee kaar tω liv helθfuli & sωωberli for toim tω kum. ðis wil by veri wel pliizi‫ צ‬tω ool yur frendz & ispe‫ש‬ali tω Your veri luvi‫ צ‬frend Even at a distance of four centuries, Newton’s rendering of ‘I’ as ‘oy’, –ly as ‘loy’, time as ‘toim’ and ‘desire’ as ‘dizoir’, and his doubled-up long vowels in ‘more’ / mωωr and ‘again’ / egeen locate the speaker firmly in the English East Midlands. image Taken as a whole, the Morgan notebook radiates a likeable, wideranging curiosity. Newton is clearly fascinated by how the world, and numbers in particular, work; he enjoys calculating the date of Easter far into the future, and the bearing that a navigator should steer on. It both brings to mind and contrasts with the notebook created 250 years earlier by Michael of Rhodes, with its hundreds of pages reiterating the same few mathematical routines. The difference is that once Newton has mastered a principle, he moves on to the next discovery, constantly setting himself problems, and then solving them with amazing precocity.

If that early notebook hints at Newton’s future intellectual development, one that he started at the end of his first year in Cambridge helps us understand his unhappiness and his famously irascible personality. On the opening pages of another tiny pocket notebook, now at Fitzwilliam College, he set down an exhaustive catalogue of his sins and faults, guarding them from curious eyes by writing in the Shelton shorthand that Pepys also adopted for his diary around the same time. Here is a brief selection: 1. 2. Eating an apple at Thy house 2. 8. Making pies on Sunday night 3. 9. Swimming in a kimnel [water tub] on Thy day 4. 10. Putting a pin in John Keys hat on Thy day to pick him. 5. 16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese. 6. 17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer 7. 18. Denying that I did so 8. 25. Robbing my mother’s box of plums and sugar 9. 46. Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne. 10. 51. Using Wilfords towel to spare my own 11. 54. Lying about a louse 12. 57. Helping Pettit to make his water watch at 12 of the clock on Saturday night We should hesitate before poking fun at the way the nineteen-year-old Newton beats himself up, and the incongruous assortment of, to us, harmless activities that he considers sinful. Using the same listing technique with which he steered his scientific inquiries, he sets out a charge sheet that allows for no acceptance at all. The list makes a particularly thorough example of what psychologists today call ‘negative self-talk’, which has been associated with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This self-destructive self-image tallies with Newton’s inability to maintain relationships, his angry responses to criticism, and the grudges which he carried for decades. Unable to forgive himself for anything, he found it impossible to forgive anyone else. image

Given such a list, and the poverty that forced him to wait upon his social betters at table, it seems unlikely that Newton enjoyed this time at Cambridge, but he certainly made the most of his time from an intellectual point of view. Surviving notebooks and college records show him rejecting any existing course of study in favour of pursuing challenges that he had set himself. In mathematics, he raced through Euclid, which (unlike Leonardo and Pacioli) he considered childishly simple, then ground through the more challenging works of Descartes. At the same time he started exploring optics, the mechanics of the eye and the properties of lenses. In 1663, at Stourbridge fair just outside the city, he bought himself an astronomical treatise and a pair of prisms, which he would famously use to demonstrate that white daylight was composed of light of many colours. In February 1664, on a visit home, he hefted Barnabas Smith’s commonplace book off the shelf and decided that, despite the quantities of recycled scripture therein, he could make good use of it. On the crudely bound cover he dated his claim, no doubt with some satisfaction, and titled the tome Waste Book. He meant nothing derogatory in this: for bookkeepers, and therefore all writers of the period, a ‘waste book’ was the place you made your first notes, on the fly. Later you would extract what you needed and copy it into the formal ledger. This tells us two things about Newton’s intentions: that he regarded this notebook as a tool to help him work problems out; and he knew that whatever he wrote here would have to be edited and transferred into some neater vessel if others were to read it. He already intended to find a wider readership than the handful of Cambridge contemporaries who could follow his thinking. Soon after Newton had started to write in his book, the plague arrived, probably from Amsterdam. In the summer of 1665, as hundreds were dying every day in London, Cambridge emptied. For many of the students this meant a break in their studies; for Newton, it would be anything but. Settled in Lincolnshire, dividing his time between the stone houses of his miserable childhood, he buried himself in the Waste Book. Unlike Barnabas Smith, Newton rapidly filled page after page after page: diagrams of circles, ellipses, parabolas and curves sit in Smith’s margins, with tangents, chords and axes crossing them. Long operations run across

the pages in strings of mathematical symbols, and Newton’s neat hand walks through the logic of what he comes up with. Frequent crossings-out, inserts and emendations show his thought processes; after each, he picks up the thread and continues. He writes nearly a thousand words a page, in up to sixty handwritten lines, and in a couple of years he filled many more pages than Smith had in three decades. Having started out as the pedestrian compilation of a mediocre cleric, the book began to hum with energy and invention. On the page headed Antichristus, where Smith found nothing to say, Newton confidently sketches out a technical schematic. A few pages on, he lays out ‘Some problems of Gravity & Levity etc.’ and proceeds to solve them in front of us, with diagrams to the side showing the necessary experimental apparatus. And so on, in a riot of fecund imagination of near-infinite scope. In tiny notebooks, Newton had carefully recorded recipes for paint and how to drug birds. Here, he expansively recorded universal problems as they occurred to him, ideas as they flowed, solutions as he discovered them. It seems to live and breathe: the physical embodiment of the period historians call Newton’s anni mirabiles, his years of wonder. But what did he actually discover? image A page (in Latin) of Newton’s notebook exploring the ‘quadrature of curves’, essentially introducing logarithms and trigonometry. From the ancient Greeks, Europe had inherited geometry, the mathematics of static points, lines and shapes that fascinated Renaissance thinkers like Leonardo. This was complemented by the Arabic discovery of algebra, which had so appealed to Michael of Rhodes. But mathematicians remained hopeless in the face of movement: they could not calculate, or describe, the flight of a ball, the orbit of a moon, or the acceleration of a falling object, in objective numerical terms. This was the challenge that Newton set himself: the mathematics of fluxions, which we today know as calculus. Historians of mathematics have used the pages of the Waste Book to reconstruct the course of Newton’s thinking. ‘This is the origin of Newton’s

mathematics,’ Scott Mandelbrote, a Cambridge specialist on the period, observes, ‘and the origin manuscript, therefore, of many of Newton’s most important thoughts.’ Here, for example, he demonstrates how differentiation could solve problems of motion that had baffled the ancient Greeks. Calculus is crucial to modern theoretical physics, and more: economics, engineering, healthcare, aerodynamics, electronics – all depend on Newton’s fluxions. The calculations in the Waste Book became the basis of Newton’s Principia, the monumental work that made him an international celebrity and cemented his position as one of the towering figures in the history of science. The Waste Book, then, is the physical embodiment of an isolated genius, inventing – alone – the operations that made the modern world possible. Except, of course, that it isn’t. Many years after his retreat to the Lincolnshire countryside, Newton painted it as the bucolic setting for his discovery of universal gravitational attraction. Seeing an apple falling to the ground, he claimed, had brought the realisation that the apple and the earth were attracted towards one another by an omnipresent invisible force, that followed underlying mathematical rules. For hundreds of years since, that story has been used to introduce the subject to classrooms around the world. There is just one problem. ‘The manuscripts do not support this story,’ says Niccolò Guicciardini, from the University of Milan. ‘Because the conception of gravity that Newton had – and also his mathematics – was very different from the mature theory of universal gravitation that Newton developed in the Principia – much later.’ The apple story, in other words, was a deliberate myth-building exercise; and it was one of many. Close study of the Waste Book gives the lie to several of the myths of Newton’s solitary genius, myths that Newton himself propagated when he had become internationally famous. image

Newton never stopped working on the Waste Book: he returned to its workings again and again, until it started to fall apart. Sometimes his purpose was to correct or refine his earlier thinking, but often he was imposing a neat order on them and improving, from his point of view, its presentation of his genius. For in the years after Newton’s initial discoveries, he learned that he was not alone. Quite independently, the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had made startling advances of his own in the same area. When the time came to publish, and seize the territory for himself, Newton copied and shared pages of the Waste Book in order to prove that he alone had originated the calculus. But he edited the text before sharing it, ‘removing passages which showed the extent to which, as a young man, he had still been thinking in terms of the mathematical tradition’, according to Mandelbrote. Chief among his influences were René Descartes, who had died in 1650, and Franciscus van Schooten, who had made sense of Descartes’ impenetrable Géométrie for a wider audience: ‘On a number of folios,’ Mandelbrote says ‘one can see Newton responding to the ideas of interpreters of Descartes… developing their insights into how something which we would now call the calculus might work.’ Page 117 of the Waste Book (which sits between the pages Smith had allocated to Ambitio and Ambulare) makes a good example: Newton didn’t want people to think that his ideas had developed in dialogue with other mathematicians, so he later presented the text ‘without those tell-tale references, to make it look as if the calculus as it was practised in the 1690s had sprung suddenly to his mind, thirty years earlier’. He even seems to have gone back and added false dates, to create a narrative of unimpeded rapid progress. In this, the Waste Book, like the Fitzwilliam notebook’s catalogue of sin, reveals Newton’s insecurity. He simply could not live with the idea that any other man’s intellect could match his own. Leibniz was only one of many greats who Newton fell out with, feuded with, or cut off, and the Waste Book became an exhibit in his dispute, just as merchants’ ledgers had become exhibits in Italian court cases three centuries before. At the end of his long life – he died in 1727, at eighty-four – Newton would leave copious papers and notebooks, giving his biographers ample material

from which to recreate the course of his life and the progress of his researches. From mathematics, optics and physics, he proceeded to alchemy and, in his last years, theology. Away from his books, he also served as an effective Master of the Mint, reforming Britain’s debased currency, and – less actively – as a Member of Parliament. He formed few close attachments along the way and never married. He would have made a terrible husband; although he never kept a formal diary, his notebooks and letters reveal a difficult personality with an insatiable appetite for conflict. Nowhere in the pages of the epic Waste Book do we see evidence of independent thought on the part of the Reverend Barnabas Smith. The contrast provided by the mind that later played across the same pages – and those of the Morgan and Fitzwilliam notebooks – could not be greater. Newton did not just collect references and facts: he engaged with them, he tested them, he used them to spring off in surprising directions. The Waste Book became an extension of his mind, not just his memory, and the smaller notebooks tell a similar story. While still a teenager, Newton had learned that even the smallest, cheapest notebook – costing only as much as a loaf of bread – could serve as the repository for all kinds of ideas, juxtaposing them so that connections became apparent, holding data until such time as they might become relevant, preserving calculations and observations without degradation. Always there, and infinitely versatile, it would equip him for investigations into colour, optics, medicine, navigation, phonetics, language, the laws of physics and the torments of his soul. * He was also practically minded, with a remarkable facility for making models out of wood. One in particular, a miniature windmill with mechanical sails driven by a rat running around a wheel, was remembered by Grantham locals long after he had moved on.

CHAPTER 16

A TALE OF TWO NOTEBOOKS Fouquet and Colbert, Paris 1661–80 On a sultry night in August 1661, Nicolas Fouquet, Superintendent of Finances for Louis XIV, threw one of the most lavish housewarming parties the world had ever seen. Fair-haired, fine-featured, wealthy and charming, Fouquet was the richest figure at the French court, a cultured patron of artists and playwrights, and lover of many of the court’s women. The party was to mark the completion of his palatial new home, the château of Vauxle-Vicomte, fifty kilometres south-east of Paris. In his desire to impress, Fouquet spared no expense, and he invited everyone who mattered. Depending on whose account you believe, the guest list ran to six hundred or six thousand names. The most prominent was the young king, Louis XIV. Tall, elegant, with cascading curls of dark hair, he was accompanied by his beloved mother, Anne of Austria. But three well-known faces were missing. Queen Marie-Thérèse, Louis’ young wife (and first cousin) was six months into her first pregnancy, and the night’s exertions had been deemed too much for her. This spared the company some awkwardness at the king’s infatuation with his new mistress, Louise de La Vallière, who had turned seventeen only a few days earlier, and who did attend. Such conspicuous infidelity would have been frowned upon by the second notable absentee, Cardinal Mazarin. The wily and conscientious cardinal had governed France through Louis’ childhood, had personally educated the king, and adjured him to remain faithful to his Spanish bride. But Mazarin had died in the spring and thus Louis could give his romantic impulses free rein. The third prominent absentee was the king’s Minister of War, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. He was no friend of Fouquet’s: a commoner, obsessed by work, cold in manner, and probably not much fun at parties.

In the absence of the queen, cardinal and minister, the guests pursued their hedonistic impulses. Proceedings opened with a lottery and a prodigious buffet, with sweet and savoury dishes, roasts, ragouts, petitfours, sorbets and game. Fouquet’s maitre d’hotel, François Vatel, directed a battalion of servants as they replenished the tables. Stuffed and highspirited, the company then trooped out to enjoy a lamplit première of Les Fâcheux, a comedy by Molière. At the interval, costumed figures emerged from behind yew trees to hand out jewellery to the ladies, and at the play’s close, spectacular fireworks shot up from the château’s domed roof, musicians struck up and more precious trinkets were distributed. This night marked Fouquet’s confirmation as the king’s leading subject. With profound satisfaction he had watched the cream of society roam the landscaped grounds, he had shared their delight in the cuisine, and been thrilled by their wonder at his free-handed generosity. Their stupefied smiles were worth every penny of the enormous expense, and he was relaxed as they capered from room to room, bumping into furniture, spilling wine, vomiting discreetly. Nothing that truly mattered would be damaged. His most valuable possessions were safely out of sight. These were not jewels, nor paintings, nor furniture: they were nothing to look at – just a pair of large black scrapbooks filled with notes and letters. Two weeks later they would bring him down. The story of Fouquet’s fall – and Colbert’s rise – for the swarthy Minister of War would immediately supplant the glamorous Superintendent of Finances – perfectly dramatises the relationship between power and information technology, a relationship as strong in the seventeenth century as it is today.

Despite enjoying Molière’s play of a hero surrounded by idiots, Louis XIV seethed as he left Fouquet’s party. While most of the guests had appreciated their host’s largesse, the king could think only of the subtext: that France now knew Fouquet to be far richer than himself. It was too much for a proud young man to bear. In the following days, Colbert, the Minister of War who had skipped the party, astutely played on his resentment, asking rhetorically how Fouquet could spend so much, while His Majesty could not even afford new fire irons for his bedchamber?

Some days later the royal court, including Fouquet and Colbert, travelled by coach and barge to Nantes, where Fouquet was arrested by Charles d’Artagnan, one of Louis’s senior musketeers. Meanwhile d’Artagnan’s men were blocking the roads to Paris and intercepting all couriers. Colbert’s plan depended on secrecy and speed: secrecy, as Fouquet had mysterious sources of information, and always knew more than he ought; speed, to prevent him from destroying any incriminating evidence and mobilising support. Orders were sent to secure the roads around Fouquet’s townhouse in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Mandé, preventing his allies from accessing his papers. After pelting back from Nantes, Colbert and his agents ransacked the place. Two weeks later, they found what they were looking for stuffed behind an armoire – the two black notebooks whose existence they had suspected but which they had never before seen. Colbert had hoped for incriminating evidence, but he cannot have imagined how conveniently it would be presented. The cassette, as the notebooks together came to be known, contained so many smoking guns that the entire court seemed to be clouded by powder fumes. In its opening pages Colbert found long lists of names that Fouquet had categorised according to their political sympathies and alliances. But the meat of the matter was the hundreds of letters that Fouquet had carefully pasted in and which bore witness to corruption of every sort: sexual, financial and treasonous. Rich, handsome, charming, twice widowed, Fouquet had assiduously pursued the women of the court, embarking on affairs with many and enlisting even more to supply him with information. These liaisons and the web of attendant obligations were faithfully preserved in the pages of the cassette. In one letter, an anonymous lady modestly suggested the price of her complaisance: I hate sin, but I hate poverty more. You’ve already sent me ten thousand écus: if you send me ten thousand more in the next couple of days, I’ll see what I can do. In another, he received a tip for a more affordable dalliance: I’ve discovered a girl who won’t cost you more than thirty pistoles: and if you find her to your taste, she’ll pleasure you as much as

many who cost much more.* Many of the letters were anonymous or pseudonymous, which created an atmosphere of febrile speculation as their contents became known. One series of letters came from Madame La Foy, who carried messages and packages between Fouquet and one of the Queen Mother’s ladies-inwaiting, the beautiful Mademoiselle de Menneville, who was prevented from marrying by crippling debts. La Foy transferred enough cash to clear them, and Fouquet’s intentions were clear: once the luckless woman was married, she would repay him by making her new husband a cuckold. Luckily for the happy couple, Fouquet’s plot never came to fruition, but de Menneville’s name remained muddied by association with him, and La Foy’s by her cynical joy at the plan. Fouquet must have gained some erotic kick from this collection of billets-doux, but that was only one reason he collected his papers so neatly. As Colbert and his men examined the cassette they discovered a murky soup of financial dealings, from gambling debts to complex investment schemes. Everyone at court staked staggering amounts on card games and an early kind of roulette called Hocca. Fouquet either cheated or had enough card sense to win steadily at the tables. He walked away with jewels, fine lace and country estates, but more than anything he won cash, tens of thousands of livres at a time. Many courtiers had ended up in hock to him as a result, their debts recorded carefully in the cassette. Fouquet had also used his banking connections to provide investment opportunities for his circle, which often pulled them into traps of debt and impossible obligations. One of those snared was Hugues de Lionne, a diplomat who had brokered the king’s marriage to the Infanta of Spain. In the cassette, Fouquet neatly collected de Lionne’s desperate pleas to be released from financial arrangements which he barely understood. The stricken nobleman even offered his son as a husband for Fouquet’s daughter, and humiliatingly agreed to a marriage contract that would forgive de Lionne’s debts yet be easily terminated at Fouquet’s discretion. Such chicanery was not restricted to individuals at court. It turned out that Fouquet had been using his position to systematically defraud the crown. He had misrepresented France’s accounts to the king, understating the nation’s tax revenues and exaggerating expenses: the massive variance between his figures and the reality had paid for the ponds, paintings and

thousand orange trees at Vaux-le-Vicomte. He had taken huge secret commissions from the bankers who lent to the state, and had solicited bribes from the tax farmers who harvested the nation’s antediluvian tariffs, customs and levies.

Yet to be hoisted by his own notebooks: Nicolas Fouquet, France’s richest man in the seventeenth century, painted by Charles le Brun.

This corruption had extended to state officials. To take just one example of many, the cassette confirmed that Fouquet had been bribing the director

of France’s postal service, Monsieur de Nouveau, to intercept his rivals’ letters – which explained the leaks that had dogged Colbert’s investigations, and justified the intense secrecy that had cloaked his plans to arrest Fouquet. De Nouveau had even reported on his private audiences with Louis himself, sending his paymaster notes only minutes after leaving the royal presence. Most shockingly of all, the cassette also revealed intimacies that the Queen Mother had vouchsafed only to her priest in the confessional, and the plans for the civil war that Fouquet intended to start in the event of his dismissal. In the cassette we find the prototype of the ‘little black book’ in which our most devious villains record their plots and conspiracies. Fouquet sat like a spider at the centre of its web of agents, debtors, lovers and sympathisers, a web that, had he not overreached that August night, he could probably have maintained for many years. Astonishingly, given the evident depth and breadth of Fouquet’s corruption, and the plentiful written corroboration, his trial for embezzlement and treason dragged on for more than three years. Even in jail, he could still count on the sympathy of courtiers who had enjoyed his largesse, and the sheer scale of the connections that the cassette documented protected him too: half the noble families of France seemed implicated. Fouquet’s supporters claimed, with good cause, that Colbert had abandoned due process in his quest to bring Fouquet down, and the judges made a point of asserting their independence. In the end, Fouquet escaped execution, and was sentenced to banishment and the forfeiture of all his goods. Fouquet was packed off to the Alps, and meantime, his place at the king’s side was taken by his nemesis, Colbert.

The contrast between Jean-Baptiste Colbert and his fallen rival could not have been more dramatic. Contemporary portraits paint them as physical opposites, Fouquet’s delicate good looks contrasting with Colbert’s stout, dark appearance. Fouquet had been born wealthy, building an everlarger fortune with two marriages to heiresses; the bourgeois Colbert came from a Reims merchant family, had learned the art of bookkeeping according to Pacioli’s system, and owed his rise to hard work and

administrative skill. Their methods were equally antithetical. Fouquet charmed, seduced and embezzled; Colbert grafted, toiled and organised. The kingdom to which Colbert brought this administrative talent was a mess. Louis, still only twenty-three, had come to the throne aged just five, and from the age of eight his education had been entrusted to Cardinal Mazarin, the nation’s first minister. With an admirable realism, the pragmatic cardinal had taught the young king to strike deals, and dissemble when necessary, but had not thought it necessary to teach him any mathematics or finance. The nation’s administration remained medieval, its treasury impoverished by the chaos and corruption of which Fouquet – and Mazarin himself – took flagrant advantage. With Fouquet out of the picture, Colbert had a free hand to apply his methodology to the national government. It depended entirely on paperwork. Colbert’s immediate priority was to bring order to the nation’s revenues, and to do so he devised a three-book system of accounts based upon Pacioli’s method of double-entry bookkeeping. The first book was the Journal, in which a daily record of expenditures was kept along with the source of the necessary funds; the second and third ledgers were more detailed records of the treasury’s income (Register of Funds) and outgoings (Register of Expenditures). Just as in Pacioli’s system, cross references made it easy to spot discrepancies and omissions. The king, who combined a firm belief in his divine right to rule with a willingness to work, now remedied the deficiencies of his education. Each month he inspected the books with Colbert, watching the journal’s balance being calculated before personally signing it off. ‘By such a clear and easy method,’ Colbert wrote, ‘his majesty forces those who have the honour of serving him to be trustworthy.’ The king came to enjoy working on the monthly figures, writing to his mother that he had begun to ‘taste the pleasure’ of his new numerical competence. And he had good cause to like the system: it worked. Within a decade Colbert had dramatically increased national revenues (some sources suggest they were doubled). Louis, who had once struggled to furnish his rooms, was able to spend extravagantly for the rest of his long reign.

How had Colbert achieved this miracle? Just like the merchants of Florence and Venice three centuries before, Colbert took ledger-based techniques of business and applied them to the management of information, using a different notebook for each purpose. He employed hundreds of civil servants to investigate every aspect of France’s economy and government: its farms, workshops and ports as well as the complex web of agreements that ruled how much tax each religious institution had to pay. He assigned each subject to a portfolio, then classed the data within each according to species. The portfolios grew in size and number, filling two huge libraries, the public one and Colbert’s own, which survive to this day. Several fulltime staff navigated them using a complicated system of catalogues, indexes and cross references. The portfolios covered everything, from the condition of France’s roads and canals to its armies, its vineyards, glassworks and breweries. Impulsive action was anathema to Colbert: his decision-making method was to gather and organise all relevant information, figures and precedents on paper, and only then to think and decide. He would have been entirely comfortable in today’s world of big data. The king needed all of this information, too, but didn’t have the time to pore through ledgers and portfolios. He hunted daily, usually had several romantic relationships on the go, went on campaign if France was (as often) at war, and busied himself with the construction of his colossal palace at Versailles. Information had to be boiled down to its most concentrated, efficient form. So Colbert made him the golden notebooks. Each year, he summarised the nation’s accounts into a tiny volume which would then be illuminated by Nicolas Jarry. With vellum pages, red morocco binding and gold clasps, they are among the most beautiful manuscript books ever made. Their tiny size enhances their gem-like quality – like the young Newton’s first notebooks, they were only three inches by four, and could be carried anywhere in a coat pocket. Whenever Louis needed to make a spending decision, he would have up-to-date figures and data to hand. These precious notebooks did not only cover finances. One of the most beautiful, which dates from 1687, consists of nothing more than tables and lists, but is so exquisitely rendered that it bears comparison with the finest illuminated manuscripts. The vellum pages are bordered in gold leaf and the lettering is so finely drawn that it’s hard to distinguish, at first glance, from

printed type. This marvellous object is, however, strikingly functional, for it arranges, over 120 tiny pages, all of the key facts and figures relating to the French navy. Every ship is detailed, from the mighty Soliel Royal (based in Brest, carrying 120 guns, crewed by 450 sailors, 130 officers, and 320 soldiers at a monthly cost of 40,612 livres) to the humble l’Inconnue (Dunkirk, only four guns and twenty-eight crew but a very reasonable 1,708 livres a month to run). There are lists of officers stationed at sea and ashore, and descriptions of the nation’s ports and shipyards. Gold-bordered tables total the numbers of grenades, battle-axes, cannon and sails stored at each base, and in case the royal reader worries that these supplies may not be enough, one page compares the strength of the navy twenty-five years before with that of today. Happily, it has become mightier in every department. In short, it is everything that the Admiral of the Fleet could wish to know to plan his operations, and it is as portable as a deck of cards.

Louis trusted Colbert with everything. The children that his mistress La Vallière bore were raised in Colbert’s household, and when relations became strained between the king and his brother, or a mistress, Colbert would mediate. He wrote a private how-to-govern handbook for Louis’ heir, the Dauphin, preparing him for the day he would ascend to the throne, and made sure that, unlike his father, he was taught how to read accounts. Colbert never forgot his mercantile roots. He ran France like a company, the CEO to Louis’ chairman, and determined to strengthen the nation by modernising the economy. Glass-blowers, shipbuilders, lacemakers were all given state support and strictly regulated. Colbert persuaded Louis to care about France’s infrastructure, funded his armies, and managed to raise tax revenues without prompting revolt either among the aristocracy or the common people. Along the way, he amassed his own huge fortune, but never made the mistake of using it to outshine the king. He died in 1683, twenty-two years and one day after Fouquet’s arrest. France was still subject to the whims of an absolute monarch, but at least that monarch could call on the continent’s finest system of information, and could understand a balance sheet. The nation was, at last, accountable.

A ‘Golden Notebook’, from just after Colbert’s time, listing the king’s warships. Colbert’s were similarly pocket-sized: three-by-four inches.

Fouquet watched this transformation from his prison cell at Pignerol in the Alps* and died in 1680, nineteen years after his fall. Although he played no part in public affairs in that period, he retained a strong cultural influence. Louis snapped up his architect, his landscaper and his painter and set them to work transforming a minor hunting lodge into a palace that would, eventually, put Vaux-le-Vicomte in the shade. They spent years – and much of the revenue that Colbert provided – developing Versailles, and Louis appropriated the finest contents of Fouquet’s château to furnish it. Louis XIV outlived Fouquet by thirty years, fathering at least seventeen children (of whom seven were named Louis and three Louise) before dying at the age of seventy-eight and leaving the crown to his great-grandson. And what of François Vatel, who had managed Fouquet’s apogee that sultry August night and devised the menu that, centuries later, would be regarded as one of the foundations of French cuisine? On his master’s fall, he rapidly found employment with Louis II de Bourbon, one of France’s leading gourmands, and for a few glorious years distinguished himself as master of his household at the Château de Chantilly. Held in high esteem, Vatel earned the right to bear a sword as a nobleman, but misfortune struck in 1671 when, halfway through a three-day reception for the king, he heard that his seafood order was delayed. There would be no lobsters for the turbot sauce.* Unable to face the blow to his professional honour that a change of menu would entail, he retreated to a private room, propped his sword against a door, and ran himself through with it three times. In the meantime, the lobsters had arrived, but the kitchen servants found him too late. Before their eyes Vatel bled to death. The festivities continued, uninterrupted. * As these excerpts suggest, French money was in a mess. An écu was worth around six livres, a pistole approximately twelve. A manual labourer might hire himself out for three livres a week; Fouquet paid the distinguished painter Le Brun a thousand livres a month – which would have bought him but three nights with the second, cheaper, courtesan. * Among his fellow convicts was the mysterious anonymous prisoner, not allowed to show his face, who entered popular culture as ‘the Man in the Iron Mask’. The loyal musketeer d’Artagnan, who had arrested Fouquet back in 1661, also, of course, enjoyed a fictionalised afterlife. * Turbot à la Vatel was still cooked two centuries after his death. As well as lobster sauce, the recipe calls for two dozen oysters, thirty crayfish tails, fillets of smelt and sole, mushrooms and truffles.

CHAPTER 17

‘BUT 18 PENCE IN MONEY; AND A TABLE-BOOK’ Table-books, England and The Netherlands 1520s– 1670s Thursday 9 May 1667 started unremarkably for Samuel Pepys, with the usual medley of paperwork and gossipy meetings with colleagues. But in the afternoon, after he had dropped his wife off to buy herself a new dress, a shocking event, close to home, caused great consternation: ‘In our street, at the Three Tuns’ Tavern door, I find a great hubbub; and what was it but two brothers have fallen out, and one killed the other.’ It turned out that Pepys knew one of the brothers, Basil Fielding, a page in the household of the Earl of Sandwich, Pepys’s patron. So as the details of the story unfold the following day, he’s involved, and unusually moved: To the Three Tuns’ Tavern, and there the constable of the parish did show us the picklocks and dice that were found in the dead man’s pocket, and but 18 pence in money; and a table-book, wherein were entered the names of several places where he was to go; and among others Kent’s house, where he was to dine, and did dine yesterday: and after dinner went into the church, and there saw his corpse with the wound in his left breast; a sad spectacle, and a broad wound, which makes my hand now shake to write of it. His brother intending, it seems, to kill the coachman, who did not please him, this fellow stepped in, and took away his sword; who thereupon took out his knife, which was of the fashion, with a falchion blade, and a little cross at the hilt like a dagger; and with that stabbed him.

A nasty story, as the victim died unnecessarily, in the act of stopping his own brother drunkenly stabbing another man. No wonder Pepys – who had displayed remarkable sang-froid as the city of London burned a year before – was shaken. Basil, a man well known to Pepys, had turned out to be a drunk and a fratricide. But Pepys’s story also contains hints that the victim, Christopher Fielding, might himself not have been up to much good. The dice suggests a dissolute lifestyle, and we may well ask what he needed lock-picks for. Whose addresses had he written down? Did he plan to break in to them? And what, the modern reader may be forgiven for asking, is a table-book?

Urban life became steadily more complicated, more modern, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the cities of Europe grew and their business became ever more involved. Many of the medieval rhythms of life – saints’ days, high days and holy days – clung on, and alongside them grew such novelties as trade fairs and theatre shows. Citizens learned to watch clocks, and keep appointments. Growing international trade pulled people away from agriculture and into urban professions, and coins from many lands circulated in Britain’s cities. Responding to – indeed, driving – that complexity, this era became a golden age of notebook culture. One such manifestation was the table-book, an everyday item that Pepys and his contemporaries knew well. Earlier, we saw how one of paper’s most useful qualities was that ink made an indelible mark in it. Once you’d written on a page, it became a permanent record to call upon in the event of memory failure or dispute. But much of the time, we make a note knowing that we won’t need it for long. A shopping list, a reminder of an appointment, or an itinerary of the ill-guarded addresses that catch a burglar’s eye – there’s no need to have a permanent record of this kind of thing. And writing in pen and ink was a cumbersome business, involving an ink bottle to dip your quill into, a penknife and a blotter. Wouldn’t it be useful to have some way to make a quick note on the hoof? Table-books opened with a brief and informative almanac, printed in tiny type – for they only measured around four by six inches – that loaded each page with useful facts, figures and illustrations. In one surviving example,

now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, a fold-out grid of figures sums any multiplication or division between any two numbers up to thirty. Perhaps surprisingly, all the numbers are shown in impractical Roman numerals, even though Arabic numerals had come to Europe hundreds of years before.* The next page has a handy guide to the four terms (Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter and Trinity) of England’s legal year, during which courts would sit; another provides the times of sunrise and sunset at the summer and winter solstices. A particularly useful spread consists of pictures of foreign coinage, along with an exchange rate, allowing you to verify the authenticity of a Spanish real, a Flanders ridder, a Scots unicorne or a French crown, and calculate its value in pounds, shillings and pence. Finally, a multi-year calendar made key dates and saints’ days unmissable. As an almanac, a table-book was clearly indispensable – though that was only half the story. The rest of the volume consisted of ten or so thick, inflexible leaves which you could write on with your pen. If you happened to be on the move, and unable to unpack your ink bottle and blotter, you could instead write on it with a stylus made of copper or other soft metal. Alternatively, those on the cutting edge could write with a pencil made of graphite, then a recent invention. This was all highly convenient, but the real value of the surface lay in another novel property: you could wipe it clean and write on it, over and again. Instructions for use, and a care tip, appeared within: Take a lyttle peece of a Spunge, or a Linnen cloath, being cleane without any Soyle: wet it in water, and wring it hard, and wipe that you have written very lightly, and it wyll out, and within one quarter of an houre, you maye wryte in the Same place agayne: put not your leaves together, whylst they be very wet with wyping. We all know exciting new gadgets that don’t work quite as smoothly as the manufacturer promises, and a little scepticism in this case seems justified. Over time, the coating on the pages of the Folger notebook had become brittle, and flaked away. Could this friable coating really have worked as miraculously as ‘Franke Adams, Bookbinder dwelling at the black Raven in Thames Street, neere London bridge’ had claimed?

In 2004, Frank Mowery set out to investigate. The Folger’s Head of Conservation, Mowery was a seasoned expert on all matters to do with bookbinding and paper, but this was still a novel process for him, and there was no chance that he would take a damp cloth to this rare, decaying artefact. So he made his own table-book pages. Following a Renaissance recipe for the coating, he stewed up keratin glue (boiled out of animal hooves) and mixed gesso (a thick, chalky, white paint) into it. He then painted several coats on to each side of a sheet of paper, leaving it to set each time. This simple formula did indeed dry to form an off-white substrate, similar to the leaves of the surviving table-book in the Folger library. Its surface caught the light, smooth and glossy: underneath, the slightly spongy page flexed slightly in the hand. The next step was to make something to write on it with. The vital ingredients in Renaissance ink were oak galls – woody balls which form on oak twigs in response to insect infestation. They are rich in gallic and tannic acids, which, when extracted and boiled down, react with iron salts (or even iron filings) to form complicated phenolic hydrocarbons. These acidic compounds make good ink, being soluble in water and admirably black. With his fresh ink, Mowery wrote on the tablet he’d made, and found that his writing adhered well and dried neatly. Following Franke Adams’s four-hundred-year-old advice, he then wiped the tablet, finding that, as promised, the ink lifted off completely, leaving the page as good as new. The same thing happened when he repeated the experiment with a graphite pencil and a fine stylus made of brass. A table-book really did offer re-use after reuse. But the last, anonymous, user of the table-book in the Folger library hadn’t wiped theirs clean. There survived several pages of scratchy, barelylegible notes, which the owner had evidently made rapidly, just as the manufacturer had intended. They gave an enticing glimpse into the life of the notebook – a window back in time, albeit not the clearest window. After some detective work – starting with the word ‘vinegar’ at the beginning of the third line – it became clear that the user had noted recipes for cures and poultices that could be applied to the infected hoof of a horse. Other contemporary examples prove how widely useful the table-book concept could be. When Mowery and his colleagues started looking for

references to table-books, they discovered these obscure items to have been in surprisingly common use. He notes that: ‘Tables were also used for collecting pieces of poetry, noteworthy epigrams, and new words; recording sermons, legal proceedings, or parliamentary debates; jotting down conversations, recipes, cures, and jokes; keeping financial records; recalling addresses and meetings; and collecting notes on foreign customs while traveling.’ Having collected such snippets in their table-books, users would later neatly write up the most valuable into the common-place books that they kept at home.

This seventeenth-century table-book now in the Folger library revealed notes made by its user on cures to treat a horse’s infected hoof.

Small wonder that everyone, from merchant to monarch, wanted one. Around the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the beginning of James I’s, tablebooks were widely adopted, and widely sold, as demonstrated by the 1616 inventory of a York bookseller, one John Foster, who clearly found them a profitable line. He had no fewer than seventy-four in stock, in five different

varieties, ranging from ‘twenty of the least sorte’ to the very desirable ‘three paire dull gilt best sorte’. Looking at the cover of the Folger tablebook, we can see what ‘best sorte’ meant in practice. Bound in brown leather, and stamped with intricately patterned gold leaf, its covers are ingeniously closed by a brass pin that passes through two clasps. The book stays shut until the user slips out the pin – which becomes a fine stylus, ready for use on the coated pages. It’s a beautiful little item, at once precious, practical, and ingenious. At the very top of the market, Queen Elizabeth herself received ‘a pair of writing tables’ (as table-books were often called), bound in vellum with silver clasps, from Lady Leighton, a Gentlewoman of her Privy Chamber, and there are numerous references to such gifts passing between aristocrats, just as upmarket notebooks are a staple stocking-filler today. John Foster’s stock of table-books represented the tidy sum of sixteen pounds, fifteen shillings and a penny, demonstrating that they had become a nice little earner for booksellers and manufacturers alike. At this point, a volume of Shakespeare’s poems could be had for three pence, and demanded much more work on the part of the printer. The information in a table-book, on the other hand, cost little to assemble. The market was wide, as any civilised town-dweller could use one, and a bookseller could stick a high price on an example with a fancy binding. With no original content, they also evaded the oversight of the Stationers’ Company, the London guild which regulated the printing, copyright and sale of books and plays. Seeing this situation as an opportunity, the Company secured for itself the exclusive right to print and sell table-books in England. Printing thousands at a time, they found this business highly profitable, and used the substantial proceeds to fund pensions worth hundreds of pounds for elderly and retired booksellers. As you’d expect for such a widespread item, the table-book makes appearances in the literature of the day. Working alongside Mowery was Professor Peter Stallybrass, a British academic at the University of Pennsylvania, who specialised in Shakespearean literature. He chased down references to table-books in Shakespeare’s works, where the table’s erasability makes it a natural metaphor for imperfect memory, and discovered that it had been hiding in plain view. In particular, a mysterious reference in the best-known play of all suddenly made perfect sense. At a critical turning point in Act I of Hamlet, the prince promises his father’s

ghost that he will move on from his youthful studies, and concentrate on the task he’s just been called to – avenging ‘murder most foul.’ Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. Shakespeare must have assumed that his audience would have considered a ‘table’ to be a natural accoutrement of a scholarly young man, and instantly get his metaphor.

We’ve seen elsewhere how quickly artists repurposed writing materials for their own uses, so it comes as no surprise to find the story repeating itself with table-books. In June 1633 a rising young Dutch painter took a journey north into the countryside of Friesland, and in the warm summer air made a tiny sketch of the twenty-one-year-old Saskia van Uylenburgh, the orphaned daughter of a prominent lawyer. He knew her well. Extremely well, in fact, for they lived in the same house in Amsterdam, both lodging with her cousin Hendryck, and had travelled north to speak to her family, for they wanted to marry. The love affair of Saskia and Rembrandt van Rijn would become one of the most vividly documented of all marriages. Tenderand intimate, the silverpoint portrait that Rembrandt made of Saskia – just two inches high, on the wipe-clean sheet of a table-book – evidently held a great significance. Not only did he never wipe it away, he kept it safe and at some later date annotated it: ‘This was drawn of my wife, when she was 21 years old, the third day after we were engaged 8 June 1633.’ image Rembrandt’s table-book sketch of his fiancée, Saskia.

The drawing is a masterpiece of complicity. Look at those eyes, that frank gaze, meeting yours, meeting the young Rembrandt’s. No wonder he kept it. It is the earliest survivor of what would be hundreds of paintings, drawings and etchings that documented a passionate bond. Rembrandt never tired of capturing Saskia’s likeness, and she modelled for him frequently, posing as a goddess, a biblical figure, his accomplice in selfportraits, or simply going about her business. But death stalked them. Their first three children died as infants, and though the fourth survived, Saskia herself succumbed to tuberculosis only nine years after Rembrandt had sketched that first likeness. He made a series of tender studies of her on her sickbed, then after her death completed one last oil portrait (the lustrous Saskia in a Red Hat), before putting his brushes down, painting nothing for a decade, and only producing drawings and etchings. At some point an unknown hand removed this first Saskia from the tafelet (as the table-book was called in Dutch) and framed it; today it can be seen in the collections of the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. A few of his other sketches on similar sheets survive, all perfunctory landscape studies, confirming that Rembrandt did indeed use the table-book when away from his studio. One can only wonder what other tiny masterpieces had previously sprung to life on the same page, lasting as long as a mayfly before being wiped away with a ‘lyttle peece of a Spunge, or a Linnen cloath.’* Our good fortune that Rembrandt made the sentimental decision to hold on to this one.

Table-books appeared in Holland in about the 1520s, were first published in London fifty years later, and seem to have made it through into the eighteenth century. Presumably the falling cost of plain paper notebooks then made them uncompetitive. But their appeal remains easy to understand. These versatile little objects carried a huge amount of useful, hard-to-remember information; they could accompany you all day long; and they allowed you to work or create anywhere – you could calculate sums, plan your week, convert currencies, make pictures to your heart’s content, or just scratch out a shopping list. And what became of the villainous Fielding, who murdered his own brother back in May 1667? The tragedy had remained on Samuel Pepys’s

mind, and on 4 July that year, another Thursday, he took a rare day off to see justice done, and in the process enjoy ‘several fine trials’ at the Old Bailey. Only when Fielding was led into the dock did Pepys realise that he had previously misidentified the corpse, and therefore had the story contrariwise: Basil, former page to Earl and Lady Sandwich, owner of the table-book suggestively filled with addresses, turned out to be the victim, and Christopher, whom Pepys had never met, the killer. Christopher mounted no defence, was found guilty and dispatched to Tyburn Gallows. ‘It was time very well spent to be here’ determined Pepys. On the way home he bought himself a new belt. * One commentator speculates that the ‘wide availability of printed multiplication charts such as those included in the Writing Tables may help to explain why English merchants continued to use Roman numerals long after most European merchants had abandoned them’. * Other Rembrandt sketches on table-book pages exist, but they are of much less interest than the Saskia picture – although they do confirm that, most of the time, this was a medium for preparatory sketches and quick studies, not for work that the artist intended to retain.

CHAPTER 18

ALBETROSSES A logged journey: London to Amoy 1699 When Magellan’s expedition (if not the man himself) sailed around the world in the early sixteenth century, a ship’s master was not expected to keep a systematic record of its progress. As we have seen, the notes taken were imprecise, partial and depended very much on the whim of whichever officer held the pen. But the mania for tidy bookkeeping which overtook Europe in the course of the seventeenth century would have an impact on the culture of ships’ logs, and as the era progressed they were professionalised, becoming increasingly detailed and revealing. By the year 1699, the East India Company had been despatching ships from London for almost a century, competing with the Dutch, French and Portuguese for a share of the incredible riches to be won from trade – and outright theft – in the East. In July that year, the Rook, a frigate of some three hundred and twenty tons, signed up its crew for a typical voyage to the East: first to Surat, the Moghul port at the top of India’s west coast, famed for its silks, and the location of the East India Company’s factory, or trading station; then onwards to Amoy (now Xiamen), on the South China coast; and then back, again via Surat. The Rook set sail on the fifth of August. From the first page of the log, now part of the British Library’s collections, we can sense a certain pride and excitement at the voyage ahead: A jurnall or account of our present voyage to the East Indies, In the good shipp Rook Frigate, Captain George Simmonds Commander, comenceing from the 6th daye of August wee Sayled from Gravesend.

The ‘jurnall’ (‘logbook’ wouldn’t be used for a century yet) immediately impresses. We aren’t told who writes, but can assume from the frequent use of the first person (my ship, my crew) that it is the captain. The handwriting is open, clear, and as confident as the spelling: dates and places are obvious at first glance, and the narrative of the days’ events is professional and far more complete than anything Albo ever bothered to supply. Just three days out, for instance, we have a detailed account of the vessel’s troubles as it attempts to enter the English Channel. This morning weighed the wind at W:S:W a fresh gale and close weather being ebb tyde we turned down halfe way the Gulfstreame and it blew so much Wind with Gusts of rain that put us back again for the foreland, and in tacking our Ship, our pinace that was towed astern of the long boat got under the bill of the small bower anchor, so being allmost full of water, wee cut her away from the sterne of the longboats and soe lost her we allsoe broke our crossjack Yard, soe at one of the clock wee anchored in 7¼ fathom water the lighthouse from us S:W: the Holder Frigatt Mr Snipps Commander, allsoe put back, towards evening better weather, the wind came to N:N:W: rode single all night. Captain and crew alike must have felt bitterly frustrated by the unseasonably bad weather. It takes the ship another six days to work the short distance round to the South Downs, where – more bad luck – the anchor fouls on a submerged plank, so the ‘capstone bars flew round and hove all my men and selfe from the bars, hurting three or four men’. Finally, fully two weeks after casting off in the Thames estuary, the Rook leaves England behind. At this point, in open water, the journal starts recording the ship’s observed location, and the distance travelled, and does so with entries of remarkable elegance. Latitude is measured twice a day, progress is estimated, and conditions of sea and air are noted with neat economy. The journal’s keeper also sketches in some of the islands he sees en route and when the Rook pulls in to Madeira makes a careful, detailed drawing of the scene. This log, despite being that of a far less significant voyage than Magellan’s, makes for far more interesting reading than Albo’s.

As the voyage progresses, and the Rook wends its way steadily down the Atlantic, the entries start to include additional details. ‘This morning we catcht a shark about a foot long’ we learn on 15 September; the next day, ‘We saw several fowls called Shearwaters, Boobies and Noddies’; and the day after that, Rook meets another English ship, and learns of bloody pirate attacks in the area. The months pass, with every day’s entry taking the same clear format: dolphins, flying fish and sharks swim by, or are eaten; ‘tropick birds’ are noted with particular interest, as, at night, are the Magellanic Clouds, galaxies easily visible in the southern hemisphere but clearly a novelty to this northern sailor. Making a steady seventy miles each day, the Rook crosses the equator, and the troubles of the voyage’s early days seem to be well astern. But as they approach the Cape of Good Hope, a new element appears in the journal. A stylised skull and crossbones sits neatly underneath the latitude observations, and above a memorial inscription: Thomas Andrews Aged 85 yrs. Cooper’s Mate. ‘This morning watch’, the journal’s entry explains, ‘one of my company was missing it’s supposed by all my company else that hee drowned himselfe, hee was a very disconsolate person, being my Cooper’s Mate’. This was the first intimation of discontent on the voyage, and would not be the last.

The Rook’s jurnull – ‘log-book’ was not yet a term in general use – records the melancholy death of cooper’s mate Thomas Andrews.

While the crew mourned their shipmate, the daily round resumed, with the writer noting the bird life – ‘albetrosses’ and shearwaters – on most days. He evidently finds the former something of a novelty, sketching them several times in the margin, not entirely successfully. South they head, aiming to give the Cape a wide berth, and the writer records whales’ heads ‘allmost white with barnicles’ and notes that ‘you will [see] many as you Pass the Cape of Goodhope’. Even when gales blow, splitting three sails and breaking the yard in the middle of the night – which must have been a terrifying moment – we are told of the ‘abundance of Mangofallukas, large fowles very like gannets, flying heavy, flapping their wings like unto a Crow or Raven’. The ship pelts on, covering two hundred miles in a day and prompting the writer to turn artist once again. ‘Be sure that you Prepare for a Storme,’ the sage caption reads, ‘when you Come neare Cape Bonesprance. The worst Storms, when the winds be at NN and WNW.’ On blows the Rook, making rapid progress across the southern Indian Ocean. One day they see an albatross unable to take off from the water. ‘It was 10 foot from the tip of one wing to another,’ writes our fascinated guide, before adding: ‘I wounded it with small shott.’ On Christmas Eve 1699, he records ruefully that ‘All the Albetrosses have left us’. By the turn of the year they have reached the tropics again and we can sense the writer’s impatience as he counts down the distance to landfall. On Monday 12 February 1700 (two days after ‘Wee killed 2 dolphins’) the Rook sails into the harbour of Quilon (now Kollam), a Dutch trading station near the southern tip of India. The Rook is depicted at anchor, sails and ropework meticulously drawn, unscathed by its journey, with the Union Jack flying proudly off the sprit topmast, and a colossal East India Company ensign at the stern.

‘An Albetross the body of a dark cullor the tipps of his wings black. The magnit[ude] about an English Swann.’

The journal of the voyage continues in much the same way as before: meticulous measures of progress, regular ornithological notes, detailed records of winds and rains, sketches of the coastline, and so on. The Rook works up the Malabar coast to Surat, reaching it on 27 March. On 1 May the ship ‘put out all the Companies Goods’ – what had been in their holds, we don’t know – took in cotton, and on 6 May receives its orders for China.

On this leg, the only significant difference in the journal are the detailed accounts of rocks and reefs in the narrow passages which the Rook negotiates around the Straits of Malacca. The writer leaves frequent gaps for drawings of the coast, but doesn’t complete any – possibly kept busy by taking many more soundings, taking bearings on landmarks, and noting the other vessels they pass on this busy waterway.

This kind of data now assumed huge importance: European companies were desperate to work out the fastest routes to their destinations, and the safest. Well-kept journals provided raw data which, over time, could be collated into a picture of what to expect in any corner of the globe at a given season. This intelligence gave any departing captain a head start, warning him of prevailing winds, seasonal storms, currents, tides, rocks and so on. Meanwhile his backers or employers back home could predict his movements, and therefore their profits, and in turn their insurers could develop a better idea of the risks involved. Aboard the Rook, disaster struck just thirty leagues short of their goal of Amoy. ‘This morning at clearing our ship,’ he writes, ‘my gunner in lighting of armed match, blew off a powder horn it splitting all to peices and carryed away his right hand, my surgeon cutt it off under his elbow, he was after very hearty’. On Tuesday 23 July, they drop anchor off Amoy, where they stay for several months. Here they are surrounded by other vessels of the company, and the journal records the socialising as officers and men row from ship to ship. In a change of pace, the writer also takes the opportunity to write a longer account of China in general. We first read a conventional description of the emperor’s court and his retinue of mandarins, but then comes an altogether more personal reaction: These people are very civill to the English at places of trade but otherwise In the country, in general they are very brutish in their natures and manners, they are allowed as many Wives as they can keep or buy… they are of swarthy complexion and middle sized but strangely given to sodomy and commonly lie with one another as male and male, they are great eaters of pork and fish, but pork to a

wonder, Yet the country affords good beef ffowles of all sorts both time and wild very reasonable with abundance of good fruits… they are extream jealous of their females always keeping them unseen to any other Nation, none suffered to goe out but such who are either old or poor, sometimes you may meet with one of them goe hobbling along for they go not as other ffolk, their feet from their minority confined in iron shoes so that you can scarce put two fingers into the shoe of a Woman of stature you must be very carefull if affronted how you strike to fetch blood of any of them for then if complaint bee made to the Tituck and Chentuck you are fined a considerable sum of money, and if not paid, if they catch you, you are bamboo’d that is beat almost to death your flesh greatly mangled and bruised. The writer paints a vivid picture of the meeting of cultures, and it’s easy to imagine him enjoying Amoy, eating better than he could have done at home, and staring rudely at women’s feet. But who was he? And why does he stop writing at the end of this eye-opening passage? For this is the last we see of our engaging journal-keeper. In November 1700, after three months in Amoy, he makes his last entry, and scribal duties are picked up by a more formal hand. In old-fashioned handwriting, this new writer records much more detail of wind, water and cargos. The ship – finally – starts to fill its holds for the journey home. Sugar, sugar candy, alum, zinc, copper, camphor, vermillion and mercury are the goods embarked; for the voyage, the salted carcasses of three oxen and a fresh set of sails. We can follow this new journal-keeper as the Rook starts the long return journey, but it is a much less engaging and colourful account: no drawings, no sightings of sharks, whales or dolphins, no birds. No sense of wonder, or joy at the novelties of the voyage.

So who were the writers, and why do they change? Why is one so serious, the other so playful? The answer perhaps lies in the second notebook to document the voyage, the Ledger, which survives in the same archive. This was the record of the ship’s crew, its pay and their debts. As the men signed on back in London, they were recorded in a neat table, where we find a couple of suspects for our authors. Top of the list is the

captain, George Simmons, signed up on pay of ten pounds a month. The enrolment then runs on down through the ranks: the mates, gunners, trumpeter, coxswain, seamen and cooks, until at fifty-four in the list we find one James Simmons, rated as a seaman but – at one pound and ten shillings monthly – earning more than all the other men of that rank. Could James be George’s son, brought aboard to learn his trade as a teenager, on an enhanced wage? When we picture the son working on the ship’s journal, it all falls into place. Captain Simmons could trust him with the ship’s business, and to write as himself, but we also have an explanation for the wide-eyed enthusiasm that the first writer brings to the voyage: his desire to draw every harbour they stop at, his thrill at seeing new constellations in the night skies, his endless enthusiasm for albetrosses. But why did he stop keeping the ship’s log in Amoy, at the journey’s most distant and fascinating point? The answer lies in another list in the ship’s ledger, which records the ship’s departures – ‘Dead, Run or Discharged’. Top of the list is the disconsolate Thomas Andrews, ‘Drowned att sea’, and some lines below we see James Simmons’s name, dated for the middle of the period that the ship spent in Amoy, with a capital R for ‘Runn’. James might have enjoyed the voyage out, but for whatever reason he didn’t fancy staying with the Rook for the trip back. Maybe he fell out with his father; maybe he wanted to stay and make his own fortune in China; maybe he was influenced by the other six shipmates who jumped ship around the same time – including his father’s personal servant, Robert Stancliff. For whatever reason, he left in a hurry, and without the pay he was owed. One can easily imagine George’s disappointment; possibly, if the filial betrayal was known to his remaining crew, his public humiliation. It must have been doubly frustrating to have to return every day to the notebook that his son had kept so distinctively, and be reminded of their parting; no wonder he kept such a minimal account of the voyage west. The Rook made rapid progress, reaching Surat by the end of March 1701, then spending a year cycling between there, Persia and Ceylon, where the ship, with its hold full of valuable commodities, was trapped for months by monsoon winds. One can imagine Simmons’ relief as he finally got to plot a course for Cape of Good Hope and home. The voyage had been long, and no doubt exhausting as well as personally frustrating. But only five days out of Gallo (Galle in modern Sri Lanka), on 30 April 1702, we see a

tiny note under the day’s latitude reading: ‘Captain took sick’. He carries on writing, but five days later there’s another note: ‘I being very sick’. And with a professional, dispassionate entry on 11 May, with the ship nearing the equator in the Indian Ocean, the journal ends, with thirty pages left blank. Captain Simmons died, and his mate John Hunnicombe assumed command. The Rook’s journal had outlasted both of its keepers.

The internal tensions of the Rook’s journal’s don’t just reveal family differences, but also conflicting attitudes towards notebooking and journalkeeping. Simmons senior’s half confirms that the haphazard logs of explorers like Magellan were a thing of the past: a ship’s captain was now a business executive, expected to keep a full account of progress, weather and events for the benefit of shareholders back home.* In that sense, it neatly embodies the seventeenth century’s shift towards punctilious recordkeeping and technical administration – and with them, colonial rule from a distance. Simmons junior’s entries, meanwhile, show a wide-eyed curiosity and joy in discovery, notwithstanding his inexpert drawing and an account of Amoy which draws heavily on sailors’ hearsay and stereotype. Even at a distance of three centuries, this openness to experience makes him rather likeable. Other journals show that a traveller’s account could satisfy both impulses. A century later, for instance, the logbooks of Lewis and Clark (the US expedition following Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase) included not just bald navigational and meterological readings, but accurately surveyed maps, landscape sketches, drawings of flora and fauna, and long-form entries on progress and events. The eighteen small notebooks that they returned with are packed with images and incidental details that the curious, whimsical James Simmons would have loved – as well as the cartography that his formal, punctilious father would have respected. It is a shame that Simmons father and son couldn’t see eye to eye: one feels for them, and the crew of their unlucky voyage. Perhaps James shouldn’t have shot that albatross.

* A generation earlier, a British merchant named Robert Williams had compiled ‘a catalogue of the books necessary’ for trading at sea. He – like Francis Bacon – listed no fewer than twenty-eight different notebooks, each with a different function; so although he achieved no particular distinction in life, he has in death become a favourite of historians of paperwork.

CHAPTER 19

‘I THINK…’ Naturalists’ notebooks, 1551–1859 The study of the natural world remained a constant through the classical and medieval periods, when any decent library possessed an illuminated herbarium and a bestiary, the former usually more grounded in reality than the latter. But botany and zoology moved up a gear during the late Renaissance, then further again during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At each point, the notebook revealed new uses which helped naturalists make new observations and new deductions. The Swiss academic Conrad Gessner – a near contemporary of our Dutch herring artist, Adriaen Coenen – had a formidably broad range of expertise, and had compiled and published a bilingual Greek-Latin dictionary by the age of twenty-three. He then directed his attentions towards medicine, mathematics, physics, astronomy, philosophy and ethics. But his most remarkable achievements were in naturalism. Between 1551 and 1558 he published a five-volume, 4,500-page survey of the animal kingdom, richly illustrated with woodcut prints, which became a huge success, despite being blacklisted by Pope Paul IV on account of Gessner’s Protestantism. Historia animalium combined observation, solid information, myth and fable (unicorns are given as much attention as leopards), but its copiousness represented a huge step forward in the life sciences. And Gessner would not rest: even as Historia animalium was at the press, he was working on its sequel, the Historia plantarum, which aimed to do the same for the plant kingdom. Two of his working notebooks for the Historia plantarum survive in the collections of the Erlangen-Nürnberg University library. Like Leonardo, Gessner knew that the best way to observe something closely is to draw it, and his pages combine drawings and paintings (most by Gessner himself,

some by his English colleague Thomas Penny) with all kinds of information: beside each image sit notes on the specimen’s habitat, behaviour and abundance. These observations from life are often accompanied by citations from Pliny and Galen, or from Gessner’s international network of correspondents. Clippings from printed books feature too. One can almost watch the collaborative process in action as Gessner adds detail and thinks through the subject’s characteristics. On the page on a member of the Gentian family (see overleaf), the plant is captured at different stages of its development, sketches show the progression of blooms opening up the stem and the details of seed pods and root structure. Gessner tells us when a variety flowers, and an erasure shows the revision process in action. Just as a common-placer returned to a headword, Gessner added to each page over time, with new observations and references. One plant particularly troubled him, causing him to return repeatedly until he had realised why it was incongruous: it was tobacco, only just arrived from North America. Another especially lively page depicts a member of the cannabis family in wonderful detail, although there is no mention of its applications. Gessner assembled around eight hundred of these beautiful entries in preparation for Historia plantarum, but his labours would not see fruition. At the end of 1565 he died of the plague, which he may have contracted in his work as Zurich’s city physician, and although his illustrations did not sink into complete obscurity, they were not properly published for two hundred years, by which time numerous other botanists had produced similar work. But his notebooks, apart from their incredible beauty, proved that the systematic collection and organisation of knowledge which Erasmus had promulgated was not just applicable to the humanities, but to the life sciences too.

This page of the Historia plantarum, on one of the Gentian family, shows how thorough and multilayered Gessner’s process could be.

The precise observations of Gessner and his contemporaries represented a major step forward from the haphazard – if often beautiful – illuminated herbaria of the Middle Ages. But, while collecting empirical data was a necessary step to knowing the world, it did not necessarily help with any deeper theoretical interpretation. As Francis Bacon observed fifty years after Gessner’s death: ‘Natural and Experimental History is so various and scattered that it confounds and disturbs the understanding; unless it be limited and placed in the right order; therefore we must form some tables and ranks of instances in such a manner and order, that the understanding may work upon them.’ The next stage, therefore, was to work out a system of categorisation. Bacon’s Swiss contemporary Caspar Bauhin described some six thousand species and made a start at classifying them. John Ray in England and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in France each took steps towards the definition of species and genera. But it would be a scholar from Europe’s north who would, through many iterations, develop the system we still recognise today. Carl Linnaeus, born in 1707 in southern Sweden, lacked the artistic skill of a Gessner, relying instead on thorough written descriptions and the specimens he collected. But he possessed a rare gift for seeing the bigger picture. Like nearly all his intellectual contemporaries, he was an enthusiastic notebook-keeper. In his travel diaries, he and his assistants indefatigably recorded and described thousands of plants, animals and geological features, and he kept several common-places, including a fivehundred-page notebook called the Manuscripta Medica, packed with lists, tables, diagrams and excerpts. As the science historian Staffan Müller-Wille puts it: ‘Linnaeus was accumulating and processing information by turning it into two-dimensional arrangements of words… that used paper space exhaustively and expediently and made it possible to grasp the wealth of information visually, as in a map’, while another, much shorter notebook, Spolia Botanica, shows him ‘experimenting with his data, by playing around with various methods of classification and their visual representation’. In the Spolia Botanica, Linnaeus tested three existing systems of classification by applying them to the flora of three Swedish regions. As he accumulated ever more data, he moved on to index cards, which – unlike bound notebooks – allowed for an infinite number of new entries to be

added to his catalogues. In turn, organising his botanical notes under common headings gave him a new way to understand species. As MüllerWille and his colleague Isabelle Charmantier conclude: ‘From now on, the world was not only populated by different species of plants and animals, but by different genera and orders as well. In short, what naturalists and biologists have since then called the “natural system” of organisms had taken form.’ But Linnaeus’s most significant achievement was the Systema Naturae, a book which he steadily reworked until, with 1758’s tenth edition, it had reached a sophistication and consistency that today’s taxonomists still admire. Over the years the Systema grew from eleven oversized pages to over six thousand; when revising each edition, Linnaeus used special interleaved copies in which blank and printed pages alternated – practical hybrids of book and notebook. In it, Linnaeus organised mammals according to the number and type of their teeth; birds according to their bills and feet; fish according to the position of their fins; and so on, in a glorious summation of known life on earth. Müller-Wille and Charmantier make the key point that Linnaeus did not work in an academic vacuum. ‘His data collection enterprise was also dependent on large-scale technological systems – the paper trade, the printing press, and the book market; a global system of postal communications; the ships and posts of trading companies – without which his activities could never have reached the scale that was needed to reach new levels of abstraction and generalisation.’

A page from Linnaeus’s 1732 Lapland travel diary. Note the mosquito.

Linnaeus – like Chaucer, Colbert and Michael of Rhodes – lived in a commercially interconnected world. The maintenance of these commercial connections would lead to the next great theoretical breakthrough in the life sciences.

On 12 August 1828, a British naval officer died horribly in a tiny harbour, dolorously known as Port Famine, on the Straits of Magellan which Albo had described so breathlessly three centuries before. Captain Pringle Stokes had been mapping the area for the Royal Navy, which needed to know all the world’s sea lanes if it was to defend Britain’s colonial possessions, and the strain had taken its toll. Driven into an unbreakable depression by loneliness and the terrible conditions of the southern winter, he had shot himself in the head, but the bullet had not killed him: he remained conscious and only expired eleven days later, of gangrene. Command of his vessel, a three-masted survey barque, presently passed to a young officer, Robert FitzRoy, who had not sailed with the unfortunate Stokes, but knew what pangs of isolation and stress he had suffered. So when, three years later, Captain FitzRoy was ordered to return to the Southern Ocean, he looked about for a shipmate whose conversation would not be constrained by naval discipline or rank: ‘a companion,’ he wrote, who ‘should share my scientific tastes, make good use of the expedition’s opportunities for naturalism research, dine with me as an equal, and provide a semblance of normal human friendship.’ The word went out, and a raw – though enthusiastic – student took up his offer. Just after Christmas 1831, Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle. Though they argued from time to time, and held opposing views on religion and slavery, FitzRoy and Darwin established a friendly working relationship with neatly complementary roles. The captain’s task was to chart the coastal waters of South America, his passenger’s to survey the geology inland. Neither man had any idea how consequential the expedition would turn out to be. When Darwin signed up he was only twenty-two. His geological experience amounted to a fortnight mapping strata in Wales, and as a naturalist he knew little about anything bar beetles and barnacles. But he made up for this lack of expertise with energy, open-mindedness and a

willingness to learn which manifested itself from the Beagle’s first stop at the Cape Verde Islands. ‘That was a memorable hour to me,’ he later wrote, ‘and how distinctly I can call to mind the low cliff of lava beneath which I rested, with the sun glaring hot, a few strange desert plants growing near and with living corals in the tidal pools at my feet.’ Happy to get started, he described everything he saw in a pocket notebook, only twelve centimetres by eight, with red leather covers and a brass clasp. The first pages are roughly pencilled sums showing how, with the help of FitzRoy and his sextant, Darwin calculated the height of a baobab tree. He then made a sketchy diagram of a cliff-face, noting layers of different rock: ‘S top of cliff Feldspathic rock Feldspar Crystalline decompose rock sea coral’. Many of the notes are abbreviated to a baffling degree. ‘Brick in modern Breccia Kingfisher eating lizard McC’, we read, then a few pages later, ‘milk cream for Shells action under blowpipe try the old ones Crabs that run & leap Milk from goat on 7th examined on 11th composed of small animalcule about .0001 in diameter’. After three weeks, the Beagle sailed for Rio de Janeiro. Here the pattern for the voyage established itself: Darwin went ashore to make his observations and collect specimens while FitzRoy cruised the coastline, surveying and charting the local waters. When FitzRoy was done, Darwin would rejoin the ship, and they would sail for the next destination. Although he would return heavily encumbered by fossils, rock samples and the bodies of interesting wildlife, Darwin carried as little as possible on these trips, and only ever packed one book to read (usually Milton’s Paradise Lost) and a single notebook. This minimal approach ensured that every one of the fifteen field notebooks has a wide variety of entries: whatever caught Darwin’s eye went in, so formal geological observations sit among notes of his routes, his expenditure, the people he met, and so on. Darwin named each notebook after the place where he first used it, so reading the paper labels he affixed to them tells you the broad strokes of HMS Beagle’s itinerary: Cape de Verds, Rio, Buenos Ayres, Falkland, Bahía Blanca, Santa Fé, Banda Oriental, Port Desire, Valparaiso, Santiago, Galapagos, Coquimbo, Copiapò, Despoblado, Sydney. All but two of the notebooks opened upwards, like a reporter’s notebook, and Darwin wrote rapidly across their small pages – none were larger than 17 cm by 13 cm – with frequent underlinings, dashes and abbreviations. ‘They are the worst,’ says the

historian John van Wyhe, who has worked with Darwin’s papers for decades and knows them better than anyone. ‘Not written at a desk, often in pencil, short lines, staccato notes, terrible handwriting, very faint, with arcane geological content.’ And yet, the notes worked.

Darwin (in hat and tails) on board the Beagle, at Bahia Blanca, Argentina, in a caricature drawn by the ship’s artist, Augustus Earle.

Darwin’s geological mission demanded thousands of detailed descriptions, sketches and diagrams of rock formations made on his gruelling trips inland. That Cape Verde cliff-face made a humble start to a project that achieved an awesome scale: one of Darwin’s greatest achievements was his cross section of the Andes, mostly recorded in the ‘Santa Fé Notebook’, which has proven remarkably accurate. In turn, many of these rocks yielded fossils, which looked like ‘apparent rubbish’ to the Beagle’s amused crew but would spark vigorous debate back in Britain as Darwin’s consignments of specimens arrived. In the ‘Bahia Blanca Notebook’, Darwin recorded the excavation of a rich seam of fossils, including ancient armadillos that were clearly related to surviving local species. He was puzzled to discover a horse’s tooth in a similar deposit, raising the intriguing possibility that horses had lived in South America, become extinct, then returned with Spanish colonisers. In the ‘Falkland Island Notebook’ he recorded a find of Devonian brachiopods, at that point unknown outside Europe, and thought to be the oldest of all fossilised organisms. This notebook also shows Darwin’s first thoughts about island endemism, the phenomenon of a species being confined to a clearly limited area. Every find seemed to pose new questions, while offering new information about the history of the earth and the development of its species. The living animals of South America, so different from European fauna, fascinated him. From the corpse of a rhea that had been shot for food he realised that there were, in fact, two distinct species of these huge flightless birds. He made the deduction only after most of the unlucky specimen had already been eaten, however, so the classification depended on the unpalatable head, neck and feet, which he described in the ‘Buenos Ayres Notebook’ and sent back to Cambridge. ‘Capinchas dung smells very sweet’ he noted – no doubt he had inspected it closely for dung beetles, one of his specialities. The subterranean tuco-tuco posed a question: why did this burrowing rodent have eyes, which it rarely used and which usually became infected, causing blindness? More contentiously: why would any animal have been divinely created with such an in-built design flaw? And how had the related bird and reptile species on the islands of the Galapagos adapted to the slight differences in their environments?

The notebooks reveal, too, Darwin’s interest in South America’s indigenous populations and European arrivals. Welsh or English immigrants provided company in nearly every port. On every excursion he noted the local industry and agriculture, and how the locals lived. Notebooks from Buenos Aires to the Galapagos show how much pleasure Darwin took observing ‘señoritas’: in Lima he writes of ‘ladies, like mermaids; could not keep eyes away from them.’ Landscapes often affected him emotionally: when describing a scene, he usually includes a word or two to capture the mood it evoked. The flat, arid wastes of Tierra del Fuego and the blasted peat of the Falklands depressed him, Brazilian jungle abundance lifted his spirits, and above all he loved to find reminders of the mild green English landscape, as he did in a pasture with willows and poplar near Buenos Aires.

As the voyage progressed, Darwin became more aware of the value of his field notes and he started writing at greater length. ‘Let the collector’s motto be “Trust nothing to the memory”,’ he would later write, ‘for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting.’ Only with South America and the Galapagos behind him did he slacken off: entries in the last few notebooks are briefer, and Darwin paid much less attention to his stopping points on the long sail back from Sydney. But that didn’t mean idleness, for the field notebooks, with their aggressively abbreviated record, represented only the first stage of his process. As quickly as possible, trips ashore would be written up as a coherent narrative. ‘How many hundred years has been. How many will be… Sublime view fine colour of rocks’, a note made at the isolated Patagonian harbour of Port Desire, became considerably more evocative in the diary: All is stillness & desolation. One reflects how many centuries it has thus been & how many more it will thus remain. Yet in this scene without one bright object, there is high pleasure, which I can neither explain or comprehend.

Meanwhile, zoological, geological or ornithological observations became formal entries on loose foolscap sheets, where Darwin also described thousands of specimens and connected his observations, where possible, to the published literature. Between FitzRoy’s books and Darwin’s, the Beagle carried an up-to-date reference library, and in the field notebooks Darwin refers to the work of at least nineteen authors. As he worked his way through a field notebook, Darwin struck through its entries just as merchants struck through journaled transactions when copying them to a ledger. And if he hadn’t transferred a field notebook’s contents in full before he had to go ashore again, he would take a different one, so as not to risk losing what he already had. So the notebooks overlap, and the reader has to jump from one to another and back again to read the entries chronologically. Ship’s captain and gentleman scientist would sit writing together in the quarters that FitzRoy had agreed to share with Darwin to encourage him to join the expedition. This dedicated paperwork left little energy for letterwriting, so early in the voyage he sent his sister Caroline the first of his field notebooks instead, writing in a cover note: I have taken a fit of disgust with it & want to get it out of my sight. Any of you that like may read it.— a great deal is absolutely childish: Remember however this, that it is written solely to make me remember this voyage, & that it is not a record of facts but of my thoughts. Once it was out of his hands, his opinion changed: in a following letter he warned his family not to let it go astray, as ‘I would as soon loose [sic] a piece of my memory as it.’ He need not have worried: his family shared the notebook judiciously, and as the Beagle continued on its way, its contents garnered growing interest.

Darwin didn’t stint on the notebooks he chose to use in the field. ‘Leather-bound, high quality, some of the best papers I have ever felt,’ notes van Wyhe, something of a stationery connoisseur himself. Not expecting to be away from home for five years, Darwin did not pack

enough notebooks, and had to stock up periodically en route. So the collection that he returned with, and carefully guarded for the rest of his life, consisted of several different styles. One group, known to today’s scholars as the ‘Type 5’, was an innovation that enjoyed a flash of popularity in the early years of the nineteenth century. Made of ‘Velvet Paper’, invented by Hall & Co., these notebooks’ pages were impregnated with a patented chemical solution which reacted with a special metallic pencil, creating a waterproof dark line. This made it attractive for outdoor writers such as the ‘Merchants, Brokers, Surveyors, Travellers, Farmers, Graziers’ to whom Hall & Co. advertised. Samuel Taylor Coleridge used Velvet Paper notebooks when exploring the Lake District, and J. M. W. Turner sketched in one. Several companies exported them from London. Darwin seems to have picked up a handful, and the accompanying pencil, at Valparaiso, which the Beagle visited twice in 1835 and where European merchantmen frequently called. Darwin started one of these ‘Type 5’ notebooks in May 1836, somewhere off the Cape of Good Hope, marking another significant change in his notebook-keeping. Now known as the ‘Red Notebook’, for the colour of its leather covers, this was the first that he devoted solely to theoretical speculation. Every field notebook contains questions – speculations as to the origin of a particular rock formation, most commonly – but in the ‘Red Notebook’, Darwin moved away from observation completely, and gave his theoretical speculations free rein, debating geological ideas with himself and contemporaries like Humboldt, Lyell and Von Buch, with one eye on later publication. ‘Does Andes in Chili. separate geographical ranges of plants[?]’, he wonders: then reminds himself to ‘Urge the entire absence of any rock situated beneath low water in the Southern ocean not being buoyed with Kelp’. ‘Geology of whole world will turn out simple’, he writes, somewhat optimistically. By October 1836, when the Beagle docked at Falmouth after five years away from home, Darwin’s star was already in the ascendant. His Cambridge mentor, Professor John Henslow, had published excerpts from his letters the year before, and the young man found himself in demand, committing to edit and publish his Beagle journal in a joint edition with FitzRoy, in addition to lecturing and to cataloguing and classifying thousands of geological, ornithological, botanical and zoological specimens. In July 1837, in the midst of this activity, he started another

notebook, which, like the ‘Red Notebook’, would be dedicated to reflection, speculation and interrogation of his own ideas. Notebook ‘B’, as he labelled it, is now often – not quite accurately – cited as the place where Darwin first hit upon his theory of evolution by natural selection. It owes this fame to his ‘tree of life’ diagram, which shows multiple species diverging from a common ancestor, some falling extinct as others survive. The laconic opening – ‘I think’ – describes process, rather than conclusion, and this diagram didn’t represent the end point of his quest, but a staging post. Indeed, these theoretical notebooks reveal a discursive, nonlinear thought process in which Darwin readily rejected any notion that didn’t answer the case. It’s also clear that Darwin retained the habit of keeping a notebook always to hand just as he had in South America. ‘He takes them out in libraries, gentlemen’s clubs, when reading, and in conversation,’ van Wyhe told me, ‘so they are still, in a way, field notebooks, collecting data.’

In July 1837 Darwin began his ‘B’ notebook on ‘Transmutation of Species’, and wrote ‘I think’ above this first evolutionary tree.

Having already filled the pages of the ‘Red Notebook’ with theory and hypothesis, Darwin was well accustomed to thinking problems through on the page. He confidently dedicated different notebooks to different

intellectual functions: his field notebooks worked as immediate aidememoires; in his journals, he constructed the narrative of his life’s events and his emotional responses; and in the ‘Red Notebook’ and the lettered notebooks – sometimes known collectively as the ‘transmutation notebooks’ – he gave his imagination free rein, posing questions to himself and recording his train of thought without inhibition (or syntax). These questions ranged from the seemingly recondite, ‘Why 2 [species] of ostrich in South America?’, to the existential. ‘Why is life short?’ he asked, ‘Each species changes – does it progress?’ The reader can almost hear Darwin talking to himself: ‘The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead’, he proposed, then replied: ‘No only makes it excessively complicated’. By privately externalising his ideas he was able to question them, manipulate them and hone the arguments that would turn a raw hypothesis into a wellsubstantiated, coherently argued theory. Darwin more than once explained the method in print, recommending that researchers ‘ought to remember Bacon’s aphorism, that Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man’. While Darwin’s notebook-keeping was streamlined and efficient compared to Francis Bacon’s twenty-eight-book system, the two men shared an important process: make copious rough notes in a waste book or field notebook, then transfer them carefully to more organised documents, analysing them and thinking questions through on the way. ‘So by 1839, when Darwin finished his Notebook E,’ van Wyhe says, ‘much of the basic framework of the theory of evolution by natural selection had been sketched out.’ The notebooks also give the lie to the common belief that Darwin worked on his revolutionary theory in secret. ‘It’s absolutely false,’ van Wyhe says. ‘He takes the notebooks out in front of people, he notes their opinion, he talks about his theory to everybody, he won’t shut up about it.’ The transmutation notebooks are some of the most famous in the history of science, and there can’t be a clearer example of the notebook’s intellectual potential than Darwin’s story. Scratching quick, incoherent notes onto their tiny pages, he had used his field notebooks to prompt observation, interrogation and judgement of what he saw. Back on board the Beagle, Darwin turned these raw materials – just one hundred thousand telegraphic words – into nearly two thousand pages of systematic scientific notes, and an evocatively detailed diary. Then, in the ‘Red Notebook’ and

its successors, he processed the arguments and ideas which would, in the six books he published in the decade after his voyage, make him one of the era’s most respected scientists – and then, in On the Origin of Species, change the way we think of life. All germinating from a pile of field notebooks that fit comfortably into a shoebox. As Gessner had, Darwin provoked those who perceived his work as an attack on biblical truth. FitzRoy himself vehemently rejected On the Origin of Species when it was published in 1860, and claimed that his own – vital – part in its creation now gave him ‘acutest pain’. He, too, had enjoyed a distinguished post-Beagle career: among other distinctions, he founded the government department that would become the Meteorological Office, coined the term ‘weather forecast’, and issued the first gale warnings. And whatever he later felt about his most momentous voyage, the manner of his death would prove that he had been wise to seek out a cheerful companion for it. Like Captain Pringle Stokes, worn down by depression and the weight of his responsibilities, in 1865, Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy took his own life.

CHAPTER 20

ONE WAY TO IMMORTALITY Diaries and journals, 1600–present Stationers had plied their trade in the Royal Exchange, in the heart of the City of London, for hundreds of years (Samuel Pepys had bought his notebooks at John Cade’s shop there). But in the early years of the nineteenth century they saw commerce, and urban life, transformed. For the first time, London’s population had reached one million, and shipping traffic had grown hugely. Tens of thousands of vessels arrived each year, carrying cargoes from all over the world, and by 1811 the city’s merchants were busier than they had ever been. Watching his neighbours rushing to and fro, always anxious to catch the next high tide, gave the bookbinder John Letts an idea, and at the turn of the year he launched a product to make their lives easier: the first dated diary.*

The first iteration of the revolutionary Letts Diary. This copy, in the Letts Archive, was kept by one William Buckingham.

Utilitarian in the extreme, the Letts 1812 ‘datebook’ contained little detail. At 104 pages, it assigned each working week a two-page spread, Monday to Wednesday on the left, Thursday to Saturday on the right, dated

the days, and that was it. Letts might have worried that his customers wouldn’t see the value in such minimal content. If so, he needn’t have: the concept was a roaring success, and each year he republished the daily diary, adding successive refinements and variations so that within a decade he offered an extensive range of products. His datebook, Letts realised, offered a natural home for the kind of practical information that annual almanacs had long collected, and so – as well as Sundays, which the first edition had omitted, as no pious man would do business on the Lord’s day – he started to include practical data. Tide tables, which determined ships’ arrival and departure times, proved a particular draw. A parallel market in women’s diaries sprang up. In 1819, one of Letts’s competitors offered ‘The ladies’ most elegant and convenient pocket book’, which boasted of its usefulness to the fashion-conscious urban woman. ‘Embellished with a view of the Point Neuf, Paris’, it contained, ‘among a great variety of useful articles… Country dances for 1819. New songs, sung at Vauxhall, &c. New Hackney coach fares. Rates of Hackney chairmen. Watermen’s rates. List of public offices. Marketing tables.’ It was a powerful offering, in a tiny package. Letts intended his invention to help his customers plan their futures: his diaries were prospective datebooks. But they had an unexpected consequence: his customers rapidly realised that they worked just as well as retrospective journals, in which they could record the events of the recent past, and Letts diaries helped to turn diary-keeping into a mainstream occupation for the first time in human history. To which, we may ask: what kept you? Why did it take ordinary people so long to write about the events of their own lives, and their reactions to them?

The earliest surviving business journal is on the oldest written papyrus that we have. It dates back to the year 2562 BCE, when an Egyptian official called Merer managed teams shipping stone ten miles down the Nile from the quarries at Tura to the huge building site of the Great Pyramid at Giza. On one badly frayed papyrus leaf, he records a series of journeys back and forth: there’s no personal information apart from Merer’s name, and the record must have been a report for his masters. This lack of written introspection makes it typical of the ancient world. Greek thinkers from

Pythagoras onwards wrote of the importance of introspection, and the Roman Seneca made self-reflection the topic of one of his letters to Lucilius, but no-one suggested writing privately as a way to look within oneself. A well-to-do Roman household would keep papyrus account books and records of events (known variously as the commentaria, ratio, quotidianum diurnam or the Greek ephemerides), just as their Florentine successors would, a thousand years later, but (so far as we know, for none survives) these were businesslike, impersonal accounts.

The Merer papyrus – keeping tabs on the building work for the Great Pyramid at Giza in 2562 BCE.

Unsurprisingly, the mostly illiterate inhabitants of the post-Roman world didn’t keep diaries either, though some flirted with the idea. In the seventh century, Saint John Climacus reported visiting a monastery near Gaza where every brother carried a small wax tablet on his belt. If one found himself committing (or considering) a sin, he would note it on the tablet, and at the end of the day confess it to the abbot, and the tablet would be wiped clean, literally and metaphorically. Monks elsewhere wrote contemporary chronicles of events, and they would be followed by secular historians. The epic journal of the Venetian Marin Sanudo, for instance, runs to forty thousand pages, and covers the years 1496 to 1536, but it was

intended as a public record. Sanudo was paid by the city to write it, and he repeatedly referred to it as the first draft of the history that he would complete once he found the time, which he never did. A few years later in London, one Henry Machyn would start keeping the record that is now known as his diary. It isn’t: Machyn himself doesn’t feature in it at all and devotes most of its pages to accounts of notable funerals, from which we can deduce (he never tells us) that he was an upmarket undertaker. Such chronicles tell us a good deal about contemporary society, but nothing of their writer’s interior lives. Even during the great flowering of literacy of Florence’s golden age, when busy writers took advantage of the arrival of paper to create all manner of new genres – and frequently wrote of their private lives and emotions in letters – no-one kept the kind of personal, or confessional, diary that we know today. Some, like the apothecary Luca Landucci, wrote vivid chronicles of the city’s affairs, many more, like Gregorio Dati (whom we met in Chapter Four), recorded domestic milestones like births, deaths and marriages, and nearly everyone kept a close track of income and outgoings, but only very rarely did a Florentine record their emotions, or the events of a normal day, on the page. ‘Today we are astonished,’ writes Philippe Lejeune, the leading historian of the diary, ‘but there it is: the idea never occurred to them.’ There were occasional exceptions to the rule. Travellers, as we have seen, often kept daily accounts of their journeys. Some pious souls wrote spiritual journals as part of their religious training – but they rarely touched upon the worldly events of the day, and usually lasted only a few weeks. For two years in the 1560s, the Florentine artist Pontormo kept a terse diary of his moods and diet, alongside sketches of work-in-progress: ‘Monday evening after dinner I felt very lively and agreeable. I ate a salad of lettuce, a thin soup of good mutton and 4 quattrini of bread’. And in 1598, Isaac Casaubon started his éphémérides, which included many of the mundanities of his life in Geneva, although nothing of his emotional state. But it remained a highly unusual habit.

A change of approach came about in seventeenth-century England. In Ben Jonson’s 1606 play Volpone, the ridiculous Sir Politic Would-Be,

shows ‘my diary, wherin I note my actions of the day.’ Sir Politic’s is the first journal* mentioned in English drama or fiction, and Jonson skewers it as sharply as Chaucer had skewered Jankyn’s book two centuries before: Notandum, A rat had gnawn my spur-leathers; notwithstanding, I put on new, and did go forth: but first I threw three beans over the threshold. Item, I went and bought two tooth-picks, whereof one I burst immediately… and at St. Mark’s I urined. This scene suggests that diary-keeping existed in England but was novel enough to require some definition from Jonson, just as Chaucer had explained the zibaldone to his readers. The habit, despite Jonson’s mockery, was catching on fast: dozens of journals survive from the first decades of the new century, and for the first time we see people keeping a real-time account of their lives, opinions and feelings in the same pages as they recorded events in the wider world. These English diaries were first surveyed by the French scholar, Elisabeth Bourcier, who found that they were written by both women and men, mostly from the middle or upper classes, many living outside the cities, although often fixated on events in London. Mixing the private and the public, they covered topics such as morals, marriage, the hazards of childbirth and the consolations of family; the business of the farm, the parish, the town; political disturbances, the civil war, patriotism; plague, disease, medicine; superstition; and the interpretation of dreams. Although the contents varied widely, religious tension was a constant: Anglicans and Puritans feuded, Jews and Catholics were actively persecuted, and no-one trusted the Quakers. And, in a theme that has never gone away, many diarists found that they could use a diary’s pages to record marital conflict. One of the most remarkable early diarists, Lady Anne Clifford, left a personal account that includes both business and her emotional responses to it. She spent much of her life in legal dispute, contesting the title that her uncle had inherited from her father, the Baron de Clifford, and this threw her into conflict with her first husband, Richard Sackville.* Her diaries record her pursuit of her inheritance, her husband’s opposition to her case, his removal of her children, and the pressure exerted on her by friends and

members of the court. On 3 May 1616, she receives a letter from her husband telling her that: The child should go next day to London, which at first was somewhat grievous to me, but when I considered that it would both make my Lord more angry with me & be worse for the Child, I resolved to let her go. After, I wept bitterly. And, as the best diarists do, she also captured life’s smaller defeats: on 28 December, she ‘forgot it was Fish day and ate Flesh at both Dinners’, then ‘play’d at Glecko with my Lady Gray and lost £27 and odd money’. At the age of fifty-three, Clifford finally recovered the titles and estates that were due to her; for her remaining three decades she moved contentedly from residence to residence, rebuilding castles and churches across Yorkshire and Cumbria, and frequently taking her tenants to court.

To celebrate her victory, Anne Clifford commissioned a ‘Great Picture’ in 1646 for her castle. This panel depicts her with her beloved paperwork.

At the other end of the social scale, the Yorkshire yeoman Adam Eyre also recorded marital strife in his ‘diurnal’. His entries for 1647 record constant conflict at home: June 8. – This morn my wife began, after her old manner, to brawl and revile me for wishing her only to wear such apparel as was decent and comely, and accused me for treading on her sore foot, with curses and oaths; which to my knowledge I touched not.

Nevertheless, she continued in that ecstasy till noon, and at dinner I told her I purposed never to come in bed with her… Like Clifford, Eyre also records his gaming, although much lower stakes are at play: June 23. – This morn I went to Bull House, and thence with Captain Rich to Bolsterstone, to bowls, where I lost 6s and spent 6d… Every entry has another telling detail: August 11. – This morn I went with Edward Mitchell to Barnsley, and called at Jo. Shirt’s by the way, where I had my hair cut, and paid for tobacco for my wife, 10d… who at night kept the gates shut, and said she would be master of the house for that night… At the end of the year, Eyre – who, as a Puritan, made a poor match for any woman who enjoyed tobacco and immodest clothing – set off to London to claim back pay for his earlier service in the parliamentary army. There he remained, taking advantage of the new political order to build a lucrative career in government – and avoid his wife. Eyre’s contemporaries included a young Royalist student, John Evelyn, who in 1641 started to fill a 700-page notebook with his own observations and experiences, and a rising civil servant, Samuel Pepys, who in December 1659 bought the notebook which would become the first volume of his unsurpassed diary, a masterpiece that combined the self-examination of the ancient Greeks, the daily confession of medieval monks, the financial accounting of the Florentines, the public affairs of Marin Sanudo, the travel observations that Francis Bacon recommended, the trivial detail that Jonson had lampooned, and, like Eyre, the discord of an unhappy marriage. Pepys even wrote about his sex life, crudely disguising those pasages by rendering them in a combination of bad Italian, Spanish and French which did equal violence to all three languages. I to my little mercer’s Finch, and did here baiser su moher, a belle femme, he writes, of kissing his tailor’s wife on 2 June 1668. Later the same day he goes to see another married woman, Mrs Bagwell:

aller a la house de Bagwell, and there after a little playing and baisando we did go up in the dark a su camera … and there fasero la grand cosa upon the bed; and that being hecho, did go away Many diarists since have resorted to similar subterfuge to camouflage intimate matters.*

Clifford, Eyre, Pepys and Evelyn were at the forefront of a significant movement. Just as Florentines had fallen for the zibaldone and Wittenbergers for the Stammbuch, so the English adopted the daily diary. Why? A combination of factors reacted one on another: social and ideological tension, high levels of literacy, growing social mobility and status anxiety all played a part. The burgeoning of paperwork in general must have been a component: as we have seen, ledgers, common-place books and travel journals all proliferated during this period. But diarykeeping had not followed when notebooks arrived in Florence or Venice. People often start diaries in times of upheaval, such as the religious conflict and civil war that shook England in the 1640s. But these were minor skirmishes compared to the bloodbaths of the Thirty Years’ War, which had devastated Germany a century earlier and not prompted a surge in diarykeeping. Public references by such prominent writers as Donne, Jonson and Bacon perhaps normalised the idea of the diary, before its popularity ensured its persistence and growth. The examples of alba amicorum, zibaldoni, Stammbücher and today’s bullet journals show that, if your neighbours do it, writing in a notebook can become an attractive trend. The habit quickly spread to England’s colonies, but only slowly across Europe. Most people, if they confided their thoughts and feelings to paper, did so in letter form, and early diarists often took up the habit only after becoming frustrated with conventional correspondence, or their friends’ inconstancy. In October 1788 a Dutch woman, Magdalena van Schinne, opened her journal with an address to the notebook itself: O my paper, henceforth you shall be the only one to hear my ideas, my feelings, my cares and joys. Here, I will be able to pour out my soul entirely; with others, even with my best friends, I want to learn

how to hide things, or at least I no longer want to tell them about myself. You alone will be my confidant. When my heavy heart longs to unburden itself, you will not cruelly reject it. You will not misinterpret what I confide in you; when my pen is borne along by happiness, you will not have a morbid talent for snuffing it out in an instant. I will have you by my side always, to turn to when in need. Her eloquent description of the emotional benefits of diary-keeping goes some way to explaining why the habit spread so widely. A hundred and fifty years later, the opening lines of another Dutch diary echoed the sentiment precisely: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support. Thus wrote Anne Frank, on 14 June 1942.

So when John Letts started producing diaries in 1812, two markets existed for them: businessmen, who wanted to efficiently plan their futures, and diary-keepers, often women, who appreciated the framework they offered for creating the narrative of the recent past. In accessing that second market, Letts and his competitors enjoyed good timing, for the early years of his innovative business coincided with two events that would forever change the way readers and writers viewed the diary. John Evelyn’s was published in 1818, and Samuel Pepys’s – heavily redacted by its editor Richard Neville – in 1825. Both were soon reprinted, and gave aspiring diarists admirable role models. A wave of imitators picked up their pens, encouraged by writers like the radical MP William Cobbett, who recommended the habit to both ‘young men and (incidentally) young women’ in 1829. ‘It demands not a minute in the twenty-four hours’, he wrote, ‘and that minute is most agreeably employed.’ A generation of men and (incidentally) women was listening and the nineteenth century became the age of the lifelong journal.*

Technical innovations made life easier for the diarist. Lined pages had first arrived in 1770, with the London patenting of John Tetlow’s ‘machine for ruling paper for music and other purposes’, but remained rare until William Orville Hickock, of Pittsburgh, produced a more effective version in 1844. Both these machines worked by drawing many inked nibs at once across a sheet: today’s lined journals are mostly printed, just as a book is. Paper changed too. At the beginning of the nineteenth century nearly all was still made with cloth rag; by its end, wood pulp papers were in the ascendant.

On the first day of 1819, the eighteen-year-old Frederic Madden prefaced his new diary with a rejection of ‘tedious description of my feelings’ and ‘incidents frivolous to everybody but myself’. Fortunately for us, he roundly failed in both aims, and the daily record he kept for the next fifty-four years is not just a valuable source for anyone interested in the history of literature and the book (he rose to become the British Museum’s Keeper of Manuscripts) but also a faithful record of a life full of passion and turmoil. Winding it up in 1873, six weeks before his death, he wrote: When I cast a rapid glance over all that I have done and suffered over the last 54 years I feel that I have been a very ill-used man, both by Fate (or Providence) and by people in office. Out of the hundreds I have laid under obligation, scarcely one ever shewed any gratitude. But I cannot dwell on such minor miseries. He had already dwelled on them for four million words. Madden’s final entry does, however, highlight a feature of the diary which many enjoy: the ability to revisit your past, encounter your former self, and perhaps even enter into conversation with them. Even more garrulous was Queen Victoria, who wrote in her journal nearly every day for sixty-nine years. After her death, her daughter Princess Beatrice made a partial copy, substantially cutting the text before destroying most of the original notebooks, but even that copy comes to over one hundred volumes, and the original may have been ten million words in length. Victoria published an excerpt in her lifetime – Leaves from the

Journal of Our Life in the Highlands – which was successful enough to warrant a sequel. She was not alone in cashing in on the new travel diary phenomenon. Thomas Letts – John’s son – promised David Livingstone a lifetime supply of perpetual diaries if he agreed to use them on his journeys in Africa, and Livingstone filled a series of them with accurate maps, meticulous descriptions of plants and wildlife, and copious notes on the Bantu languages spoken by the people he encountered. Many other travel journals were published, but – interestingly – few domestic examples. Many people didn’t feel the need to write at great length, but found the new pocket diaries useful. The fifteen-year-old Emma Wedgwood* started to keep brief notes of events in her Marshall’s Fashionable Repository, or Ladies Elegant Pocket Diary For 1824, whose title page promised engravings of ‘the Newest Parisian Costume’ and ‘Four Engraved Pages of Original Music (by an eminent composer)’. From her minimal entries we know when Emma ‘played at charades’, and who came to call (‘Horrid little Langleys’) at the Staffordshire family home. She listed every book that she read, and, in a habit that she would keep up for over thirty years, entered a large X each month. Marshall’s Fashionable Repository, it turned out, made a convenient period tracker.

The extravagant-fonted frontispiece of Marshall’s Ladies Elegant Pocket Diary for 1824, used by the young Emma Wedgwood.

A notable American journal bucked the trend by capturing a marriage in its happiest moments. When Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne married in 1842, they started a joint diary in a marbled notebook, each writing alternate entries in a series of mash notes. ‘A rainy day—a rainy day’ it opens, in Nathaniel’s hand, ‘and I do verily believe there is no sunshine in this world, except what beams from my wife’s eyes.’ Sophia responded

with equally elemental passion – ‘how I foam and sparkle in the sun of his love’ – and somehow the pair kept this stuff up for a full year, only slowing down as their three children arrived, and stopping once the oldest, Una, appropriated the notebook for her own stories. Given that everyone who was anyone now seemed to keep a journal, it is no surprise that this period also saw it arrive as a fictional form. Nikolai Gogol’s 1834 Diary of a Madman conveyed a slide into hallucinatory delusion, while Maupassant’s short story of the same name took the form of the diary of a psychopathic judge. More happily, George and Weedon Grossmith’s 1888 Diary of a Nobody was the first to make the most of the format’s unmatchable efficiency in delivering comic irony, establishing an enjoyable tradition that intermittently throws up massive commercial hits, from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes through The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ to Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Letts, managed by John’s great-grandsons Harry and Norman, grew its diary sales by a factor of twelve between 1900 and 1936, to three million copies every year. Their annual range included four hundred editions, including novelty thumb-sized datebooks, substantial desk diaries and specialised models for professionals. Special interest groups like motorists, bowls players, pigeon-fanciers and radio hams were also catered for. Letts and its rivals competed fiercely for sales, making luxurious products with leather bindings, gilded edges, their own propelling pencils and wipe-clean pages for temporary notes which worked just as table-books had, centuries before. A huge market in corporate gifts developed: if you were in business, you came to expect a diary from your suppliers each Christmas, embossed with their company’s name, and including their details in the almanac section – along with such invaluable information as a London Tube map, the dates of the full moon, and the price of a dog licence. These classic pre-war models, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, are among the most elegant of all notebooks, small masterpieces of paper manufacture, bookbinding, typography, ornament and information design – despite consisting mainly of blank space. Millions now used them as both datebook and journal despite the fact that, as Virgina Woolf noted

ruefully in Jacob’s Room, ‘Mr Letts allows little space in his shilling diaries’. Woolf wrote her own journal for many years, and paid great attention to those of others; the Woolf expert Barbara Lounsberry says she read at least sixty-six published diaries. Her circle included many diarists: the economist John Maynard Keynes, who for several years was the lover of her friend Duncan Grant, used his to record his impressively wide-ranging sex life. Strangers – ‘lift boy of Vauxhall’ – and regular partners – ‘DG’ – alike were listed, and in a separate series of entries Keynes grades encounters using a letter and number code, still unbroken, in which the letters C, A and W play key roles. It was now widely accepted that recording your life brought benefits to your emotional state just as planning your future made you more efficient. ‘Keep a diary, and someday it’ll keep you,’ advised Mae West in the 1937 movie Every Day’s a Holiday, which she both wrote and starred in, but the line wasn’t new even then, having been coined by Margaret Astor fifteen years before. The social historian Joe Moran writes that the ‘art, purpose and etiquette’ of diary-keeping had become a frequent subject for discussion in the new mass media. Among its leading advocates was Arthur Ponsonby, a Labour MP who published several anthologies of diaries and encouraged everyone to preserve the detail that Jonson had lampooned: ‘the trivial pleasures and petty miseries of daily life – the rainy day, the blunt razor, the new suit, the domestic quarrel, the bad night, the twinge of toothache, the fall from a horse.’

Diaries as testimony: Victor Klemperer’s wartime exercise books.

By now the habit had become completely international. When war, long expected, finally broke out in 1939, many Europeans reacted by putting pen to paper and recording what they saw as the world they knew was upended. Many of those diarists were Jewish. At every stage of Nazi persecution, its victims picked up their pens, often intending that their contemporaneous record would bear witness in years to come, when the madness was over. Victor Klemperer, a Dresden professor already in his fifties when Hitler came to power, was something of a cineaste, and had kept a diary of his film-going for over ten years. But in 1932 his diary changed, as the full force of the Nazi state was brought to bear on Germany’s Jewish citizens, of whom Klemperer was one. For thirteen years he documented this escalating oppression in detail, only surviving in precarious limbo because his wife was classified as an ‘Aryan’; with her, he spent the war years in an overcrowded ‘Jew’s House’, suffering forced labour, and watching Dresden’s Jewish population dwindle by deportation. Klemperer recorded it all in exercise books, making a close study of the Nazis’ twisted language, and writing of its injustices for posterity. ‘As far as it lies in my power,’ he wrote in September 1942, ‘the Jew’s House at 15b Caspar David Friedrich Strasse and its many victims will be famous.’ As

Gestapo persecutions intensified, discovery would have meant death, so his wife smuggled his pages to an ‘Aryan’ friend who preserved them. Klemperer survived, and his diaries, published in three volumes in the 1960s, became a key source for students of the Nazi period. In 1944, a boy imprisoned in the Łódź ghetto started his own diary. Like Klemperer, he had to hide it, and wrote in the blank endpapers and margins of a French novel – presumably because it would attract no accidental interest. For three months between May and August, as the Nazi occupiers prepared to liquidate the crammed ghetto, its inhabitants clung to the hope that the Red Army would reach them in time. In English, Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish, the anonymous, orphaned teenager wrote of this yearning, as well as the daily struggles to survive and keep up his younger sister’s spirits, and his angry bafflement at the German prosecution of the war and genocidal murder. ‘There are different rumours current, good ones and also bad ones,’ he wrote in English in July 1944. ‘It is now impossible for me to write down a few decent lines because of the utter destruction of my nervous system.’ Two days later, he wrote a furious comparison of the German occupiers with the fleas that tormented him at night. The entries end in August just as the ghetto’s inhabitants were being shipped out, and we must assume that its young writer died, as most did, soon afterwards. After the war, when a surviving neighbour returned to his building, the diary was found and archived – although it took six decades for its polyglot writer, Abram Łaski, to be positively identified. Many such diaries did not endure. One photo from the period shows a pile of notebooks sitting by a stove, waiting to be burned for desperately needed heat. Even those who had lost all hope wrote diaries in testimony. In Auschwitz, the Sonderkommando unit of Jewish prisoners was tasked with shepherding new arrivals into the gas chambers, sorting victims’ possessions, stripping their bodies and loading them into the crematoria. Witnesses to the most unspeakable crimes, and surrounded by industrialised murder, these men expected that they would not be allowed to live to testify, so some risked immediate death by writing accounts of their experience in salvaged notebooks or on scraps of paper, then burying them in tins in the crematorium yards. Zalmen Gradowski cached a notebook which explains their motivation: ‘Take interest in this document; it contains important material for historians,’ he wrote. ‘We, the Sonderkommandos, have wanted for a long time to put an end to our terrible labor, forced upon us on pain of

death. We wanted to do a great deed.’ He closed his notebook with the address of an uncle in New York. Another, Zalmen Levental, buried a diary which had arrived with its owner from the Łódź ghetto, wrapping a note around it which ended ‘search further! You will find still more.’ Many such testimonies went astray in the chaos following the abandonment and liberation of the camp. One, the diary of the teenager Rywka Lipszyc, remained for decades in the Siberian wardrobe of Zinaida Berezovskaya, the Red Army doctor who had found it in 1945. Unable to read Polish but sure of the school notebook’s importance, she kept it safe. After her death her granddaughter took it to California, and in 2015 it was translated and published, taking its place on the shelves alongside the diary of Anne Frank, written at the same time in Amsterdam. Buried testimonies were unearthed at Auschwitz as late as 1981, each adding detail and resonance to a story which continues to appal.

The diary impulse didn’t vanish in 1945 but seems not to have found such a wide expression since. The long European peace gave most adults less cause to write a journal and, accurately or not, diaries became associated primarily with the solipsistic turmoil of the modern teenager (take a bow, Adrian Mole). Perhaps the arrival of television, giving people a different way to fill their evenings, had something to do with it; the arrival of digital culture, and the demise of the handwritten letter, definitely did. Published diaries tended either to be gossipy show-business affairs or selfserving politician’s tomes. But Letts, still family-run, prospered. Selling tens of millions every year, and expanding successfully into the US, they acquired Filofax* in 2001 before, after seven generations in the business, they finally sold up. The simple idea that John Letts had tested in 1812 had served his descendants well. London’s rapid growth had posed other challenges than time management for merchants: the teeming metropolis had suffered badly from crime. So in 1829, as John Letts prepared to hand his business down to his son Thomas, the first policemen stepped out onto the city’s streets, carrying with them the first police notebooks.

* At this time, the word ‘diary’ was also used to refer to almanacs which predicted the future day by day, as well as a document that recorded the past. A ‘Gentleman’s Diary’ had, for instance, been published annually since 1741 by the Stationers’ Company in London, consisting of almanac material and mathematical puzzles and problems. * I use the words ‘journal’ and ‘diary’ interchangeably to refer to any daily (or regular) personal contemporaneous account, whether or not it is written in a printed datebook, and regardless of the length or tone of the entries. ‘Journal’ came into English from the French jurnal or jornel, ‘Diary’ from the Latin diarium, and both words acquired the meaning of ‘daily written account’ in the second half of the sixteenth century. Some people attempt to tease the words into meaning different things, but Pepys used both to mean one, and that’s good enough for me. * Clifford believed strongly in the power of paperwork, engaging a team of legal researchers and secretaries to compile huge volumes of deeds, charters and testaments that supported her claim, in triplicate, so that she could refer to them at each of her three houses. * The passage seems to mean ‘I went to Bagwell’s house, and there after a little playing and kissing we went up in the dark to her room and did the great thing on the bed, and that being done, I left’. * We can never know exactly how many people wrote diaries and when, but the catalogue of an exhibition which Letts curated in 1987 provides one useful metric. Its bibliography lists twenty-three published British diaries from the seventeenth century; seventy-five from the eighteenth; and one hundred and twenty from the nineteenth. * Emma Wedgwood (1808–96) married a notable fellow journal-writer, Charles Darwin, in 1839. * Filofax deserve a footnote. In the 1980s and 1990s the Filofax ‘personal organiser’ swept large swathes of the world with its chunky leather ring-bound folders and loose-leaf inserts, including not just diary pages, address lists and note pages but maps of metro systems, travel planners and business expenses. The Filofax was a classic yuppie accessory – potentially disastrous for those who opted not just to organise their whole life in its pages but to add plastic holders for their credit cards (a feature added at the request of Diane Keaton). The idea dated back to a 1910 product called Lefax, designed for power plant engineers in Philadelphia, and was used by engineers for many decades, as well as by the army (the Filofax archives show their product on an early military expedition to Everest). In its 1980s incarnation, Filofax info pages (sold individually) recalled the almanacs of the old table-books. Its core market of professionals, inevitably, transitioned to digital devices, but the Filofax has found a new audience among a generation of journal-keepers who treat it more like a scrapbook.

CHAPTER 21

‘YOU’RE SPOT ON’ Police notebooks, 1829–present Anyone who ever reported a crime before the smartphone era will recall the ritual that followed the arrival of the officer at the scene: the emergence of the notebook, the taking down of details, the methodical questioning accompanied by capital-letter note-taking. The black police notebook, opening reporter-style at the top edge, seemed a crucial part of the crime-solving apparatus, as emblematic as the truncheon and whistle: indeed, for years, beat constables would parade with all three items in hand before being sent out onto the streets. Before I started looking at the story of the police notebook, I assumed that I would be uncovering a tale of methodical detection, in which notebooks played their part in witness interviews, evidence gathering, and so on. I was wrong. For the first thing I learned about the constable’s notebook was that it hadn’t been intended as a tool of detection at all. ‘Notebooks are about control of the copper,’ says Chris Williams, an academic who has devoted years to the study of the police. He tells me the real reason why the notebook (or pocket book, or memo book) had been an obligatory part of the constable’s kit since the first British police forces were formed in the early nineteenth century. Those uniformed constables were not turned out onto the streets to wander at will: their role, defined with the creation of London’s Metropolitan Police in 1829, was built on ‘the beat’, a walked loop of about an hour’s duration, which could not be varied. As one constable of the time later wrote, ‘the police were strictly confined to patrolling their beats. It was laid down that it should be their duty first and always.’ Because the constables, who mostly patrolled at night, weren’t trusted not to slack off – the lure of a warming fireside or comfortable bed must have been powerful indeed – they always carried a notebook in which

they logged their progress past predetermined landmarks. The sergeant’s role was to roam more freely, periodically intercepting constables, verifying the honesty of their records, and countersigning them.* When the copper returned to the station at the end of the beat, the duty officer could quickly inspect the notebook to verify that he had indeed performed his duty. That indoor role solidified into the rank of ‘inspector’; the officer whom we think of as an investigator was, originally, merely there to check the paperwork. This monitoring system lasted for about eighty years, until the advent, in the 1920s, of police phone boxes (bestknown today as the model for Doctor Who’s Tardis.) From that point, constables had to phone in every half-hour; sergeants could retreat to the warmth of the station and inspectors could take on more interesting responsibilities. So the first police notebooks did not facilitate investigation but subjugation; they embodied the force’s control over its officers. But given that the constable had to carry his notebook everywhere, a secondary function inevitably arose, characterised by Williams as, ‘Things I saw, which were important.’ If he did happen upon a crime, or its aftermath, or something out of the ordinary, a constable was expected to note down the details; then, on return to the station, he would transfer the details to the Occurrence Book, a larger ledger which served as the main record of events.

Beat coppers, pocket books ready for action, being briefed at St Albans Police Station, 1965.

Here too, every new entry was checked by an inspector, and the Occurrence Book in turn became the basis of further reporting up the chain of command. A constable’s notebook orbited at the outer edge of a bureaucracy that grew as policing systems evolved, but it was an instrument that initially pointed inward, directing data into the organisation. ‘And then,’ says Williams, ‘once they’re understood by coppers as internal forms of control, they try them out on the rest of the world.’ It became clear that officers’ on-the-spot notes would assume central investigative importance. They recorded what eyewitnesses said, described the scene of a crime, and preserved details such as car number plates. Surviving examples from the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, filled with offences and arrests, are rich sources for historians.

The history of police corruption is as long as the history of policing itself, and the notebook was a form of evidence that was particularly vulnerable to tampering. If an arrest or prosecution might be aided by the existence of a particular note in an officer’s pocket book, that note might well conveniently appear after the event. In the early years of the twentieth century, in an attempt to prevent such practices, the pocket book became subject to a host of regulations. Notes should be made at the time of the occurrence, warned the Metropolitan Police’s inter-war instruction book, and must be written by each officer separately and independently and without consultation. At the end of a shift, the officer had to hand his pocket book to the Station Officer to read and initial the day’s entry: after which, no changes were to be made. No gaps could be left, to prevent insertion of notes after the event, and every page would be numbered, to stop the removal of inconvenient facts. Completed notebooks were to be retained by the station.* But these orders were not always obeyed. The 1990 report into Birmingham’s notorious West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, for instance, showed that all kinds of paperwork had been manipulated by a unit that preferred claiming overtime for ‘meetings’ in pubs to investigation. When they did make an arrest, the squad’s detectives specialised in securing rapid admissions of guilt, at a rate which eventually made outsiders suspicious. Investigators and lawyers uncovered a stew of bad practice. Some confessions, when read aloud, lasted substantially longer than the interviews during which they had purportedly been made. Suspects whose backgrounds ranged from Birmingham, London and Liverpool, Ireland to India, all confessed using startlingly similar language and a limited supply of stock phrases – ‘You’re spot on’ and ‘You’re putting a good case’ recurred, suggesting a common author. Only Afro-Caribbean suspects varied this pattern: they confessed with the same phrasing as everyone else, but with ‘man’ at the end. Notes from one interrogation, ostensibly taken down by torchlight in a car driving down a motorway at night, seemed surprisingly neat and tidy. Investigators found that the squad had

manipulated pocket books, arrest records and even the visitors’ book at a local prison in order to implicate suspects in crimes they hadn’t committed. In the end, after sixty of the squad’s convictions were overturned, its officers were redistributed to other units. Despite the years of incarceration they had inflicted on innocent men, none faced criminal charges themselves. Central to the revelation of the unit’s corruption was the ESDA machine, an ingenious piece of equipment that had been invented a decade before by Doug Foster and Bob Freeman, two scientists based at the London College of Printing, who had been trying to make an instrument that could lift fingerprints off cloth. The electrostatic device which they came up with failed in that challenge, but they accidentally discovered that it could create prints of invisible indentations on paper. For the first time, it became possible to look at a blank sheet on a notepad and read what had been written on the sheets above it: in one early success, the machine incriminated a London bank robber whose note – ‘THIS IS A HOLD UP – GUN AIMED AT YOU UNDER PAPER’ – came from a pad on which a letter ending ‘Love Elsie’ had previously been written. The Metropolitan Police and the FBI became early customers for Foster and Freeman’s device, and it was used to identify falsified confessions in several of the Birmingham miscarriages of justice.

At the same time as the investigation of the West Midlands team, the South Yorkshire police force was tampering with paperwork on an industrial scale. On 15 April 1989, ninety-six football fans were killed by a crush at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, in a disaster caused by the police’s failure to manage the crowds. The morning after, police who had been on the scene were summoned by a senior officer. ‘Do not start making pocketbook entries,’ he told them, before dropping a sinister hint. ‘Yesterday was the most traumatic experience of my life and large chunks of it I cannot remember. I am sure it must be the same for many of you.’ This senseless order ran directly contrary to training and regulations, and in any case came too late for those who had already filled their notebooks with accounts of the tragedy. But those valuable contemporaneous accounts did not find their way into the official record. Instead, officers were gathered

once again on the following day, and told to write after all – not in their notebooks, but on loose sheets of paper. These testimonies were then redacted, with inconvenient phrases like ‘I at no time heard any directions being given in terms of leadership’ or ‘it was utter chaos’ being excised. Over two hundred accounts passed through this censorship before submission to the first official inquiry, which unsurprisingly found that no senior officers should be prosecuted. Stunned by that abrogation of responsibility, and by the coroners’ official verdicts of accidental death, survivors of the crush and victims’ families spent more than twenty years pursuing justice. Their struggle for accountability was periodically helped by fresh discoveries of evidence. In August 2013, one of the pocket books which had been completed on the day came to light. This opened a floodgate: ninety more were handed in by ex-officers over the following month, then in 2014, 2,500 more were found in boxes in a police station, covering the flawed preparations for the fateful match as well as its aftermath. A further cache of 1,600 emerged in 2018. By then, belatedly, senior officers were facing trial, although none would be convicted: even those known to have tampered with sixty-eight of the statements submitted to the 1990 inquiry were let off. Once again the police had broken their own rules around paperwork, and once again they had got away with it. American police departments also found the paper logbook to be amenable to dishonest record-keeping. Notebooks there remained the officer’s own property, and were usually kept haphazardly in their lockers or at home, making them even less trustworthy as evidence. ‘Memo books were a big source for deception and cover-up’, the New York Police Department whistleblower Frank Serpico told me. He frequently saw fellow officers leaving spaces in their notebook records that they could later return to, adding observations which would persuade a judge to issue a warrant. In this context we should be grateful that the traditional paper notebook is being removed from service. British police officers now tap notes into digital devices, interviews and interrogations are recorded, and body-cams preserve interactions with the public. In New York, memo books were replaced by an iPhone app in 2020, to the relief of management and the suspicion of the unions, who grumbled about oversight and workplace surveillance. So the story of the police notebook nears its close: two hundred years of genuine usefulness to set against a shadow history of

deception and corruption. The notebook, which had been trusted by medieval merchants as a reliably tamper-proof guarantee of truth, had been shown to be anything but. * On rural beats, where sergeants were scarce, constables instead had to obtain the necessary countersignature at the door of a village’s most respectable family. * If an officer gave testimony in a trial, he could refer to his notebook to refresh his memory, but it was not usually considered part of the evidence – meaning that the defence was unable to examine it to find inconsistencies or late additions.

CHAPTER 22

‘YES, BETTER IF DENTIST IS DEAD’ Authors’ notebooks, 1894–present By the end of the nineteenth century, European writers had been using notebooks for six centuries, inventing or reinventing genre after genre as they did so: the essay, the travelogue, vernacular poetry, drama, and so on. Only a frustratingly tiny handful of writer’s notebooks – Boccaccio’s zibaldoni, for instance – survive from the earlier part of that period, but as time passed more and more were preserved, and the student of Victorian or twentieth-century literature has thousands to refer to. How did these later authors come to use their notebooks, and how did it affect their work?

The prolific Anglo-American novelist Henry James had a habit of collecting names for characters as yet unwritten. In the winter of 1894–95 he listed more than fifty in his notebook, each evoking, by association or pronunciation, attributes which might later be useful in his dense, morally nuanced stories. ‘Hanmer–Meldrum – Synge – Grundle’, the roster begins; in eighteenth place appears ‘Grose’, not an immediately impressive name. A few nights later, taking tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury, James heard the ‘vague, undetailed, faint sketch’ of a chilling anecdote, which he noted next to the list. This was his normal creative practice: an inveterate invitee who could go for months without dining at home, James collected snippets of well-nourished gossip by the score, especially if they hinted at cruelty or human weakness hidden by a veneer of respectability. ‘The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children’, he wrote

of this example, ‘the children are bad, full of evil to a sinister degree’ – and then he left the idea alone. Two years later, when asked for a ghost story by the publishers of Collier’s Weekly, he rediscovered the entry, finding it ‘the vividest little note for sinister romance that I had ever jotted down’ and working it up into a successful serial, The Turn of the Screw. A lasting commercial success whose sinister ambiguity delivered on the promise of the Archbishop’s anecdote, the story featured, in a key role, a wellintentioned if unhelpful housekeeper called Grose. By this point in his career, James was a conscientious note-taker, but he had not always been: he rued the fact that, in his twenties, he had ‘lost too much by losing, or rather by not having acquired, the note-taking habit’. At the peak of his career his notebooks became key to his method, a place where ideas – germs, as he often called them – could mature and develop into stories populated by names from his lists. Although he didn’t actually compose his stories in them (he would usually dictate to a secretary), he did use them to write about his work in progress, stand back from it, and comment on his characters’ actions and motivations. James wrote at length about his creative process, and many of his peers also referred to the important role that notebooks played in their own. From a young age, Virginia Woolf kept notebooks far more assiduously, including a string of ‘reading notebooks’ in which she kept track of the books she read, rather than the ones she wrote. These had a practical purpose, as for decades Woolf reviewed books for the Times Literary Supplement: in the third of twenty-nine such copybooks, kept in 1919, she records reading ‘with a pen and notebook, seriously’ one novel by Daniel Defoe every day for a week in order to meet her deadline. Other scrapbooks and notebooks each dealt with a specific subject: and unlike James, Woolf actually drafted her work in notebooks, as well as collecting material for them. The Waves, for instance, came to life in seven small hardbacks, in which Woolf’s fountain-penned lines, with frequent emendations, slope up the page from left to right. Woolf may have been prolific in her notebooking, but her efforts pale by comparison with those of her French contemporary Paul Valéry, who devoted himself to his notebooks to the point that he called their 28,000 pages his ‘true oeuvre’. Over fifty years he filled 261 copybooks, getting up at five o’clock every morning for private sessions of intellectual exercise. Engaging with art, memory, language, literature and mathematics – and his

own psychology – he wrote, doodled, drew and painted, striving to record every idea as precisely as he could. In the persistence of his obsession Valéry had few peers, other than Leonardo da Vinci, whose ‘secret writings and adventurous calculations’ Valéry celebrated in one of his first books. At the end of his career he published a selection of notebook entries as Tel Quel (‘As It Is’), which presents a playful selection of observations and aphorisms, juxtaposing light vignettes (the sight of a wealthy tourist window-shopping with great seriousness) with weighty meditations (the morality of suicide).

The poet and essayist Paul Valéry at work, surrounded by his ‘true oeuvre’ – his 261 copybooks.

Like Henry James, Patricia Highsmith was a New Yorker who found European life more congenial. And like Woolf, she was an inveterate and well-organised notebooker, who maintained parallel – indeed, interlocking – series of diaries and notebooks for decades. Despite living in France, Switzerland, Germany and Spain, she managed to use nothing but allAmerican stationery for her creative journals: thick student jotters with ‘COLUMBIA’ emblazoned across a blue stripe on the front above the university’s crest. They had novel spiral, or coil, bindings, which had been invented in New Jersey in 1932 and rapidly caught on in schools and workplaces. Highsmith had started her fifty-year sequence while studying at Barnard, Columbia’s women’s college, although her ongoing preference for these notebooks in particular was down to her being a ‘stickler for uniformity’ more than any nostalgia.* She asked friends back home to source them for her, decorated the covers with stamps, used the line on the cover provided for her address, numbered them in sequence, and completed the place for ‘graduating year’ with wry summaries of the contents: one with ‘Greater outer & inner mediocrity’, another ‘the ever present subject’ – her sexuality. These creative notebooks reveal an acutely self-conscious character who endlessly scrutinised both her own technique and her subject matter, oscillating from despair to euphoria in the process. On 27 May 1950, she writes that ‘When I worry and rearrange, I always fail and always write badly’. Four days later, in a better mood, she reflects on ‘the murderer’s psychology’, and how good and evil ‘can be made the other, and all the power of a strong mind and body be deflected to murder or destruction! It is simply fascinating!’

A selection of Patricia Highsmith’s diaries and Columbia-branded journals, discovered after her death secreted in her laundry closet.

Highsmith didn’t hide her dependence on these notebooks. Writing in her own how-to guide, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, she offered advice that James, her polar opposite in matters of morality and style, would no doubt have endorsed: It is surprising how often one sentence, jotted in a notebook, leads immediately to a second sentence. A plot can develop as you write notes. Close the notebook and think about it for a few days — and then presto! you’re ready to write a short story. Given how notebooks preoccupied her, it comes as no surprise that she wrote them on occasion into her fiction. In 1976’s The Story-Teller, Highsmith’s protagonist Sydney accidentally leaves a horribly incriminating notebook – in which he speculates, innocently as it happens, about what it would feel like to commit a murder – in the village shop. Her own notebooks were, of course, packed with such morbid musings. In the end

they ran to 8,000 pages, which were eventually edited down to 1,000 pages for publication.

Non-fiction writers also wrote about the notebook’s creative uses. In a 1966 issue of the magazine Holiday, the young Joan Didion published an essay titled ‘On Keeping a Notebook’. Opening with a scene that was called to mind on reading an old notebook entry, Didion then confesses to a Jamesian compulsion to capture facts, encounters, overheard phrases, however tiny or trivial, in case they later become useful: See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write – on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there. She collected such ideas, in her telling, differently to James. He harvested raw material from dinner-table conversation, while Didion’s modus operandi was to observe a scene unobtrusively from a corner of the room. There’s also a private, introspective, purpose to her note-taking: ‘Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point,’ she writes, calling her notebooking ‘something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker… your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.’ Despite the broad horizon conjured up by its title, ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ tells you nothing about the notebook-keeping of anyone who isn’t Joan Didion. And, it transpired, it wasn’t particularly accurate about that, either. For Didion’s notebooks were, in fact, far less intimate and more conventionally journalistic than her article implied. Like any other reporter, she filled loose-leaf pads with interview notes and observations, and at the end of each day she would type up that day’s notes and interviews, imposing her distinctive style on the material: arresting metaphors in crisp Hemingway-esque sentences. So while the idea of Didion as a detached, slightly neurotic observer isn’t entirely false, she did use her notebooks in a

less idiosyncratic way than she had implied: they weren’t just about remembering what it was to be her.*

All the authors mentioned thus far kept their notebooks in a semblance of order, even if the notes they contained varied widely in nature. All kept notes sequentially, and often dated, while organised thinkers like Woolf and Highsmith transitioned neatly from notebook to notebook depending on what was on their mind. As they did, all won critical esteem, loyal readerships, and respectable sales. But the most commercially successful author of them all kept some of the most chaotic notebooks. Agatha Christie used cheap school exercise books and wrote with whatever came to hand: pencil, fountain pen, biro. She never managed to organise her notebook’s contents and the seventy-three that she left, with notes for fifty-eight of her sixty-six mysteries, are horribly disordered. Only five times does a single notebook correspond with a single novel: nearly all contain notes for five or six. Christie admitted to usually having ‘about half a dozen on hand’ so the notes for any given novel might be scattered wildly between that many notebooks, or more: the record is twelve. Only once in every hundred or so pages did she write a date, and those days and months that she did record are of limited use, because she almost never included the year. She would flip a notebook over and write into the back: she would skip pages, then return to fill in the blanks with fresh entries. The only mercy she granted her researchers is that her handwriting, unusually, steadily improved with age; notebooks from the 1930s can be near illegible, but those from the 1970s are merely a mess. Many entries or whole pages are struck through with confident crossed lines. On top of all this, the notebooks are also filled with domestic distractions: her daughter’s homework, scores from rounds of bridge, shopping lists, travel plans, things-to-do, sketches for dust jackets, and notes of phone calls with her publishers. And yet these incoherent notebooks played an integral role in a peerless career of crimewriting.* How?

School exercise books were the notebooks of choice for Agatha Christie as she plotted he way through 72 novels and 165 short stories.

Higgledy-piggledy they may have been, but the notebooks were key to every stage of Christie’s process. She brainstormed scores of set-ups into them – ‘Poor little rich girl – house on hill – luxury gadgets etc,’ reads one: ‘Old lady in train variant – a girl is in with her – later is offered a job at the village – takes it’. Sometimes she would pick an idea like this up and

immediately start to develop it; more often it would languish until she came across it again and it sparked her imagination. Once she started work on a scenario she would ‘worry about it’ until it came right, writing multiple options for its development down on the page: for One, Two, Buckle My Shoe she considered seven possible motives, from ‘Man secretly marries one of the twins’ to ‘Dentists killed – 1 London – 1 Country’; considering 4.50 From Paddington she asked ‘Where can you push a body off a train’. Set-up established, she would populate the scenario and fill out the plot. This process involved considering multiple paths – surprisingly often, she changed the murderer when well into the outline – and planning the action in lists of episodes labelled A, B, C and so on. F. Mary and Audrey – suggestion of thwarted female – Servants even are nervous G. Coat buttons incident H. Moonlight beauty of Audrey Such sequences would be rearranged as the outline became steadily firmer – as Christie employed an idea, she might strike its original entry through on the notebook page – and all the while she would interrogate her plans, speaking to herself on the page. ‘How about this’, she might write, ‘A good idea would be’, or ‘Yes – better if dentist is dead’. As John Curran, who took on the Sisyphean task of disentangling the ‘seeming chaos’ of the notebooks, put it: ‘Using the Notebooks as a combination of sounding board and literary sketchpad, she devised and developed; she selected and rejected; she sharpened and polished; she revisited and recycled. Only when she had tested and teased the story and plot into a convincing whole would Christie turn to her typewriter and start on the novel proper: extracting, from incoherent disorder, works of clockwork neatness.’

Pulling back, we can see that, despite the wide variety of ways that writers used their notebooks, they broadly fall into three modes. Firstly, nearly all authors habitually use notebooks for immediate observation: capturing words, lines, scenes, ideas, transient moments, for later use. Secondly, some – but far from all – use them for drafting and redrafting.

Austen, Mary Shelley and Woolf all did so; James Joyce’s notebooks gained blocks of vivid colour, as he used red, blue and green crayons to highlight successive passes through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The distinction between these two modes recalls – yet again – the two-stage process of the Italian bookkeepers, who had used their memoriale to record transactions in the moment, then copied them over to the double-entry giornale or quaderne for analysis and reconciliation. Artists, essayists, scientists had all adopted similar practices: Agatha Christie’s striking-through of ideas that had been employed in a book echoes the bookkeeping practice of striking through matching credits and debits. But writers like James, Highsmith and Christie also used notebooks in a third way, to write about their own writing even as they wrote. With the ever-present blank pages as sounding boards, they could enter into dialogue with their own work, come to considered judgement about it, refine it, and improve the end product. If your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium – and your mirror. * Highsmith has been justly excoriated for the racism and anti-Semitism revealed in her late diaries and notebooks – made all the more shocking by the fact that the volumes of her youth reveal something of an idealist, preoccupied by copious reading and an intense desire for romance. * After her death in 2021, Didion’s executors discovered brand-new Moleskines in quantities that suggested that Didion had been one of those Barnes & Noble customers who bought one on every visit. They bundled them into three lots and sold them at auction with the rest of the contents of her Upper East Side apartment. Every lot went for over $9,000: an average of over $800 for each unused notebook, still in its shrink-wrap. Those that had actually been written in were not for sale. * The only author to rival Christie (more than 100 books and 16 plays, billions of copies sold) for quantity of output is Georges Simenon (425 books, 600 million copies sold). Simenon usually didn’t use notebooks: he wrote at his typewriter in manic bursts, and even his most devoted fans would admit that his oeuvre lacks the consistent rigour of Christie’s.

CHAPTER 23

PRESERVING AND COOCKERY Recipe books, 1639–present Andrea Nguyen left Saigon in a hurry at the age of six; when she returned, it had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City and she was in her thirties. She walked the streets and markets that she remembered from her earliest years, but it was a small object in a museum’s display of colonial-era ephemera that gave her one of the sharpest jolts of recognition. Twenty years after that encounter, she vividly recalls the sight of a pale orange exercise book, made in France, with a smiling runner holding a torch on the cover and the word Olympic in bold italic running over a globe. She knew those notebooks: her mother had owned an identical one, which had come to embody a family’s complicated journey and sense of home. It was filled with recipes. Nguyễn Thi Tuyết – to westerners, Clara Nguyen – lived in Saigon with her husband Quốc Hoàng – Gabriel – and their five children. She had worked in logistics for uSAid, and he had been a military governor in the South Vietnamese administration, so in April 1975, as North Vietnamese tanks closed in on the city, they viewed the future with trepidation. A grim sentence in a re-education camp was the best that Gabriel could hope for if the family remained, so they prepared to make a new life with their five children. For Gabriel, this meant scouring his American contacts to find someone with the influence to get them onto a boat or a plane; Clara, thinking further ahead, started to collect recipes in a schoolbook. Her plan was to support the family by opening a Vietnamese restaurant in the US, and with the help of the family’s housekeeper, Older Sister Thien, she started collecting the components of the future menu.

A taste of home – Clara Nguyen’s recipe book.

Naming the orange notebook Mom’s Book of Domesticity, she copied down recipes in her neat hand: the very first was for a pomelo salad. Knowing the basic recipes already, she focused on collecting specialoccasion dishes, including colonial-era recipes with French influences, or those which were too laborious for everyday cooking: one recipe for moon cakes runs over four pages of the notebook. And although her handwriting

was beautifully formal, Clara abbreviated and used her own shorthand to keep the recipes brief. Despite Clara’s lack of restaurant experience, the plan made sense in the context of Nguyen family life. Clara took both food and the dining experience seriously: the family ate with ivory chopsticks, laid perfectly straight before the meal, and her youngest daughter’s most vivid memories of Saigon life would be of her regular visits to the wet market with Thien, where she gazed at fresh meat, colourful displays of fruit, and live fish waiting for the chop. With Thien to help, a growing market to appeal to, and a bank of recipes to call upon, Clara felt that her scheme was realistic. But they had to make it to the US first. By mid-April, after aborting his first plan of setting out to sea with a group of other families, Gabriel had succeeded in securing the passes that might – if all went well – get them out. To avoid attracting attention, the group of eight travelled with just two small suitcases. Hearts in their mouths, they made it through the military checkpoints that ringed the imperilled airport, and onto a plane. The Olympic notebook, now half-filled with recipes, travelled in Clara’s handbag. The family flew to Guam, then Hawaii, and finally to California, where Thien thanked the family politely for their help, and said goodbye. The restaurant plan never came to fruition. Clara found work as a seamstress, Gabriel as a teacher, and the family started to explore the novelties of American life. The recipes in the Olympic notebook track their progress. In suburban southern California it was hard to find Vietnamese ingredients, and recipes for American discoveries like kosher pickle, oatmeal cookies and brownies, recorded in the older daughters’ handwriting, fill the next few pages of the notebook. Together, the family got to know parsley, rosemary and other Western flavours.

In collecting recipes by hand, Clara Nguyen was extending a tradition that went back to the origins of paper notebooks. We have thirteenthcentury recipe collections from the Abbasid Caliphate, which are formal presentation manuscripts but which must have drawn on working notes. A century later in Florence, many zibaldone writers collected recipes, unsystematically, alongside their literary excerpts – everything from how to

prepare a hare to a list of spices that would improve young wine.* The line between recipe and remedy is often blurred: dishes and domestic cures jostled alongside each other. One zibaldone recommends that a potentially tasty paste of ground beans and olive oil would enhance male sexual desire if applied directly to the testicles. During the same period, domestic accounts books would detail a household’s expenditure on food and drink, telling us what people ate, if not the details of preparation. The habit of collecting recipes persisted even as zibaldone gave way to the formal commonplace book in which note-makers would often record the odd recipe alongside favourite poems and other useful information. Isaac Newton and Stackhouse Thomson both punctuated their notebooks with recipes, with Newton favouring herbal cures and Thomson pure indulgences like blancmange. Dedicated anthologies of hand-written recipes arrived in England in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. This coincided with a general growth in notebook-keeping: diary-writing was catching on at the same time, students had common-places, and ever more households kept formal accounts. It also reflects the arrival of England’s first published cookbooks for women: if you weren’t able to buy your own copy of Thomas Dawson’s The Good Huswifes Jewell (1585) or Sir Hugh Platt’s Delightes for Ladies (1600), you could excerpt your favourite recipes for candies and liqueur from a friend’s. The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey lists sixteen surviving collections from this period, including one which belonged to Henry Frederick, first son of King James I – although nobody suggests that the young prince ever used it himself to cook. Katherine Packer, who started collecting recipes in 1639, opens her notebook with a selection of ‘good medicines for several diseases, wounds, and sores both new and olde’, including preparations for gout, septic wounds and overflowing gall bladders. A ‘Medicine for a sore breast’ opens with the instruction ‘take a sheeps head with the woole & wash it very cleane an boile it in 3 pottles of water 3 hourse together’. The second half of the book, thankfully, is dedicated to ‘Preserving and Coockery’. The first of its many recipes is for ‘a quakeing pudding’ consisting of a pint of cream, mace, white bread, sugar, six eggs, saffron and nutmeg, boiled up for an hour.

The somewhat sketchy title page of Katherine Packer’s seventeenth-century ‘Preserving and Coockery boocke’.

Most recipe collections of the time concentrate on such special-occasion fare. Presumably, cooks knew by heart their repertoire of everyday stews and meat dishes, and saw little need to write them down. Fancy puddings were a different matter. Many are the work of several hands: these notebooks were passed around the kitchen, just as Clara Nguyen’s compilation would be, and from mother to daughter. Family favourites were copied from notebook to notebook over the generations, although few seem to have been created by the writers: nearly all the recipes can be traced back to published cookbooks. Historians use these manuscripts not just to research cuisine, but to analyse social networks and shifts in international trade: in the eighteenth century, for instance, American ginger cake recipes substitute molasses for the honey that appear in traditional European

versions, and English cooks quickly followed suit when the sticky new substance appeared at their markets.

So Clara’s Olympic notebook sits in a long tradition. Over time, its contents evolved yet again: when the family found a Chinese grocery in Los Angeles, Vietnamese recipes made a comeback. The final pages were filled in July 1986, eleven years after the first, with a recipe for sweet potato fritters – a North Vietnamese speciality, different from the dishes that Clara had grown up with, and tricky to get right. Her restaurant hadn’t materialised, but her Book of Domesticity had nonetheless proved its worth – and Andrea, the youngest child, who had loved exploring the wet markets in Saigon, would eventually turn to it for her own purposes. Like all the children, she attended the University of Southern California, studying business and Chinese, but by her mid-twenties she had decided that she wanted to write recipes for a living. They would be Vietnamese recipes, to bring the tastes she knew to an American readership – recipes that would reflect her displaced childhood, ‘looking back while looking forward’, as she told me. It took several years for her to achieve that goal, but when her first book Into the Vietnamese Kitchen appeared, it was nominated for multiple awards and made Andrea’s name. In its introduction, she told the story of Clara’s notebook, which had now been passed down to Andrea for good. Six more cookbooks followed, on topics like tofu, bánh mì and pho, including recipes from the Book of Domesticity with the instructions edited to make sense to American cooks. When I spoke to her, it transpired that Andrea had not only inherited a love of food from her mother, but her notebooking habit too. She confesses to buying new ones almost compulsively, and as every recipe passes through multiple handwritten iterations, with tweaks and improvements recorded in fresh drafts, she fills several notebooks for each book she writes. Through them, she can go back and trace how a book or recipe has changed over time. ‘You’re able to record the evolution of your thoughts,’ she enthuses, ‘and you can scribble.’ Her enthusiasm for them shines through when we speak: they embody creativity, professional pride, and her deep love for the food of her homeland. At the completion of a project, she gathers the working notebooks and files them carefully away. Unlike the

orange Olympic notebook, they aren’t readied for a sudden move, and Andrea has no particular plans for them. ‘I don’t know what I’ll ever do with them. But they’re there.’ * The fourteenth century also saw the first European compilations of recipes, all surviving in formal manuscripts on parchment: Le Viandier de Taillevent in French, El Llibre de Sent Sovi in Catalan, Daz Buch von Guter Spise in German and The Forme of Cury in English. All were courtly productions with an accordingly grand selection of dishes.

CHAPTER 24

EXPRESS YOURSELF Journaling as self-care, 1968–present In 1968, Jamie Pennebaker arrived at a Florida college on a music scholarship. He was a budding clarinettist but, after running across ‘two or three people who were just genetically better at it than me’, decided he wouldn’t cut it as a musician. Instead, he set his sights on law school, which meant that he could major in almost any subject for his bachelor’s degree. He seized upon this intellectual freedom, taking courses in philosophy, mathematics and anthropology before, by chance, picking up a second-hand psychology textbook and falling in love with the subject. And so began one of the most influential research careers in modern academia, one which would thoroughly examine the key question for any diary writer: why does writing about ourselves feel so good? ‘Psychology took advantage of my interests in physiology, learning, social processes, culture,’ he recalls today, fifty-odd years after that pivotal moment. ‘Social psychology just looked fun.’ And what interested him in particular was how we perceive our physical selves: our feelings, our heart rate, even our hunger. ‘The reality,’ he tells me, ‘is that we are terrible at reading our bodies.’ Having gained a PhD in 1977, he started work on a book on the subject, which in turn demanded research. Working with a team of undergraduates, he came up with a questionnaire that asked people about any factor that might be related to their developing a symptom of any kind. Diet might be one, or a subject’s relationships with their parents. Finally, one student suggested asking if they’d ever had a traumatic sexual experience. When the results came in, it turned out that her question was the most significant: if you had endured sexual trauma, you were much more likely to feel unhealthy, or to visit the doctor, than if you hadn’t.

This intriguing result demanded further study. In a fortuitous coincidence, Pennebaker was then contacted by the editors of Psychology Today magazine, who were planning to conduct a large-scale survey of their readers. He asked them to add a question about traumatic sexual experience and the 24,000 responses repeated the earlier finding, but on a much greater scale. Some 22 percent of female respondents and 11 percent of males had experienced a traumatic sexual experience, and Pennebaker and his team found that these people were much more likely to have been subsequently hospitalised, or be diagnosed with cancer, or suffer from high blood pressure, colds and flus – any of the health issues that the questionnaire had asked about. Was there something, apart from their sexual nature, which distinguished these traumas from others, such as injury or bereavement? Pennebaker circled around the question before settling on a crucial difference: victims were much less likely to talk to other people about sexual traumas than other kinds. In other words, these people harboured a secret. Was it possible that the mere act of keeping a secret could damage your health? Looking at the question the other way around, could disclosing your secrets improve your health? To find out, Pennebaker devised a simple study which would go on to be one of the most cited and most replicated in the history of psychology. He brought participants to the lab and, based on the toss of a coin, asked half of them to confide a major trauma, not to an interviewer, but on paper, in fifteen-minute sessions. The instruction to them read: For the next three days, I would like for you to write about your very deepest thoughts and feeling about the most traumatic experience of your entire life. In your writing, I’d like you to really let go and explore your very deepest emotions and thoughts. You might tie this trauma to your childhood, your relationships with others, including parents, lovers, friends, or relatives. You may also link this event to your past, your present, or your future, or to who you have been, who you would like to be, or who you are now. You may write about the same general issues or experiences on all days of writing or on different topics each day. Not everyone has had a single trauma but all of us have had major conflicts or stressors – and you can write about these as well. All of your writing will be completely

confidential. Don’t worry about spelling, sentence structure, or grammar. The only rule is that once you begin writing, continue to do so until your time is up. A control group, meanwhile, were asked to write for the same period about their daily routine or other superficial topics. Slightly to his surprise, Pennebaker and his fellow investigators discovered little reluctance in their participants: it turned out that everyone could find a traumatic event to write about, and that they were nearly all willing to do so. With participants’ permission, he then tracked their visits to the student health centre in the months before and after the study. The results were dramatic: Pennebaker’s study revealed that those people he’d asked to write about trauma went to the doctor at about half the rate of people in the control group, who’d written about routine matters. They used less aspirin, too. The correlation, he would later write, was ‘exceptionally powerful’, and unambiguous: ‘when people write about upsetting experiences it has a positive health effect upon them.’

The writer and artist Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like An Artist, drew these notes in a lecture by James Pennebaker.

The results were published in 1986, first causing a splash, then inspiring an entirely new field of study around what Pennebaker called ‘expressive writing’. Such a dramatic result demanded further exploration, so he, and many other researchers, went back into the lab, refined the test, and repeated it. Interest grew exponentially: in the decade after his first publication, around twenty studies followed; in the ten years after that, another hundred and fifty. ‘The paradigm has been used in countries all over the world. It works in Japan, and in Korea, and in Mexico, and across Europe, South America,’ he told me. ‘I just got a paper to review, and

according to that there are now twenty-two hundred papers on expressive writing.’

So what do we know about expressive writing and how it works? For one thing, it defies our preconceptions about men finding it difficult to process emotions, or women dwelling on them overmuch: multiple metaanalyses of these experiments show no consistent differences between the sexes. The same applies to ethnicity, mother tongue, education, social status and age: children, maximum-security prisoners, pensioners, students, professionals – everyone enjoys similar benefits. Expressive writing should be free from constraint, and it’s up to the writer to decide what topics count as emotionally traumatic: researchers have found that the more specific their instructions are, or the more they constrain the topics that participants can write about, the less effective the exercise is. Any structure in the writing needs to come from the participant, not the researcher. That said, if participants, in writing, identify benefits to their traumatic experiences, or formulate their own coping strategies, they’re more likely to enjoy greater benefits. Using language of insight (‘now I realise that…’) or cause (‘one consequence was that…’) in your writing is a sign that you’ve processed your emotions so they will stress you less in future. On the other hand, writing that just recounts the facts of a trauma, without an acknowledgement of its emotional effects, won’t be effective. If you experience fresh trauma, when should you start to write about it? The research suggests that you shouldn’t rush to put pen to paper: one to two months after the event is probably best, but no sooner. And there’s no difference between writing completed in one day, or over several days or weeks. And what is to be gained? The benefits don’t only take the form of reduced calls on your doctor and lower consumption of painkillers: your blood pressure may come down, and emotional disclosure writing has been connected to a reduction in the recurrence of heart attacks, as well as better antibody response to vaccination and to Epstein Barr virus. One New Zealand study found that wounds heal faster, discovering biological markers for tissue recovery which correlated positively to emotional

disclosure writing. Those are all objective measures, but participants’ selfreported wellness also improves, and there are broader benefits, too. Students’ grades go up; workers take fewer sick days; and one study found a lower risk of alcoholism developing if you wrote after losing your job. So far, so incredible. But how does it work? There are undoubtedly multiple factors at play. As we verbally process trauma, we have to name and label our emotions: and this practice, in turn, is known to improve life satisfaction. It’s known as the A-to-D emotion theory, in which ‘analogue’ emotions (nonverbal, woolly, hard to organise, imprecise) are turned into ‘digital’ (verbal, cognitive, easy-to-organise) chunks. ‘Your writing goes from more emotional to more cognitive,’ Elizabeth Broadbent, who had led the New Zealand study, puts it. The more care we take to identify differences between our negative emotions, the more likely we are to understand them, and act effectively in the future. The same applies if we organise our experiences, and our emotional reactions to them, into a coherent story – easier to do on the page than orally. ‘When people write expressively about past trauma, they’re placing it in the context of the rest of their lives and they’re reducing the impact that it has: it’s no longer sitting at the back of your mind, having a subconscious effect,’ continues Broadbent. ‘You’re brought it to the surface, you’ve dealt with it, you’ve made sense of it, now you can move on.’ Pennebaker also stresses the importance of working memory, the sort of short-term remembering we do when multiplying two numbers in our head, taking notes in a lecture, or getting the right round of drinks at the bar. ‘People who are under stress, who are worried about stuff – that’s taking up their working memory,’ he tells me. ‘They’re not paying attention to what they’re doing, where they are going, so they’re more likely to have injuries, or do poorly on tests, and so forth.’ Any kind of memory that still causes you everyday stress, even at a level that you can’t consciously perceive, eats into that working memory. Several studies have shown that expressive writing counters that interference by organising the events or experiences that we are obsessed with. ‘What this would mean is,’ Pennebaker concludes, ‘if I have more working memory, I should do better on exams: and people do. If I have better working memory, I should interact more with my friends, and listen to you when you’re telling me about your problems, and be more present. In a sense, my mind is clearer, I should sleep better – and people do.’

It seemed right to ask the professionals if they use the technique themselves. ‘I do do expressive writing, now and then, maybe once or twice a year,’ says Pennebaker. Having written or co-written fifteen books, a language-analysis software package, and 328 scholarly articles and chapters, he seems to have bounced back from the disappointment of failing to make it in jazz clarinet. Broadbent tells me that she’s employed the technique too. Neither, though, are regular diary-keepers. ‘If my life is going well, why in the hell would I ever want to write?’ asks Pennebaker, rhetorically. ‘I view writing as a way to work through miserable things. If I’m happy I don’t have to work that out.’ He admits to one exception: ‘Writing is really beneficial when things are unknown, they’re complicated.’ So when you find yourself in a war zone, or a divorce, or you lose your job – then, keeping an everyday diary will have benefits. The same applies ‘when you’re suffering from hormone poisoning’, he continues, referring to our teenage years. So is regular diary-keeping a good habit, or not? The internet is choked with articles (many begin with the words ‘science has shown’) that selectively quote from Pennebaker’s work, claiming the benefits of emotional disclosure in diary-writing. But Pennebaker’s own subjects included many habitual diary-writers, and he observed no difference in their results compared to those of their peers. One study by British researchers even found that those ‘who reported having kept a diary reported more anxiety/sleeplessness and social dysfunction’. But no two people keep identical diaries or journals; uniqueness is part of the point, which makes it hard to draw a general conclusion. For every person who uses their diary to process their emotions, naming them and making them easier to manage, another may recycle unhappy memories without taking the necessary cognitive steps to move on.* Even if it doesn’t apply to those of us who assiduously keep a diary every day, Pennebaker’s discovery has proven therapeutic value, and has been widely reported for decades. Yet when I ask if it has been widely adopted, I’m surprised by the answer. ‘No,’ he says, flatly. ‘Which is not a very smart strategy, for either patients or physicians, but it’s cultural, and it’s hard to fight culture.’ Expressive writing is sometimes used as an ‘alternative’ treatment for chronic pain and PTSD, but physicians,

particularly in the US, remain invested in the traditional model: pills. Pills are faster to prescribe, and patients happily accept them, whereas, if you tell a suffering patient to write about their past traumas they may rebuke you for assuming that their illness is ‘all in the head’. And, adds Pennebaker, ‘You can’t make money off it.’ * There have been unambiguously positive results for the practice of ‘gratitude journaling’, as popularised by Oprah Winfrey in the 1990s. As simple as writing down three positive things about a day, this exercise is widely prescribed by therapists and educational psychologists working with adults or children in difficult circumstances.

CHAPTER 25

BLUE, GREEN, RED, YELLOW Electioneering, Florida 1977–2003 America’s founding fathers counted several distinguished notebookers among their number. As a young man, Thomas Jefferson kept a daily Memorandum notebook, and based his professional notebooks, the Case Book and the Fee Book, on that daily record. When in 1770 he lost most of his records in a fire, the Memorandum Books survived and from them he laboriously recreated Case and Fee Books for the preceding years. Many years later, he would use an ingenious ivory ‘polyptych’ to record temperature, wind direction, bird migrations and other seasonal variations at his Monticello estate. Operating on the same principle as a wipe-clean table-book or wax tablet, the polyptych consisted of twelve fine ivory sheets, pinned together at one end so that they could fan open for temporary note-taking. Back at his desk, Jefferson would transfer the day’s observations to more substantial ledgers. Benjamin Franklin, meanwhile, was well-known for using a daily notebook to keep track of his daily progress towards ‘moral perfection’. He also kept an account book, using black spots in a weekly chart to record ‘faults’ against twelve virtues running from Temperance to Chastity. When a Quaker friend then told him that he was ‘generally thought proud’, he added a thirteenth virtue to aspire to: humility.

Thomas Jefferson’s ‘ivory notebooks’.

But neither Jefferson nor Franklin could rival their successor, Senator Bob Graham, of Florida.

It started with a move that represented either a high point of American democracy or the most cynical campaign stunt of all time. Or possibly both. We are all familiar with politicians dropping in on a factory, hospital or building site as a backdrop for a policy announcement or as an appeal to the electorate. The fluorescent hi-vis vest and hard hat is often the uniform of candidates and lawmakers who have little experience of – or sympathy with – those people who wear them day in and day out. So when in 1977 D. Robert Graham, languishing at 1 per cent in polls to become governor of Florida, adopted workplace visits as the basis of his campaign, he knew he would face a sceptical reception. His response: full commitment. Instead of turning up at midday for a flying visit in the company of journalists, he would clock on when the regular workforce did. Instead of merely striking an industrious pose for the camera, he would work the whole day. And although the press pack would have to come along – he was trying to get

elected, after all – he resolved to despatch them rapidly so he could spend as much time as possible on the job, learning from his temporary coworkers. All this his campaign team could understand. But the scale of Graham’s project took them aback. He resolved to work no fewer than one hundred full days in one hundred Florida workplaces in the year-and-a-half before polling day. This, his aides protested, was going too far. But he did it. He hefted sacks of fertiliser, he manned a shrimp boat, he taught twelfth-grade civics, he even searched the crime scene when the patrol car he was riding in arrived at a fatal shooting. He carried bags at the Orlando Sheraton, bussed tables in Little Havana and delivered parcels in Miami. The only job he turned down was as a strip-club wardrobe assistant. And it seemed to work. The press loved it, and they followed him with growing respect around classrooms, crab boats and paper mills. Nine months later, 1 percent had become 8. Graham, who by now had dropped the D. Robert and went by Bob, carried on: gutting mullet, fixing Toyotas, trucking tangerines, and eventually winning the Democratic party primary. The Miami Herald called him ‘a rich man who doesn’t mind working his tail off under a broiling sun to better understand the problems of Florida’s working men and women’, and greeted the news of his election to governor with the headline ‘Graham Lands 101st Job’.

Graham had started his project as a campaign trail stunt, but his desire to learn from his experiences was genuine, and he impressed his temporary co-workers with his open-mindedness and willingness to put in a shift. But the sheer amount of new information – names, numbers, events – he had to deal with threatened to overwhelm him, and he wanted to recall it all, as he planned to write a book about it. His father’s example presented a solution. A dairy farmer whose land – when developed into the suburb of Miami Lakes – formed the basis of the family fortunes, Graham Snr would frequently whip out a notebook to record which fences needed repairing or which cows required treatment. Most farmers, in fact, used similar notebooks, which were usually branded giveaways from fertiliser or seed salesmen. So Bob Graham started keeping his own. The notes he made covered everything: his co-workers’ names, details of their skills and qualifications, their duties, and the exact timings of the day’s events. Over

time they became a formidably useful resource: ‘It gives you a storehouse of stories you can tell,’ he later said, ‘and that helps you relate to an audience.’ In particular he was relating – for the first time in his life – to Floridans who were living at the sharp end, with very little money, such as the waitress struggling to raise a family on her daily wage of $17, or the mullet gutter who made $90 a week but whose wife’s medical bills came to $40. Graham Jr started keeping detailed notebooks every day. This had the advantage of helping him manage the demands on his attention that his new position threw up, which was easy to explain to those around him. But over time it became less obviously practical. For Graham was soon noting everything. As his biographer Shirish Dáte put it: Want to know what brand of cereal Graham had for breakfast on that second week of July in 1989? Graham can tell you. How about which hotel room Graham stayed in during a vacation to Hong Kong in October 1983? Graham can tell you that, too… He can tell you the exact time his wife Adele phoned to tell him that eldest daughter Gwen had been accepted into law school. Or the score of the Dolphins game the night that second daughter Cissy had a baby boy… Graham logs how long he has spent doing the various tasks in his day. This includes even the time he has spent logging his notebook entries. The entries are, as the New York Times later noted, ‘devoid of introspection and opinion and are probably not fit for the history books’. But oh, what completist detail they collected. Graham didn’t stop noting, even in extreme peril: one entry from a 1986 flight to Brazil reads: 2:39 P.M. – Pilot announces hydraulic failure. Must make emergency landing. Happily, the plane made it, and Graham was soon able to record: 3:20 P.M – Take bus to hotel. What he had not noted, however, was his inability to hold his terrified wife’s hand during the pilot’s announcement. He had been writing, of course. Such frequent record-keeping meant that Graham filled hundreds of notebooks each year. Because he could complete one at any moment, he took to carrying two about at all times: the one he was currently writing in and its successor. In order to know immediately which was which, he

devised a simple rotation: a blue notebook would be followed by a green one, green by red, and red by yellow. Apart from the colours, the notebooks never varied: each one comprising eighty spiral-bound pages with sixteen faint blue lines, bound in heavy manila cardboard. His staff bought them in bulk from a stationer in Florida, as the official stationery available to members of Congress didn’t suit him, and when they learned that the factory was stopping production in favour of toilet paper they bought up all of the remaining stock.

The constant note-taking brought organisational benefits: Graham’s staff members testified that they did ‘immeasurable’ good in ‘jogging the office memory’, and the notebooks yielded ‘literally hundreds’ of ideas to pursue. Whenever Graham went on a workday, a meet-and-greet or a campaign trail stop, he would pass the current notebook to everyone he spoke to, asking them to write their name and address in it. Thousands did so over the years and everyone whose name Graham took away with him would receive a personal letter from him a few days later, expressing his happiness at having met them. There’s an echo of the Renaissance album amicorum in this habit, and one senses that it sometimes gave Graham (or his staff) a chance to exercise their ironical skills: ‘I enjoyed seeing you at the Orlando Airport March 21,’ one 1987 letter read. ‘Thank you for the material which you gave me on Jehovah’s Witnesses and mankind’s future. I appreciate having this very enlightening information.’ That was one of fifty-one letters sent to people he had met that day.

Notebook in hand: Bob Graham’s governor’s portrait by Marshall Bouldin III.

This had a political purpose, of course, as Dáte noted: ‘Personal contact matters. For every person who gets such a note, ten friends and neighbours might actually see the letter and a hundred acquaintances may eventually hear of it.’ Florida’s electorate constantly refreshes itself as new voters move to the state: historically, this has made it difficult for an incumbent politician to retain their seat but Graham managed to buck the trend by forging connection after connection with everyone he met, winning two

gubernatorial and three senate elections. Graham’s notebooks were a crucial cog in a strikingly effective political machine. And Graham governed just as effectively as he campaigned: his eight years as governor saw the Florida economy boom, and when he left the role his approval rating stood at over 80 per cent. With such a track record, the step up to the nation’s senate seemed a natural one, and once more Graham combined formidable electoral accomplishment with a respectable and prescient voting record through the 1990s and into the new century. He voted against George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and established himself as a heavyweight on the Select Intelligence Committee investigating government missteps before the 9/11 attacks. Having visited the Middle East, he prophetically warned of disaster if Americans tried to impose their will on the region: invading Iraq would ‘energize the most extreme fundamentalist elements’. And the notebooks accompanied him at every step, helping him to ‘stay organised in the hectic environment of the Capitol’. He noted conversations with other politicians, with specialists, and with all kinds of government operatives – and he continued with workdays. With this track record, and Graham’s popularity in one of the electoral college’s bellwether states, talk of the White House became inevitable. First Michael Dukakis, then Bill Clinton, then Al Gore considered Graham as a running mate, before choosing other men. Then in 2002, Graham announced his own presidential run, which proved short-lived. Everyone knew his strengths: his unflappable style, his commitment to working-class Americans, his sound judgement. But against this stood the well-known, undeniably unusual, fact that Bob Graham wrote everything down. On his first day in the Senate, Graham had allowed Maureen Dowd, a New York Times reporter, to shadow him, and the resulting profile focused on his notebooking habit: she poked fun at it, many others followed suit, and it became a political vulnerability. For as long as Graham had operated on a local stage, the notebookkeeping was regarded as an eccentricity. When one Florida opponent, Paula Hawkins, called him ‘a robot’ for his exhaustive life-tracking, the insult did not stick. On the national stage, things were different. Ignoring the fact that nearly all of the notebooks’ entries dealt with the grind of governing, reporters sketched Graham as obsessive and vain, and when the Washington Post parodied the notebooks (‘Ascend stage, stumble, regain balance’), some commentators didn’t pick up the joke and quizzed Graham about

those entries. Worse came when Professor Aubrey Immelman, an academic psychologist who had never met Graham, made his diagnosis: ‘I think it is a bit compulsive. It almost has a pacifier element to it, a security blanket. It suggests to me someone who has a lot of uncertainty and needs to create a structure.’ While Immelman didn’t mention obsessive-compulsive disorder, others found it easy to extrapolate from his analysis. ‘It could be egotism. It could be Alzheimer’s,’ speculated Colorado’s Summit Daily. The damage was done. And so Graham’s career stalled. Never beaten at the ballot box, respected by both sides on Capitol Hill, and a scandal-free zone, Bob Graham could not take the next step up the political ladder. In 2008 he retired, and the notebooks, over four thousand of them, already neatly archived in envelopes and cardboard cartons, were packed off to the University of Florida. By the following year, Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ had, as Graham had predicted, turned into a messy failure, with scandal growing as stories of abuse, waterboarding and illegal imprisonment leaked into the press. It emerged – shockingly – that waterboarding had been secretly approved by those closest to the Bush White House, but senior Democrats claimed to have been kept in ignorance, and demanded the CIA’s records of who had been told what, and when. So in May 2009, the bureaucrats at the top passed over a schedule detailing no fewer than forty meetings, from 2002 to 2004, at which ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques had been discussed with Nancy Pelosi, Bob Graham and other Capitol Hill figures. For a few spring days, the CIA’s ‘matrix of congressional briefings’ dominated the news cycle. Republicans were exultant: it proved their critics’ complicity in the ‘enhanced interrogation’ policy. How could they criticise it now, if they had known about it all along? The affair threatened to derail Obama’s attempts to reform the CIA and its operations. Graham – who appeared on the matrix four times – initially denied any knowledge: ‘I do not have any recollection of being briefed on waterboarding or other forms of extraordinary interrogation techniques.’ This, pitched against the agency’s long list of meetings and briefings, seemed weak, and the controversy continued. But in the background, Graham was taking action. Librarians in Florida dug through the cartons and discovered that the CIA’s account was, to put it mildly, hogwash. Three of the four claimed meetings hadn’t happened at all, and although the subject of interrogation had come up at the fourth, there had been no mention of waterboarding. This blew a

major hole in the CIA’s account, and as the agency acknowledged it, others made similar checks in their own records, finding that many more of the claimed meetings had never happened. The CIA’s reputation took a further dive, while Pelosi’s was restored, and Bob Graham’s notebooks had again made the news. As TV commentator Rachel Maddow put it: ‘Nerds one, spies zero’.

CHAPTER 26

NON-TRIVIAL Climate logs, 1850s–present To hear Michael Purves speak, you’d think him a sailor of implausible longevity and experience. ‘The first ship I worked on was the HMS Grafton, a Royal Navy cruiser,’ he says. ‘And at the time when I joined they were in the Red Sea in 1915. As time went on I was involved in the landings at Gallipoli… then I was on a British gunboat in the Yangtze River in the 1930s… I was on USS Concord in the Philippines in 1898… I saw the USS Pensacola in Iquique, Chile in 1873.’ He wasn’t, of course. He’s never worked a ship. But the immersive, painstaking quality of his work with these vessels’ logbooks means that he quite unselfconsciously speaks as though he trod the same decks as the watch officers who wrote them. For over a decade now, Purves has spent thirty to forty hours a week working on the notebooks of ships that stopped sailing long ago. Purves hasn’t always been obsessed by ships’ logs. He has lived on Vancouver Island for the last decade but for more than two decades he worked as a meteorologist in the Yukon, Canada’s far north, where, if his work hadn’t alerted him to the urgency of climate change, his surroundings certainly would have. ‘If you were in Northern Canada or Northern Russia, you could see the climate change thirty years ago,’ he tells me. Before he left the Yukon he carried out a couple of studies, looking at how the climate was moving, and his discoveries were hair-raising: the weather had moved six or seven hundred kilometres up the globe. ‘A huge northward shift,’ he tells me. ‘And that was in 2010.’ So when a friend told him of the Old Weather Project, which had launched a couple of years earlier, he was strongly motivated to help. In principle, the Old Weather Project has a simple aim and process. In order to understand how climate change is playing out, we need to know

what the climate used to look like, which means assembling untold weather readings into some kind of coherent global picture of temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind, cloud cover, precipitation, and so on. The records of land-based weather stations have long since been collected into global datasets, but most of the globe is covered by water, and that’s also where most of our weather systems originate. What if ships’ logs could be used to fill in that vast gap in our knowledge? Huge numbers survive from the nineteenth century, the first time in history when vessels could not only precisely plot their location in the open sea, but also measure conditions in the atmosphere and the water with reasonable accuracy. If science could extract the raw numbers from those ageing pages and convert them into digital data, they would add significantly to existing climate models. But employing armies of data entry clerks would entail impossible expense. Instead, the Old Weather Project would crowd-source the labour it needed, using the public-spirited goodwill of citizens like Purves to advance climate science.

A decade on, the Old Weather team now structure their research into specific, targeted projects which help climatologists address areas of particular interest. The first of them, Old Weather Arctic, presented Purves with a particularly knotty challenge. Kevin Wood, a former merchant marine officer turned climate historian at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was working on ice coverage; he needed to know how accurately existing climate models were estimating where sea ice had been historically, and how patterns of sea ice formation had changed. Purves remembers his first request: ‘The USS Bear, 1920: note when and where she sees ice, and the weather for two days before and after that.’ Purves collected the data and Wood compared the ice positions that his climate models generated with what the Bear had actually found. Results seemed promising, so they tried it with a few more logs and Wood proposed scaling up: not only identifying ice sightings, but adding in all the weather of the voyage, and transcribing many, many more logbooks. He raised money to have them digitally scanned, Purves assigned volunteer transcribers, and they got to work, completing a colossal data series that ran

from the 1880s to the 1950s, taking in vessels including coastguards, whalers and icebreakers working the freezing waters around Greenland and northern Canada. The nineteenth century saw the logbooks of national navies become increasingly formal and detailed – and, therefore, more useful to the OWP. Hourly readings of speed and heading were now the norm, and ships’ masters were encouraged to take between seven and ten weather readings every hour, often receiving new observational equipment in exchange for sending fresh data back to the authorities. The oldest logbook transcribed by the OWP dates to 1854. The most recent they transcribed is from 1955, when electronic weather stations around the world started to collect information automatically.

The Old Weather process has evolved over time, but usually looks something like this. A scientific partner, often the NOAA, identifies years and areas of interest. Relevant logbooks – most often the property of the US government, although some are held in other institutions like the British archives – are digitally scanned, page by page, and distributed to volunteers for transcription. They use ingenious spreadsheets in which images of logbook pages are overlaid by the grid lines of the cells they need to fill, speeding up the work and reducing the rate of error.

Detail from the log of the US Steamer Omaha, far from land in the South Pacific. Weather and location data is recorded hourly.

When the log is completely transcribed, the transcribers return the completed spreadsheet to Purves and his colleagues, who collate the transcribed data, carry out quality control checks, and send it to the NOAA in Colorado. They in turn convert the transcriptions into a form that a

climate-modelling supercomputer will understand (degrees Fahrenheit, for instance, won’t work), then drop this information into their climate databases and the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Dataset. Every spreadsheet that adds to this huge dataset adds a little detail to our picture of the world’s climate. But even with this clear workflow established, there were still difficulties to overcome. First was the lack of consistency across the raw materials. The US Coast Guard, US Navy, US Fisheries Commission and US Revenue Cutter Service all retained thousands of logs in their own formats, which might change from year to year. The Old Weather team uses no fewer than twenty-seven different spreadsheet formats to deal with this variety, and when independent whaling ships are factored into the mix, it becomes messier still. Whalers’ data can be particularly valuable, as they hunted bowhead whales, which feed at the edge of the sea ice, so their logs tell us precisely how far south it extended. But they kept logs much less systematically – on one whaler, the Fleetwing, the duty fell to the captain’s fourteen-year-old daughter, who covered the weather, the ice pack, the ship’s catch and her needlework in equal detail, and in an informal style that thumbs its teenage nose at the very notion of digital workflow.

Wood and Purves also wondered if they could make the data more precise. The original climate models used a large grid of so-called ‘Marsden Squares’ to map the readings, with each square representing an area hundreds of kilometres across. This worked fine if you only recorded a daily position for a ship’s weather reports, but as the data-crunching supercomputers became more powerful, the grid that they worked with steadily shrank. So Wood challenged Purves to add detail to each ship’s journey by extrapolating from the existing logs to automatically calculate a ship’s exact location for every hour of every day that it was at sea, placing it in the right square of an ever-contracting grid. ‘It took a lot of programming work,’ says Purves, with some understatement. ‘You have to calculate the magnetic declination for any point on the earth for the last hundred and fifty years.’ He pauses, reflecting on the grind of placing a ship on the ocean, accurate to an hour, a hundred and fifty years ago, and correcting its wind

direction reading to true north at the same time. ‘It’s non-trivial.’ But it made the data more useful, and so he did it.* Not all of the team’s work is climate-related. If an officer of the watch notes an earthquake in a logbook, the team records it and passes the sighting on to specialist researchers. When two ships meet each other, either in port or at sea, that’s noted, too: such sightings often suggest what other logbooks they should turn to next. And if a transcriber comes across a human interest story with no scientific relevance, they will share it on the Old Weather member forums – where many long-term, long-distance friendships have formed. When Wood died in early 2022, he was mourned around the world. What concrete results has the team’s work achieved? The data has been fed into five major climate reconstructions, giving researchers better data to work with. More specifically, Old Weather Arctic validated the models used by specialists in sea ice, so we now know with high confidence exactly how much of it has melted due to global heating, and the collected wind and barometric readings allow historic hurricanes to be compared to the ones that blow today. There have been others, and there will be more: for although the Old Weather team has transcribed hundreds of thousands of pages of logbook data, with millions of data points, they’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s available. Denmark’s archive alone occupies seven hundred metres of shelf space; the New Bedford Whaling museum has tens of thousands of whalers’ books; the navies of Spain, Germany, the UK and so on have barely been tapped. ‘So we won’t run out of logbooks in my lifetime,’ Purves predicts. Similar university-led projects are running round the world, all adding to what we know. It’s not a new phenomenon either; climate scientists* have been working with ships’ logs on a smaller scale since the 1970s, and collating ships’ weather data into a ‘protracted series of sea observations’ was first suggested (although rejected) as long ago as 1728 by Isaac Greenwood, Harvard’s first Professor of Natural Philosophy and owner of America’s first barometer. But Old Weather is the largest volunteer-driven project, with passionate amateurs tapping away around the world, turning the analogue mist of nineteenth-century copperplate handwriting into critical data for no reward other than the satisfaction of the work itself. Every day they open the log of their nominated ship – the Bear, the Vicksburg, the Temeraire, the Inflexible

– and step onto its deck, immersing themselves in its progress; the wind, the water, the ice and the air. * This is the same operation that James Simmons had performed as a one-off as the Rook approached the Cape of Good Hope. As magnetic variation is irregularly distributed around the globe, changing significantly as the years pass, Purves’s automated calculation was indeed a non-trivial achievement. * Talking to Michael Purves made me curious about the climate impact of notebook manufacture: I braced myself for uncomfortable news, and buried myself in the literature. Historically, when paper was made of recycled rags in water-driven mills, the environmental impact was minimal: today, with paper-making a significant industry, things are different. Happily, the notebook consumer need not feel too guilty about their purchase, as long as it’s FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified as coming from a sustainably managed source. It will probably be made from uncoated ‘woodfree’ paper, whose production, per kilo, results in approximately 1.5 kg of CO2 equivalent emissions. (Confusingly, ‘woodfree’ paper is made of wood: the term refers to the pulp having been bleached to remove the tint of wood sap.) A Moleskine-style notebook weighs in at under 500 g, representing about 750 g of emissions, which is not much in the daily run of things. You need to scribble through twelve notebooks before you generate climate change emissions equivalent to a quarter-pounder beef burger.

CHAPTER 27

ATTENTION DEFICIT Bullet journaling, Brooklyn 2010 The boy struggled at school. His thoughts skated off from one topic to another, so he couldn’t concentrate on lessons or on what the teachers said, and he found it impossible to keep his hands still. When he was supposed to be writing, he drew compulsively, and his drawings often reflected his fraught relationship with his teachers. Years later, he came across an old middle-school exercise book: A folded sheet fell from its pages. Curious, I unfolded it to find a grotesque rendering of a very angry man. He was yelling so hard that his eyes bulged and his tongue flapped out of his mouth. Two words were written on the page. Once small word, shyly tucked into a corner, revealed the identity of the apoplectic man: an old teacher of mine. The other large jagged word, the one revealing the target of his rage, was my name. The boy who the teacher was shouting at was called Ryder Carroll. This disturbing image was typical of Ryder’s exercise books. His middle-school classmates would end each lesson with a more-or-less faithful record of their learning, but he was left only with educationally useless broken-off sentences in a scrawled hand, and the drawings that he couldn’t stop himself from making. And while his schoolwork suffered, Ryder was bullied by schoolmates too: it was clear that something was going badly wrong for the boy. So when the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder arrived it came as no surprise. The condition’s symptoms can include a short attention span, being easily distracted, making careless mistakes, forgetfulness, inability to concentrate on tasks,

difficulty following instructions, constantly changing activity, difficulty with organisation, being unable to sit still, impatience, impulsiveness… small wonder that Ryder’s teachers were frustrated – as was he. And yet, he would find a way round the obstacles that the condition posed. Faced by a desperate need to make school bearable, the young Ryder came up with his own solution: he would make lists – not just lesson notes, but lists of everything. As he stopped trying to record everything the teachers said, the scrawled half-notes gave way to list after list. Bullet points filled his pages, and in the process he discovered that, by rephrasing ideas as economically as possible, he could train his mind to stay on topic, and follow lessons through to their conclusion. To make the notes intelligible, he trained himself to write in capital letters, which forced his mind to slow down, in turn helping his focus still further. Finally, his classroom problems eased: after years of clashes with teachers, this came as a huge relief, and Ryder embraced the possibilities of the blank page, making ever more elaborate lists as he progressed through high school. ‘I realised that doodling in my notebook actually helped me pay attention,’ he told me in a Zoom call from Brooklyn, ‘so I applied my artistic leanings to the way I took notes, got into calligraphy… so when I took notes I could take them artistically.’ He discovered the journals of Peter Beard, the unruly American artistphotographer who combined layers of photos, handwriting and found objects onto the pages of his notebooks, often smearing ink, paint or blood across them – and this made Ryder think about the look of his own pages. ‘Over time I focused much more on the design of the page, the text layouts rather than the design of the lettering.’ This was clearly some kind of breakthrough. ‘It kept me engaged, and I realised I was able to focus more, take better notes, and process the information.’

Ryder Carroll’s bullet method – the basic icons.

Ryder draws a distinction between the daily notes that he was making and a conventional journal or diary. ‘One of my English teachers made it a point for us all to keep a long-form journal every day,’ he recalls, ‘but I quickly grew to resent it, because I didn’t have anything to write about unless it was being bullied, and I didn’t want to write about what I had for lunch, so journaling quickly became useless.’ Instead, he found that shorter, less reflective entries, laid out with visual appeal, were easy to maintain and refer to. He listed every day, and gradually developed ways to managing the listed items, using four categories, each with their own bullet symbol. The first one was the simplest: ● for a task to do; then ✘ as Ryder completed it. Nothing more complicated than anyone would do with a shopping list. Ryder had always found it difficult to think ahead, so he introduced a couple of other icons to help him do so: › showed when an incomplete task was moved to the next day’s list, while ‹ tagged a task that had been deferred and placed on another future list for attention the following month. Again, nothing too surprising, but this private system of icons* ensured that

nothing was forgotten, and allowed Ryder to break down complicated tasks or substantial long-term goals into small, manageable chunks. It also let him change his priorities as circumstances demanded.

By the time the formerly struggling student arrived at college for a double major in Art and Creative Writing, he was using notebooks for everything, and was carting several around at once. This encumbrance was annoying, and multiple notebooks created inefficiency rather than eliminating it, so Ryder started to keep notes from all his courses, and his social life, in just one notebook. This necessitated systematic indexing: a further level of organisation, which in turn helped him to collect his thoughts. At the same time, he started thinking about visual hierarchy – the relationship of grids, layouts and styles which graphic designers use to present complicated information so that readers can digest it in an instant. These ideas, too, informed the layouts in his notebook. He developed the practice of noting down events, ideas, opinions and other useful thoughts, in the same daily lists as the tasks he had to do or had completed: ❍ showed an event: anything that had happened – denoted anything worth remembering but not for actioning This marked two conceptual shifts. Ryder was now making notes about things that had happened, not just managing tasks in his future. Secondly, he was adding comments and other value judgements. The journal was now a kind of diary – admittedly one with unusually pithy entries – as well as a planner. Thus a list that looked like this at the beginning of the day: ● ● ● ● ● ●

go to supermarket prepare for project plan meeting cook dinner change sheets on bed pay credit card renew library card

Might, at the end of the day, look like this:

✘ go to supermarket ❍ prepare for project plan meeting ❍ cook dinner ✘ pay credit card ✘ renew library card – project plan meeting at the office – I’m design lead – Amy on copy / Marie on client care ● research competing brands ● prepare first visuals for Wednesday At the end of each day Ryder prepared the next day’s list, referring as necessary to the monthly tasks or to whatever goals he had already defined, copying over some points and leaving others behind. Decision-making formed a key part of this task-migration: with every bullet point, he would ask himself ‘Is it vital?’ and ‘Does it matter?’ If the answer was no, twice, then he wouldn’t transfer the note to the new list. Over time, unexpected benefits emerged from this system, as Ryder’s notebooks revealed themselves to be much more than aide-memoires. ‘I’d started taking notes in class, then started making notes about ideas, writing short stories, and coming up with short movies,’ he recalls. ‘Then I realised that there’s much more utility to a notebook than I first saw: I started using it to actually think.’ He had discovered the power of externalising his thoughts. Once again, he frames this as response to the windblown thought processes of the ADHD sufferer. ‘In my mind, things just come and go, constantly, and that doesn’t allow me to make progress. It’s one thing to have a notion, it’s another to really develop it… I make significantly more progress in my thinking when I have tools to process my thoughts and get them to another place. So note-making is an opportunity to interact with my thoughts that I wouldn’t naturally have.’

Ryder’s notebook became a platform with infinite applications. This is, of course, a discovery that millions have made for themselves down the years, but Ryder’s deliberate search for ways to manage his ADHD had

prompted him to think longer and harder about it than most. Like the Florentine accountants, Renaissance artists and early modern scientists before him, he’d come to understand his notebook as a crucial tool for the mind, a way to turn intangible thoughts into more concrete written ideas that could more easily be manipulated. The young graduate went into web design, and felt an immediate jolt of recognition when he was introduced to the concepts of Agile web design – at that point, the digital cutting edge. Conceived in 2001 by a group of designers meeting at a resort in Utah, Agile software development prioritises flexibility, daily collaboration, frequent reflection, and a constant preoccupation with efficiency and change. ‘Basically, you try on things, and see if they work,’ summarises Ryder. He saw strong parallels between Agile and the way that he managed his own life – constantly reviewing his task list and deciding where every item on it really belonged. Mapping the concepts of Agile back into his analogue notebook, he realised that he’d already developed a coherent system, with several styles of bullet points on a handful of lists which he maintained every day. By this point, Ryder was well on top of his goals, and was enviably productive. Established as a web designer in New York, he was working with prominent brands like Adidas, Macy’s, American Express and IBM, and even found the time to successfully launch a startup with a friend – an ingenious business called Paintapic that turned customers’ photos into paint-by-numbers projects. To the outside observer, Ryder’s trajectory seemed to steer irresistibly upwards. But Paintapic’s launch sparked a crisis, as Ryder detailed later in his book. Deep confusion and frustration set in. On paper, I had accomplished everything that I was told would make me happy. I sacrificed a lot getting to this point, but now that I was here, it just didn’t seem to matter. Despite his stellar career, his creative success and the satisfactions of his startup’s launch, Ryder was unhappy. And the reason, he realised, was that the efficiency, energy and creativity which his journals had marshalled so effectively were misdirected.

My entire life I thought, once I get organised and productive, I’ll be happy, everything will be fine. But then I noticed that it didn’t make me any happier. I launched this company that required tens of thousands of actions, and none of those things ended up mattering. So Ryder turned the problem on its head. If his efficient professional habits had got him into this mess, they might also get him out of it. He had focused on what his career demanded: now, for the first time, he asked himself if the journal could be used to address his own needs – and make him productive with his own emotions. The way Ryder frames the question implies that he was trapped by his career ambitions, unable to think about his emotional life without using a professional frame of reference. But his crisis also connected him to the moment in the 2000s when mindful ways of thought went mainstream. Mindfulness depends on the conscious separation of thought and emotion: practitioners step back from their feelings so that they can examine and name them, thereby reducing the hold that negative emotions exert on their thoughts and behaviours. Diarising one’s emotions, turning amorphous feelings into considered sentences, has always been an inherently mindful practice – predating the coinage of the phrase by hundreds of years. Ryder did it with bullet points rather than prose, but in analysing his emotional productivity in the pages of his notebook he was at once tapping into a long tradition and expressing the most millennial of mindsets. Over time he discovered, as many diarists have, that this practice not only affords short-term stress relief, but also encourages personal growth and development: ‘triangulating personal insight’ as Ryder refers to it, ‘correlating your actions with your experience, recording your insights, becoming significantly more self-aware’. Another millennial trope: that of continuous evolution, self-improvement – a growth mentality. It was around this time that Ryder first shared his journaling methods, showing them to a colleague who was struggling to juggle her professional workload with plans for her upcoming wedding. She listened quietly as he unpacked the system of dashes, dots and constantly evolving lists. Eventually he petered out into an embarrassed silence. ‘You have to share this,’ she said. She became the second member of Ryder’s ‘user base’, and encouraged him to create a website so that the wider world could see the method in action. Motivated as much by a desire to practise a new coding

language as anything else, Ryder spent two weeks pulling together a website, launched it in 2013 – and was amazed to see it picked up by a couple of design blogs with wide readerships. The combination of clean, design-conscious notes with mindfulness and intentionality struck a chord in a world where Marie Kondo was applying the same principles to tidying up. Traffic rose sharply, and never stopped rising: a book deal followed, then profiles in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue. The book sold well, was translated, and was followed by a tie-up with Leuchtturm, so you could buy a premium journal with spreads specifically designed for Ryder’s system. Ryder’s website offered introductions to ‘BuJo’, as it came to be known, in twenty languages. Suddenly, by around 2018, bullet journaling was everywhere. It was a thing.

Like diarists for hundreds of years before them, bullet journal keepers enjoy doodles and diagrams.

Much of this growth was driven by a huge online community of bullet journalists who took to social media to celebrate and share their own journals, tagged #bujo. Many of these journalers cared more about decorating the page than following Ryder’s slightly austere ethos to the letter. A characteristic style of lettering emerged, florid and calligraphic, and in turn, books which showed you how to letter in this style themselves became bestsellers. Simple line drawings of fruit became a cliché of the genre, and people tagged their posts with the brand of their notebook and favourite highlighter pen. Habit tracking is a recurring theme, with users using small check-box tables to encourage them to read more books, call their parents more often, and drink prodigious amounts of water. Looking at their lists and journal spreads, one senses less intentionality than a straightforward pleasure in prettification, but it’s impossible to object to what most posts express: the desire to improve, to express gratitude, make good choices and develop better habits. Why did it catch on so quickly? Part of the explanation is that we all have to conquer, one way or another, the same ogres that Ryder did. Which of us has never felt overwhelmed by the organisational demands of twentyfirst-century life? We are required to manage finances, family and work more efficiently than ever – and, increasingly, the additional pressure of maintaining a virtual presence too. Mental overstretch and emotional strain are common, exacerbated by the omnipresent expectation that we should all be busy and happy, all the time. Happiness lies within our grasp, we are told. What could be more appealing than an easy solution to disorganisation and unhappiness? No doubt the novelty of a low-tech, low-speed approach also helped. By the time Ryder’s bullet journal method broke out, iPads and iPhones had become omnipresent, but it was clear that they – and the Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram apps that they ported – didn’t bring as much happiness as they promised. Indeed, the constantly pinging alerts generated by calendars, emails, messages, social media, games and other apps not only failed to make us significantly more productive, they were also demanding attention and eroded our attention spans with an irresistible stream of dopamine hits. Simply by picking up a pen you could regain some

sense of agency, and think at a better pace – with the added benefit that, as you complete a notebook, you make something unique and personal. It’s easy to be cynical about Ryder’s method, his story and his success. Yes, his book fits neatly into the perennially irritating self-help genre. Yes, it packaged up familiar wellness saws and clichéd promises. Yes, he got his method out at exactly the right time, just as disillusionment with digital tech tipped over into an interest in analogue alternatives (although he himself rejects any digital v. analogue binary opposition, and tells us just to pick the right tool for the job at hand). And yes, if you follow bullet journalists online, you see many doodled sunflowers next to their things-to-do list. But there is something substantial at the base of the bullet journal method, a solid core of practices that psychologists and time-management experts alike recognise as beneficial. For years, my own diaries shared many features with Ryder’s journals, and I can testify that combining the prospective (future plans) and retrospective (diary entries) works for me. The combination of emotional organisation, practical task management and intentionality – even the fun of doodling or indulging more advanced artistic impulses – makes keeping a notebook not just useful, but fun. Today, running the Bullet Journal community is a full-time job for Ryder Carroll and a team of four. It’s impossible to look at that operation, or to listen to him speaking fluently about the differences between a resolution, a goal, a plan and an intention, and see the confused and unhappy boy that he used to be. Like Charles Atlas, Ryder is his own method’s best advertisement. But he also occupies a unique place in the notebook’s history. For all the complicated systems of use that the notebook has inspired – bookkeeping, life drawing, common-placing and more – few users have ever stepped back and conceived of it as a tool, wondered how it actually works, or thought about how it may be made to work better. * The iconography went through various iterations – dotted bullets were originally small boxes, for instance – so to avoid confusion I refer here to the version that Ryder settled on and still uses. For the same reason I use the terminology – migrate, schedule, etc. – which he hit upon later, when explaining his system to others.

CHAPTER 28

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME Patient diaries, 1952–present When the British poet and children’s writer Michael Rosen was admitted to hospital it was almost too late. He had been suffering from Covid at home for two weeks, an infection that began with breathlessness and then sapped him completely as the oxygen levels in his blood fell to the threshold of what a body needs to live. A doctor neighbour called for an ambulance but, in the chaotic peak of Covid’s first wave, none were available, so his wife Emma drove him to London’s Whittington Hospital. Days later, with his condition fast deteriorating, a doctor told Rosen that his only chance of survival was to be placed in an induced coma. He was moved into the strange fluorescent world of the intensive care unit, where he was drugged into unconsciousness and his body connected by tubes to the machines that would keep him alive while his embattled immune system fought the virus. He has no memory of the next forty-eight days of his life. But he does have a diary of them.

Intensive care was invented in Copenhagen in 1952, in reaction to a devastating outbreak of polio. As the disease raged through a population weakened by post-war malnutrition, hundreds of patients – half of them children – presented at the city’s Blegdam hospital, suffocating or drowning in their own secretions. With only a handful of cumbersome ‘iron lung’ respirators to hand, the hospital had no hope of coping with this influx of the desperate; of every eight new arrivals, seven would die. At a meeting on 27 August, an anaesthetist called Bjørn Ibsen suggested a radical

intervention: ventilating patients with emergency tracheostomies. This procedure would introduce oxygen directly into a patient’s lungs, relieving them of the need to pump air in and out themselves. The first patient was a twelve-year-old girl named Vivi Ebert: she was sedated with a hefty dose of sodium thiopental, a small slit was made in her windpipe, a tube inserted, and air was blown directly into her lungs with a rubber bulb. Vivi began to recover, then Ibsen’s team rolled out the procedure through the wards, enlisting teams of dental and medical students to squeeze the bulbs and keep the air flowing into the sick bodies. This remarkable team effort lasted months, and it worked: by the spring, nine in ten polio victims were surviving. Miraculously, none of their carers contracted the disease themselves. The following year, buoyed by this remarkable success, Ibsen opened the world’s first intensive care ward. Each bed in an ICU sat at the centre of a full life-support system, freeing the patient’s body of the burdens of breathing, eating, drinking and wakefulness so that it could apply all its energies to fighting infection or recovering from trauma. Within a few years the concept had spread around the world, becoming a key component of modern medicine. Many doctors and anaesthetists now mark 27 August as ‘Bjørn Ibsen Day’. His innovations have saved untold thousands of lives – including Michael Rosen’s. But surviving a spell in an ICU is only part of the story. Medically induced comas may help our bodies to heal, but feeding tubes and drips and ventilators are deeply invasive, disruptive processes. Given that, and the psychological complexity of recovering from any serious illness, it shouldn’t surprise us that intensive care often brings problems. Speaking from her home in Wales, Christina Jones told me about the forms that these problems take. A former ICU nurse, with a PhD and qualifications in biochemistry and psychotherapy, she is an expert in the care that patients receive in hospitals, and the difficulties that the road to recovery can present. In 1990, in order to address these problems, she set up an outpatient clinic dedicated to post-ICU patients at Whiston Hospital on Merseyside. Her patients didn’t just complain of black-outs during their comas, but delirium, delusional memories, hallucinations and paranoid delusions. ‘One sticks in my mind,’ she tells me, ‘a young lady in her mid-thirties. She’d had abdominal surgery, had a tracheostomy, and been woken up, but

she was very nervous and wasn’t sleeping. After about three days she told me that her whole time in intensive care that she could remember, everybody had been replaced by aliens. They looked exactly like her family – but she knew that they weren’t, that they’d actually been taken over, and if she went to sleep, she’d be replaced by an alien. And that is so real that it was her memory of intensive care.’ This is a textbook example of Capgras delusion, in which the brain fails to connect a familiar visual stimulus – a face – with the emotional memory of the person behind it. Other sufferers see their relatives as shop dummies or waxworks: real, yet unhuman. ‘The most common delusion,’ Jones continues, ‘which as you can imagine is quite a frightening memory to have, is the nurse trying to kill you.’ Some research suggests that as many as 80 per cent of ventilated patients suffer from such traumatic memories. The hallucinations often draw on the unusual stimuli of the busy hospital environment, and the full-face protective wear of the Covid ward provides potent raw material for Capgras-type delusions of alien abduction. Patients may believe that they are being wheeled into an oven, not an MRI scanner, or are being sexually assaulted, rather than catheterised. They may be able to express these fears in the moment, or they may experience them vividly while straitened by anaesthesia: one specialist says of sedated patients that their ‘muted, sort of restful, peaceful look can be mistaken for sleeping when in fact their brain is on fire’. Almost as disquieting is the rupture in time that ICU patients cannot avoid, particularly if they are admitted while unconscious or unaware. An accident victim may wake up with no idea of where they are, having permanently ‘lost’ weeks of their life. Referring to this blank space, Rosen would later write in a poem of ‘a matter of regret / that I’ve lost track of something’.

Christina Jones had been working with such patients for a decade when, at a conference in Stockholm, she first heard of the patient diary, an idea that had originated, fittingly enough, back in Denmark. In the 1970s, nurses there had realised that patients needed to recover from intensive care, as well as in it, and it was they who started keeping patient diaries as a way of helping their patients make sense of their experiences. They came

up with a beautifully simple practice: each day, a nurse writes an informal diary entry telling the patient what they have done, what has been done to them, and how they are. ‘We try to put ourselves into the patient’s place and describe what is happening, and how we think the patient is experiencing it,’ as one nurse puts it. The diary contains no medical information. Instead, the keynote is empathy, perfectly illustrated by this typical entry: You are in a deep sleep, but when we bathe you we see that you can react. You try to open your eyes… It is hard to tell if you will later be able to recall any of this, but we talk to you and explain what we are doing, even if you cannot respond. Hospital stays generate reams of paperwork, but the vital signs that staff measure and record every hour are of little help when it comes to our own personal narrative. On average, nurses spend about five minutes writing a day’s entry, time that is well spent given the resulting improvement in the patient’s prospects. When the patient recovers and is discharged from the ICU, they are given the diary to take away, and with it they can piece together their fragmented memories, explain the changes to their body, and reconstruct the stories of their illness and treatment. Able to dig through what Rosen calls the ‘layers of consciousness’ that coma, medication and illness lay down, the patient-reader can decode their delusions and confirm that, contrary to their vivid memory, their nurses were not in fact trying to kill them.

Affordable, accessible, therapeutic: a typical ICU diary with entries from a nurse, a doctor, a pharmacist – and the patient’s daughter.

Patients’ families soon became involved in the diary-keeping: visiting relatives were encouraged to leave their own observations and thoughts alongside those of the professionals’, giving the diaries another dimension and providing a direct, informal line of communication between nursing staff and patients’ loved ones. Carl Bäckman, a Swedish specialist, came up with the idea of adding photos of the patient, so that they could see what their treatment looked like, and where their new scars had come from. Another Swedish practitioner poetically defined the aim of the exercise: Att ge tillbaka förlorad tid – ‘to give back lost time’. The diary can become a vital part of psychological recovery. Numerous studies of the Scandinavian experience testified to its effectiveness in recovering the patient’s quality of life, especially in preventing the onset of depression. So when Christina Jones heard Bäckman speak about the concept, she immediately started hunting for grant money to introduce it to her colleagues on Merseyside. The first British patient diary was started in 2003, but the practice didn’t take off immediately. ‘It was a struggle to get

people to change the way they write,’ Jones recalls, ‘because it’s a much more informal style than medical notes or the nursing report, and it’s written directly to the patient.’ She was also unsure about including photos of the Whiston’s burns unit patients, but the first such patient to see his diary asked where his photo was, so they started to take them of everyone and showing them on request. When Jones collated her own results, she found that keeping a diary for a patient cut the risk of PTSD by over 60 per cent, prevented panic attacks, flashbacks and nightmares, and reduced anxiety and depression. And the blank notebooks they required cost pennies. One by one, intensive care units adopted the practice, and not just in the UK but – eventually – in North America, too. Expecting her to point to the compelling statistics in the research literature, I asked Jones what her sales pitch was. Without missing a beat, she replied in just seven words: ‘Speak to a patient who’s got one.’

So it was thanks to Christina Jones that, after two months in hospital, Michael Rosen returned home to find a black spiral-bound notebook waiting on his kitchen table, instructions for use crudely taped to the front. I spoke to Rosen by video chat a year after his return home, the only apparent trace of his ordeal a shadow of the tracheostomy scar at the base of his throat. He told me that he had first heard of the diary’s existence during the ‘liminal state’ of his period on the recovery wards, where he had spent more than three weeks after coming around, but that he had been too fogged to understand its significance. It was given to his wife Emma, who had then left it out for him to discover. Like many recovering patients, Rosen did not rush to open it. An initial ambivalence is quite common; many people are reluctant to return to the site of so much pain and trauma, and Rosen admits that even now he sometimes doesn’t dare to look at it. He waited until he had got over the ‘sensory level of this hurts, that hurts, this food tastes nice and that’s it’.

‘The last letter in my Patient Diary. I don’t remember the conversation (still drugged) but how kind is this? And how full of foresight and wisdom.’

An accomplished poet, performer and broadcaster, Rosen unfurls long, copious sentences that answer not only the question you ask but two or three other, more interesting ones that you didn’t. But when I ask how he felt when he finally did open that black notebook, he pauses. ‘I felt… overwhelmed,’ he eventually submits. The notebook’s humble exterior belied its contents. On opening it, Rosen found ‘every word a gem, a jewel’. It affected him in two ways. Firstly, reflecting on its value in filling in the gap in his life story, he points to our fundamental need to organise events: ‘We as human beings constantly try to get things into shapes and understand them. You’re doing it now, you’re trying to understand notebooks – what are these things, what’s the shape and meaning of them? So I’m consciously trying to hang on to a moment of huge dissipation, my mind being dissipated and dissolved.’ He pauses again, picking out the right metaphor from his store. ‘These notes are stepping stones,’ he concludes. ‘They are rocks in the bog.’ But as Rosen emerged from his recuperation, he came to dwell more on another aspect of his patient diary, one that its originators did not have in mind. He realised that he had returned home with ‘a treasure’, a relic of the selflessness and compassion – the love – of the people who cared for him during his tribulations. In normal times, one ICU nurse takes care of one patient. On Rosen’s Covid-impacted ward, the ratio leapt to four patients to one nurse, the number of beds doubled, and anyone even tangentially qualified came in to help – physiotherapists, speech therapists, nurses from other departments, a dental hygienist, even a school nurse. All found themselves on the front line, intently caring for their patients and updating the diaries each morning as the long night shifts ended. Rosen refers to their writing as a caring act in itself. ‘It’s… lovely,’ he says with emphasis. ‘All their training, all their intelligence and skill, but then there’s this extra mile of care… and no cynicism.’ These young professionals, thrown into a role for which they had little training, found themselves surrounded by death, day in and day out, yet on the page they recorded only encouragement and positivity, ‘all in the hope that one day I will read it’. With no memories of his own, he was overcome by what the diary revealed, its simple assertion of individual humanity amid institutional chaos, of a future despite the present, of life in the face of death. ‘The idea that they stood around my bed and sang Happy Birthday to me,’ he wonders, still incredulous. ‘They did what?’

The upbeat tone of the diary obscures – deliberately – the horror of those weeks. One of the doctors who treated Rosen later told him how the rapid pace of the disease had taken one of his patients from conversational to dead in the time it took to make a cup of tea. Some 42 per cent of the patients with whom Rosen shared the ward died. But even in those cases their diaries have value, as bereaved relatives appreciate them as much as survivors do. Many find it impossible to accurately remember the course of a relative’s illness, and the patient diary allows them to reconstruct the full story, and thereby come to terms with it. It comforts them to read of the care that their loved ones received, and if they too are able to write in the diary, it gives them a safe space in which to express their own feelings. ‘Some relatives write such poignant goodbyes’, says Jones, ‘that it brings tears to my eyes.’ She knows of relatives who have placed the diary in its owner’s coffin.

Surprisingly, patient diaries are not universal. I know of a Covid patient who was in intensive care in London for even longer than Rosen, suffered from terrible delusions, and didn’t know anything of the practice until long after he had been discharged. Jones tells me of a patient who has attempted to reconstruct his time in intensive care from his medical charts, and of another who was using his wife’s WhatsApp messages in a ‘desperate attempt to piece something together, and work out where all these weird memories came from’. Considering their effectiveness in helping with psychological recovery, it cannot be long before diaries become a standard part of life on the ICU, as omnipresent as saline drips, beeping machines and round-the-clock bright white lighting. One last observation. The patient diary’s origins among the needles and tubes of Danish wards had nothing to do with laboratories, Big Pharma or international conferences. It was not an invention of consultants, surgeons or doctors. Nurses came up with it, repurposing an everyday item, making it the epitome of a front-line, grass-root, hands-on solution: pragmatic, compassionate, effective – and cheap. They invented a new genre of notebook writing, the therapeutic diary which the beneficiary has no part in composing; turning a plain page into a place of hope, empathy and compassion. It must be the most powerful recent application for this

centuries-old invention. Yet the names of those Danish nurses, unlike those of Dr Bjørn Ibsen and Professor Henry Lassen, are nowhere to be found in the literature.

CHAPTER 29

NOTHING ON THIS EARTH BETRAYS OUR OWN KARAKTER SO Notebook studies, 1883–present Leonardo’s notebooks, with their miraculous drawings and remarkable scientific observations, languished under-appreciated for three centuries before receiving the attention that they deserved. That belated investigation didn’t come from any of the notebooks’ royal and aristocratic owners, but from a young German travel guide writer. Jean-Paul Richter had developed his art-historical expertise while researching Italy for the Baedecker publishing house, but he nurtured higher ambitions than explaining Renaissance altarpieces and warning of inferior hotel plumbing, and in 1878 he published a monograph on Ravenna’s Byzantine mosaics. This made his name in the right circles, and, having moved to London, he became the first person to read Leonardo’s notebooks in their entirety since the death of Francesco Melzi, the artist’s heir. Richter had set himself an intimidating task. The manuscripts were scattered across England, France and Italy and their various custodians had, he noted, been rather more eager to own the notebooks than to understand them. They had rearranged pages as they fancied, making it hard to impose order on the stupendous variety of topics covered, a task that was further hindered by Leonardo’s poor script, mirror writing, intermittent dating and idiosyncratic abbreviations. But Richter trained his eye, systematically worked through more than five thousand leaves, and within five years was ready to publish. When The Literary Works of Leonardo came out in 1883 – dedicated to Queen Victoria – it completely changed how Leonardo was

understood. Richter had arranged the notebooks’ contents by topic, revealing ‘an Author, a Philosopher, and a Naturalist’, a thinker ‘whose discoveries were infinitely more in accord with the teachings of modern science, than with the views of his contemporaries’. For the first time since his death, the full scope of Leonardo’s genius became apparent. Richter was succeeded as editor by his daughter Irma, whose selection from the notebooks is still widely read today. Freeing Leonardo’s investigations from unread obscurity, their work had great importance in its own right, but it also marked a turning point on the journey of the notebook. For centuries, writers’ manuscripts, artists’ sketchbooks and all kinds of other notebooks had usually been disposed of once they had outlived their initial usefulness or their keepers had died. Only when the owner had found the highest fame – a Newton, Leonardo or Francis Bacon – did executors see any enduring value in their working notebooks, and often fame alone was not enough, as the complete disappearance of Shakespeare’s manuscripts attests. If a notebook found itself on a library shelf (as William Worcester’s had), or in the archive of a historically conscious city (as many zibaldoni did), it might survive. Most, though, did not. For as long as critics studied finished work and not creative process, this absence presented no problem, but Richter had sparked something, and attitudes and interests were changing. In the 1890s, for instance, the diaries of the French painter Eugène Delacroix were collected and transcribed just as Leonardo’s notebooks had been. After centuries of service, the notebook was receiving some credit. Even so, the critical or historical gaze always fell on individual examples, not on the notebook as a subject of interest in its own right. It took decades more for anyone to look underneath the bonnet, and ask how this invention had been used, and how it had changed patterns of human culture. When academics finally paid attention, they adopted a conceptual language that had originated under surprising conditions.

James J. Gibson’s studies of human perception started in the most urgent of contexts: the Second World War. As a young psychologist working for the US Army Air Force, he researched how pilots saw – and reacted to – their rapidly changing environments, and devised experiments

to weed out those trainees whose slower perceptions would leave them vulnerable in the critical microseconds of a dogfight or bombing run. Conventional models of perceptual psychology didn’t accurately account for what he saw, so once peace had returned Gibson set to work on a new theory of perception, which included the concept of affordance: that aspect of an object which makes the object useful to a human interacting with it. This idea of affordance spread, making itself useful in a wide variety of fields. In 1988, Donald Norman wrote The Design of Everyday Things, in which he adapts the notion to describe design features that encourage instinctive use. When we approach a door with a flat panel at elbow height we unthinkingly push it; when we see a handle, we tend to pull. I first came across the term when reading Orietta da Rold’s appraisal of paper’s arrival in Chaucer’s England. By contrast with traditional histories of paper, which exhaustively record the spread of paper mills and watermarks, da Rold’s focus on affordance encourages us to consider what people actually did with the stuff, and why. In her telling, paper wasn’t just a cheap substitute for parchment, but an exciting new material with novel properties, and people adopted it not just because it was cheap, but because you could do things with a paper notebook that you couldn’t do with a parchment codex. Da Rold also emphasises the role of human networks: not just the trade routes which carried paper out of the Mediterranean and spread it across the continent, but the social connections which allowed new uses of notebooks to develop more locally. The merchant’s ledger allowed sophisticated businesses to develop; zibaldoni played an important role in the popularity of Tuscan literature; alba amicorum physically embodied the friendships of young students; and so on. In each case, notebooks first derive from, then strengthen, a web of social and cultural relationships. In that sense, da Rold is part of a growing community of historians who treat paper – and the notebook – not just as a commodity, but as a key technology in a world of increasing complexity. Educational psychologists, prominent among them Professor Ken Kiewra, had meanwhile been looking more objectively at how this technology works, and the effectiveness of different note-taking strategies. Kiewra had become interested in the subject when, as a young postgrad in Miami, he had been instructed by one professor, Harold Fletcher, not to take lecture notes. By supplying his students with a handout, Fletcher aimed to free them from the distraction of simultaneous note-taking and, he

reasoned, allow them to concentrate fully on what he had to say. Kiewra demurred and hid behind the largest student in the lecture hall – a former lineman on the football team – in order to discreetly digest the proceedings into a small notepad. He looked up to find the professor standing over him, unimpressed, but the pair soon resolved their difference. Kiewra embarked on a productive academic career, researching note-taking and establishing its value in the classroom beyond any doubt; Fletcher became his academic supervisor.

With the growth of social history in the 1960s and 1970s, historians looked more carefully at the diaries, travel journals and other records left by common people, and again found their critical vocabulary wanting. ‘Egodocument’, a neologism first coined by the historian Jacques Presser in the 1950s, is now a widely used umbrella term for diaries and journals, and the first academic journal devoted to ‘life writing’ appeared in 2012. Egodocuments of all kinds now attract historians looking for fresh insights into their fields.

Marie Curie’s lab notes – handle with care for the next 1,500 years.

Physicists and mathematicians pore through Newton’s and Einstein’s notebooks, identifying moments of crucial insight. They would love to browse Marie Curie’s lab notebooks too, but proximity to her experiments left them irradiated. Musicologists have done the same with Mozart’s and Beethoven’s manuscripts, noting that both used ‘sketchbooks’ to work on ideas at an early stage. Critical editions of Jane Austen, the Brontës and James Joyce draw on the notebooks that they worked in, identifying the changes which clarify the writer’s intention. Periodically, a previously unpublished notebook of a Kafka, a Wittgenstein or a Pacioli will be issued in a new critical edition from a university press. And feminist historians have mined women’s diaries and notebooks to find fresh perspectives, long ignored by conventional accounts. The diary of the New England midwife Martha Ballard, which runs from 1785 to 1812, for instance, corrects the settled understanding of small-town life in the

young United States. Examined by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, it reveals women to have been much more active economically than previously assumed, and shows medicine to have been practised as much by women as by men – despite the fact that there were no female doctors. And, naturally, its record of 814 deliveries makes it an invaluable resource for historians of obstetrics, mortality and demographics. Hundreds of long-obscure notebooks have, in similar ways, belatedly given voice to their neglected creators. The first systematic collection of ordinary people’s diaries came about as a result of conflict, when the UK government’s Mass Observation unit collected diaries from hundreds of regular correspondents. MO aimed to monitor public opinion and morale before and during the Second World War, but most of the diaries went unread and were filed away in a basement on London’s Cromwell Road. Rediscovered by the historian Paul Addison in the late 1960s, the collection has since become a well-used resource for historians and authors alike. Several European institutions subsequently opened their doors, aiming to make a better job of collecting and sharing ordinary diaries. Pieve San Stefano, a small town near Florence, declared itself the ‘Città del diario’ in 1984, opening a museum – the charmingly named Piccolo Museo del Diario – to which any diary may be donated. France’s Association pour l’autobiographie followed in 1992, Germany’s Tagebucharchiv in 1998, London’s Great Diary Project in 2007, and the Nederlands Dagboekarchief in 2009. All of these collections offer to preserve and catalogue any personal diaries they are sent, giving historians a new kind of resource, less systematic than a traditional library yet wonderfully idiosyncratic, and presenting – as the Piccolo Museo puts it – ‘history told from below’. Like the Old Weather Project, the archives use volunteer readers to decipher, describe and catalogue the diaries and journals in their possession. At some point, no doubt, some of this work will be assigned to AI, allowing millions of handwritten pages to be transcribed and indexed for digital search. Who knows what stories that process will unearth? So, armed with a new conceptual framework, students, critics and researchers finally engaged with the wealth of raw material hidden in unpretentious, tatty old manuscripts. Using the language of affordance and egodocument, and an ever-better understanding of genres such as the

sketchbook, zibaldone and common-place book, they started to bring some shape to the notebook’s story, and this book owes much to their work. But even as they did so, their contemporaries were doing their best to disrupt any attempt to categorise or bring order. For the twentieth century also saw notebooks used in a flood of new ways.

Pablo Picasso, born while Richter was burying himself in Leonardo’s writings, would carefully retain all the sketchbooks of his long career, and after his death in 1973 a stream of studies, preparatory works and sketchbooks emerged, prompting one critic to remark that he ‘still seems to be making art posthumously’. When 175 of them toured the world in 1986, they didn’t just testify to the artist’s tendency to hoard, they also opened a unique window into his revolutionary creative process. No. 42, from 1907, reveals the evolution of the shocking nudes of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and how far the artist was moving from the traditions of figurative drawing. This isn’t a conventional sketchbook in which an artist captures a likeness, but a place where likeness can be deconstructed, where bodies are forced into unnatural geometries, where torsos become triangles and faces become masks. Picasso used this sketchbook to move in an opposite direction to Giotto: away from, not towards, the faithful representation of a scene. Picasso’s contemporary Paul Klee took an entirely different approach in his sketchbooks, exploring line, design and colour so inventively that the results are frequently compared to Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting – although Klee took meticulous care to ensure that others could understand his clear and elegant pages. Edward Hopper also kept a visual journal with sketches of his paintings, but he completed each entry after the event: these weren’t creative studies, but dispassionate descriptions for his records, in which he often recorded the details of sales and payments received. Frida Kahlo went in yet another direction, filling notebooks that were neither sketchbooks nor diaries, but a new kind of visual journal. Unlike her formal, painstakingly composed paintings, these spontaneous, seemingly unplanned pages capture changing emotions with striking combinations of word and image. And so on. The sheer variety makes it impossible to usefully generalise: all we can do is look at the sketchbooks alongside the finished works, and

enjoy the insights they bring. Happily, as proof that they are now taken more seriously, collections and exhibitions often display them alongside the finished works.

The formal manuscript book, usually printed with the lines of the musical stave, had long been the composer’s essential tool, but as new musical forms emerged to challenge the classical orthodoxy, musicians found new ways to use it. In the summer of 1904, a young Hungarian student of musical composition overheard a woman named Lidi Dósa singing a Transylvanian tune to the child in her care. It sparked a lifelong fascination: from this point, Béla Bartók would pay as much attention to simple folk songs as to his own avant-garde compositions (which often employed discordant intervals that the pious compilers of LHD 244 would have rejected out of hand). In the company of his friend Zoltán Kodály, he left Budapest and went deep into the Carpathian farmlands and mountains. Seeking out farmers, shepherds, swineherds and their families, the pair would elicit songs in Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak, Bartók recording the melodies in red leather-covered manuscript notebooks just as a journalist would take down an interviewee’s words. They were amazed by what they found: a rich seam of music, outside the classical tradition, that was unknown to the virtuosi of the conservatoire and opera house. Bartók transcribed over one thousand folk melodies on these expeditions – one village south of Debrecen yielded eighty-three alone – and by the time that the outbreak of war in 1914 had put paid to the pair’s trips, they had filled sixteen such books. They would prove a rich vein of inspiration for Bartók’s own composition, and with this fieldwork, and his subsequent analysis, he became one of the world’s first ethnomusicologists. In laboriously transcribing this vast quantity of previously unknown music, Bartók realised that most of the melodies sprang from the pentatonic scale. Then viewed by classical musicians as a primitive curio, this combination of only five notes (a classical scale has seven) allows a surprisingly wide variety of effects, and when Bartók and his successors started looking for it elsewhere, they found it in folk music as far apart as Algeria and Japan – and in the blues. Now part of the musical mainstream,

the pentatonic scale underpins genres as diverse as reggae and heavy metal. Bartók was a pioneer in another area, too: although he wrote down every melody he heard on paper, he also recorded about half of them using an early phonograph. The wax cylinders survive to this day, the voices of longdead Carpathians and Transylvanians pealing out with a striking immediacy.

Bartók at work, with his field notebooks, transcribing folk melodies recorded on his phonograph in Carpathia and Transylvania.

Sixty years later, an equally avant-garde young musician would use his notebooks to come up with ideas that would change our conception of what music can be. In one of many Alwych brand notebooks, Brian Eno (preRoxy Music, pre-fame, and surviving on unemployment benefit) created an acrostic to express his creative relationship with them: Nothing

On This Earth Betrays Our Own Karakter So The journalist Vivien Goldman dipped into these notebooks when interviewing Eno years later: ‘Every page covered in tantalising word juxtapositions, perfect miniature diagrams and cartoons, flippant games… Disciplines collide, clash, overlap. There’s sex and adventure and bravado and games, lots of games.’ It’s easy to see the germs of Eno’s subsequent output: his tape loops, ambient juxtapositions and conceptual electronica all manifest the playfulness that Goldman saw on his notebook’s pages. Popular song had changed with the arrival of rock’n’roll, when a generation of songwriters and performers arrived for whom the five lines of the classical stave were completely irrelevant. The greatest virtuoso of the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix, couldn’t read music, and neither could most of his peers.* Rock songs were written in cheap exercise books or on scraps of paper, and the musical backing was represented (if at all) by a letter or two representing the chords: E, A, D, Gm, B7, saving aspiring musicians from the grind of deciphering crotchets, quavers and key signatures. The era’s most successful composers started their partnership writing in this way, playing truant from school to spend the day at the piano in one of their houses. At 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool, they wrote one song each session on the blue-lined pages of a school exercise book, each headed ‘Another Lennon-McCartney Original’. ‘We never had a dry session,’ McCartney would later recall. ‘In all the years, we never walked away from a session saying “Fuck it, we can’t write one.”’ For each Beatles album session they would set aside a week for songwriting, ‘a song a day… the usual two guitars, two pads, two pencils’, looking over each other’s shoulders, finishing each other’s lines. The notebooks in which Bob Dylan wrote the dense, multifaceted songs that would become Blood on the Tracks would not allow for such congenial collaboration. Only three inches by five, these 19-cent spiral pads have been

pored over by obsessives, revealing an exhaustive process of revision and correction – and tiny handwriting. Helpfully, Dylan wrote at different moments with blue ballpoint, black ballpoint and pencil, making it possible to tentatively apply some kind of chronology to the songs’ evolution. They form a sequence: in the orange and blue books, Dylan drafted and redrafted; in the third, which entered Dylanologist myth as ‘The Little Red Notebook’, he collected final versions to use in the recording sessions. It was apparently stolen from him in the 1970s, then resurfaced at the Morgan Library in New York, home to one of the world’s great collections of illuminated manuscripts, before landing at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa. There it sits in a display case, attracting the gaze of curious visitors.*

Dylan’s notebook habit was well established by the time of this image, recording Highway 61 Revisited, his sixth studio album, in 1965.

The twentieth century’s first new artistic medium also rewarded creatives who adapted the notebook format in new ways. When studying theatre arts at college, Francis Ford Coppola had learned the importance of a ‘prompt book’, a copy of a play’s script which included all the technical notes that would allow the stage manager to run the show. A copy of the script would be unbound, then remounted page-by-page on loose-leaf sheets into which a window had been razored, allowing both sides to be read. The pages would then be hole-punched and ring-bound, and the script’s new wide borders allowed for scene shifts, lighting cues, actors’ entries and exits and so on to be added as the production developed. ‘The building of the prompt book took hours,’ Coppola recalled, ‘and the tedious activity of cutting, reinforcing and organising the pages provided many meditative hours during which one could use the other side of the brain to roam over the ideas and essential themes of the playwright’s intention.’ So when he was offered Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel The Godfather to direct, he did the same thing with it – all 446 pages. ‘I spent many hours cutting, reinforcing, and gluing the pencil-notated novel pages, and built the loose-leaf notebook with care, so that it would last through the many months of production: it would be the repository of every idea I could think of about this future project.’ The notebook was so large that he had to buy a new satchel for it. Coppola then went systematically through the expanded pages, dividing the novel into five acts before subdividing it again into fifty scenes, working out how to turn it into a screenplay. He added additional blank sheets before each act, where he could summarise his creative intentions, then excised a couple of subplots and distilled each remaining scene down to its core in a single sentence. Going through the novel with coloured pencils and a ruler, he worked out what he wanted to accentuate, what he wanted to play down, what parts would be cut. ‘The more pens I used and the more ruler and squiggly lines there were… just the sheer amount of ink on a page would tell me later on this is one of the most important scenes.’ To these notes he added details from his own Italian American background, and at the front he listed the characters.

The notebook would accompany him through the entire making of the movie, from casting discussions through to production design, costume design, shooting and editing. ‘The screenplay was fast’ he recalled ‘because it was based on the work I had done in the notebook.’ On the shoot, he referred to the notebook rather than the final screenplay, because it also included ‘what I really felt was going on’. You can tell all this from looking at its pages: how Coppola identified the themes he wanted to pursue, how he sculpted the script and the movie around it, how he turned a potboiler novel into one of the great movies.

Inspired by such stirrings from the creative front lines, a wider demographic started to explore the notebook’s potential – and, once again, expanded our conception of what a notebook could be. At the turn of the twenty-first century Moleskines were suddenly everywhere, and Sebregondi’s astute appropriation of the Chatwin, Picasso and Hemingway myths had freshly connected the physical notebook with the act of creation. But others now proposed that this simple item had greater potential yet. Productivity gurus such as the bestselling author David Allen told us we could transform our efficiency by making the most of our journals. Something as simple as a task-list frees us from the effort of holding our todos in mind, and supposedly make us not only more efficient but happier. Another pundit, Mark Forster, devised a ‘SuperFocus’ system, also based on making lists in notebooks, which promised even more spectacular results. The titles of his books give a good idea of his confidence: Secrets of Productive People, Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play and How to Make Your Dreams Come True. These books and many like them were reviewed by Oliver Burkeman, who wrote about happiness and efficiency for the Observer newspaper, and tested so many such self-help systems that he was able to distil three general principles for successful listing. Firstly, you should always keep two lists: a master list, where everything goes (and which will never be empty) along with a daily list of your immediate priorities. Secondly, you should make your daily list a ‘will-do’, not a ‘to-do’, stocked only with the items that you’re absolutely confident you can complete. Finally, once you’ve started the day’s work, you should keep control of your agenda by

only adding new tasks to the master list, not the daily list. If you manage your life according to these principles, Burkeman suggests, you’ll quickly develop a better view of your professional and domestic tasks, prioritise effectively, and feel in control. The only problem he found was that a listmaking system this sophisticated becomes impossibly onerous to maintain. Burkeman also reviewed journal-keeping practices, discovering that keeping a food diary resulted in his eating a healthier diet, and that a Bob Graham-style time log revealed the alarmingly large chunk of each day that he idly frittered away. He noted that this kind of self-logging was a species of mindfulness, and that it brought benefits: ‘merely observing your behaviour makes for better behaviour’, he wrote. But, again, these habits are hard to maintain consistently. The most effective notebook habit, in Burkeman’s judgement – or at least, the one which he stuck with while all others dropped away – is Morning Pages. The simplest of routines, popularised by the Hollywood screenwriter turned creativity-guru Julia Cameron, this consists of sitting down with a notebook at the beginning of each day and writing till you have three pages – then stopping. You can write a ‘what-just-happened’ diary entry, or you can go entirely fictional: what matters is taking what’s on your mind and dumping it down on the page so that your stream of consciousness can run on, unencumbered. Cameron has written a book about this process in which she reels off the benefits: self-knowledge, confidence, creativity, optimism and so on. Its adherents have, she claims, published novels, written plays, recorded albums, adopted children, dropped toxic friends, moved to the mountains – all as a result of writing their Morning Pages. She even suggests the method may help you ‘get laid’. Although he initially found ‘the cult of journaling’ to be ‘a bit wallowingly self-absorbed’, Burkeman tried Morning Pages, liked it, and has since filled stacks of Moleskine and Leuchtturm notebooks with an unsystematic yet productive stream of thoughts, plans, emotions and ideas. Cameron, like the note-taking psychologist Ken Kiewra, focused on the way that verbal notes help us to manage abstract concepts and lines of thought. Others took a visual approach to the subject, and came up with yet another new kind of notebook. The designer Mike Rohde started notetaking at conferences with a blend of doodle, cartoon, arrow, hand-lettering and so on: he then published a book, The Sketchnote Handbook, showing how to do it yourself, creating pages that have something of the comic strip

about them. Rohde was followed by many others: the arrival of Instagram allowed anyone to showcase their visual planners, sketchbooks and diaries, so you can lose hours to the artistry and dedication on view under hashtags like #urbansketch, #stationery-love or simply #diary. Heaven help the academic who tries to make sense of it all.

Jean-Paul Richter can’t take all the credit for this explosion in notebook-related activity, but we should accord him some. By devoting years to the study of Leonardo’s notebooks, he showed critics and academics what spectacular discoveries might be unearthed from working manuscripts, and prompted them to start taking them seriously. The rest of us duly followed: when we pore over displays of Picasso’s or Dylan’s working notebooks, or page through facsimiles of Frida Kahlo’s journal or Coppola’s Godfather notebook, or subscribe to notebook-oriented bloggers, we are on the trail he established, one that helps us to understand creative process, and in turn helps us enjoy the finished product more. And it gives us permission, perhaps, to look at our own notebooks in new ways. * A few of the great jazz musicians couldn’t read music, either. Django Reinhardt, Errol Garner, Wes Montgomery and Rahsaan Roland Kirk are the names usually cited – but they were a rare breed. * We were unable to reproduce ‘The Little Red Notebook’ in this book but images are widely available online. They’re fascinating.

CHAPTER 30

A DIFFERENT PART OF THE BRAIN Observing artists, 2022 I had found that most sides of the notebook’s multifaceted story had left helpfully unambiguous traces. We know the importance of ledgers to bookkeeping because the ledgers themselves embody it; diaries and logbooks couldn’t exist without notebooks; and thinkers like Erasmus and Darwin openly acknowledged that, without paper to think on, they would be lost. But one gap in the story nagged at me. I had hypothesised that without their sketchbooks, the artists of the Italian Renaissance would never have been able to develop their skills, and, in particular, that Giotto’s unprecedented mastery of figurative painting came too soon after the arrival of paper notebooks to have been a coincidence. But the lack of surviving examples from the 1300s meant that it was impossible to make any kind of definitive statement. If I was to strengthen the hypothesis, I would need to come at it from a different angle. And so I went to an artist’s studio on a South London industrial estate. Humphrey Ocean is one of Britain’s most distinctive painters, a Royal Academician whose work includes a memorably downbeat portrait of Philip Larkin that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Like many artists, he has an intimate relationship with his sketchbooks, which he showed me to the sound of angle grinders shrieking in the adjoining unit. His collection covers his entire career and Ocean can point to distinct phases in his use of them. First came his student sketchbooks, filled with exercises that he had been set by his teachers, as well as his own free-time drawings. Nostalgically recalling the brand, Bushey, he passed me a battered hardcover example which, as I opened it, promptly fell apart. Filled

with pencil sketches of friends, models, small objects, street scenes, the pages trigger fond memories of drawing with similarly obsessive fellow students. ‘We used to drink cups of tea and draw all night and listen to Bob Dylan,’ he tells me. But Ocean’s eye is not uncritical: he seizes on details in some drawings that point to the artist he became, but the work is more interesting for the strength of the memories it triggers. Even five decades on, he can recall the radio play he listened to while making one drawing. Looking at another, his eyes light up: ‘You can populate a whole room from looking at a drawing of part of it.’ The same can’t be said of the visual diaries that Ocean started to keep two decades later. He shows me a stack of small Cornellissen sketchbooks: these are gem-like treasures, filled with intense gouache paintings of songbirds, pen-line drawings of people and places, and diary entries in neat black ink. Ocean created these in Africa, during visits that he paid to his sister, then a nun in Kenya. The days would be spent out and about with her, with Ocean hungrily taking in everything he saw; and in the long evenings – ‘nuns go to bed early’ – he would spend three or four hours writing and drawing alone, filling page after page in order to preserve his impressions and memories. Each trip resulted in a completed sketchbook, embodying that period. And, today, Ocean uses sketchbooks in yet another way. ‘All colour aspires to the condition of black,’ he tells me, and pulls out a series of large printer’s samples whose bright white blank pages make the perfect base for meticulously inked drawings of everyday objects. Ocean calls these the ‘Dot Books’ – ‘because everything starts with a dot’ – and clearly loves their unforgiving nature. Every mark he makes in them has to be final: there is no halftone, no hatching, only blocks and lines of pure black, which in his hands produce dense, solid, marvellous images of small things. His sketchbooks have gone from training tool, to life document, to the purest expression of light and line.

Humphrey Ocean revisits a student sketchbook.

Ocean’s conversation is packed with warm reminiscence of his teachers and fellow artists: he credits many people with helping him to develop his skill and practice. He talks of studying the works of Rembrandt and Vermeer, with pencil in hand and without, and makes it clear that sketchbooks are just one of many ways he has developed as an artist. But it is equally clear that they have played a central role, over the decades of his artist life. And we know an unusual amount about what Ocean is – as I learn from the story he then tells me, of how he became the first artist whose living brain was observed in the act of creation.

image MRI scans have been around since the late-1970s, when they were invented at the University of Nottingham. They can detect and record many aspects of anatomy and physiology, including the flow of blood around the brain. In 1999, an experiment was designed by Robert Solso, an American professor of psychology, to use MRI technology to discover what might distinguish a trained, professional artist. Solso specialises in the intersections between psychology and art and he judged Ocean to be a perfect subject due to his many years of diligent drawing (quantified by Solso at three to five hours a day). Back then, MRI scanners were still rare beasts, so Ocean flew to California for the experiment, which took place at the only available hour – two o’clock in the morning. With his head secured in the cramped, noisy aperture of the scanner, Solso had Ocean draw rapid pencil portraits from photos pasted into a small sketchbook while he monitored the flow of blood around his brain. An untrained control subject then took on the same task. The MRI revealed that the control subject drew portraits using the right posterior parietal area, the brain’s facial-recognition module, with which we recognise people and judge their mood. Ocean was also drawing faces but, that part of his brain was quiet. Instead, the blood rushed to the right middle frontal area, associated with spatial awareness: the part of the brain whose usual purpose is to stop us from bumping into things as we walk. Ocean’s working mind, the scan revealed, didn’t consider the face as a face, but a collection of shapes. This let him create a recognisable likeness, while the amateur hardly used the front of his brain, and couldn’t. The difference in quality between the two sets of drawings was striking. Solso’s experiment, subsequently replicated and refined, changed the way we think about artists at work. It showed that to create a realistic, figurative image, one that ‘looks like’ the subject, you have to do something that doesn’t come naturally, and – if you’re painting a portrait – actively disengage the parts of the brain that instinct tells you to call upon. ‘The MRI proved something scientifically that I knew already,’ reflected Ocean when we spoke. ‘When you see somebody you know, you say “Hello John, hello Mary”, what have you. You recognise that person. But when you draw John and Mary, you use a different part of the brain, the bit you use when

you’re manoeuvring round a piece of furniture.’ He gestured at the table in front of us, loaded with books, papers and pictures. ‘It’s a spatial thing.’ ‘And you can feel that when you draw?’ I asked. ‘Not quite as such, but the fact is that when you start drawing a nose, if you look at the light and the… blush, it’ll have a shape, and that shape is essentially abstract. Ian Dury,* my art teacher, told me, “When you’re drawing a nose, for Christ’s sake don’t draw a nose. Just draw what you see. And after half an hour, you step away, and there will be a nose.” If you try and draw a nose you’ll fall flat on your face.’ It’s hard to look at the figures in Byzantine art without thinking of Dury’s advice: those paintings are full of body parts that don’t express patterns of shape and light, but rather the idea of what they ought to look like. image Ocean was involved in another art-science study, in which he wore an eye tracker – ‘a hefty, helmet-type thing’ – for a team of psychologists, led by John Tchalenko, in Oxford. They fitted a motion sensor to Ocean’s hand then precisely measured how eye and hand movements correlated as he drew and painted a portrait. Once again, his actions were compared to those of an untrained control group assigned the same tasks. Tchalenko made significant observations. Firstly, while drawing or painting, Ocean moved and fixated his eyes differently to when he was not. In ‘John and Mary’ mode, not painting but relating to the model as a person, his eyes flicked rapidly from spot to spot, moving three times a second and never settling down. It was a different story, however, when Ocean started work: as his mind shifted into drawing mode, so did his eyes, fixating on an area for five or six seconds. Untrained control subjects did not share these long fixations: their eyes continued to hop around the model’s face. Ocean’s hand moved differently, too, making rapid anticipatory strokes with the pencil above the paper before applying it to make a mark. Solso’s and Tchalenko’s observations suggested that training transforms an artist’s mental and physical activity in complex and connected ways: eye movements, eye fixation, signal processing and hand movement. They assumed that these ways resulted from Ocean’s education and regular practice – rather than any innate, inherited ability – and would apply to any

similarly trained artist. But Ocean differed. ‘I said: “You’re not going to find out how artists think while they draw. You’re going to find out how I think when I draw.”’ He makes a valid point. Although the 1999 studies could confirm, with remarkable accuracy, which part of his brain worked on a given activity, a sample size of one didn’t allow neuroscientists to generalise. But it soon became possible to settle the argument through an invention called voxel-based morphometry (VBM). The obstacle that researchers had previously faced was the considerable variation in our brains: although all share the same fundamental structure, each varies in size and shape. But by mapping multiple brain scans one by one onto a common template of three-dimensional grid references, or voxels, VBM smooths out differences between individual examples, allowing neuroscientists to combine MRI scans of many subjects into a composite image from which they can draw general conclusions. VBM also lets us look below the surface and deep into the cerebrum. The undulating outer layer that gives a brain its distinctive walnut-like appearance is the famous grey matter, rich in neurons, where most of the computing happens. Under it lies the white matter, composed of billions of connective cells, carrying signals continuously between different areas of the grey matter. Think of an office, in which computers hum on every desk, representing the grey matter, while miles of cabling connect them, representing the white matter. Both grey and white are critical: but it’s the grey matter that is the actual stuff of thought, and by using VBM we can assess whether a part of an individual’s brain has more or less of it than the average. In 2014, a team led by Dr Rebecca Chamberlain of the University of Leuven, in Belgium, looked inside forty-four heads to search for physical differences between artists’ brains and those of the general population, and it made striking findings. Firstly, they observed that skill at drawing closely correlated to increased grey matter in the right medial frontal gyrus – the area that Solso had watched getting busy while Humphrey Ocean drew. Chamberlain’s team also spotted something that Solso hadn’t: a significant growth in grey matter on the left anterior lobe of the cerebellum, an area behind your left earhole that governs fine muscle control. Finally, they saw a difference between the brains of hobbyists who were merely good at drawing, and those who had enjoyed full-time training. Art school attendance yields an area of denser grey matter in the right precuneus, an

area towards the top and back of your skull that deals with visual imagery and three-dimensional forms.* All these observations confirmed that, as artists draw, they don’t just use specific areas of the brain, but also permanently change them, laying down grey matter just as bodybuilders lay down muscle. image We can draw striking conclusions from Tchalenko, Solso and Chamberlain’s experiments. Long practice teaches an artist to direct their gaze in an unusually focused way; it trains them to repurpose areas of their brain; and it changes the very structure of the brain’s neural networks. Ocean’s unusual patterns of thought – and his unusually developed brain – were normal in trained artists. Other neurological researchers have shown that paper notebooks make particularly effective learning tools, with an edge over their digital counterparts. Multiple studies have found that students who take lecture notes on laptops don’t learn as well as those who write with pen and paper. This is partly due to the distracting temptations offered by the internet, and partly because typing encourages verbatim note-taking, rather than paraphrasing, summarising and concept mapping, which are much more effective ways at encoding new information in the memory.* In 2021, a Japanese study compared how effectively we take (nonacademic) notes on paper, a phone, or a tablet. Pen and paper proved the most efficient by far: not only did subjects complete the note-taking task more quickly, they later had much better recall of the details. This study also used MRI scanning to discover that the hippocampi, precunei, visual cortices, and language-related frontal regions of the brain were all much more active in the notebook users. This explains, on a neurological level, why they outperformed the digital device users, but it raises another question, relevant to artists too: what is it about moving a pen across paper that stimulates the brain so brilliantly? The physical labour seems to play a part, as we encode memories better when muscular effort is involved. So do the tactile, sensory qualities of the paper itself, and the fact that a note on a page has a fixed location, while a note on a screen scrolls away or vanishes altogether. Together, these factors result in ‘deeper and more solid’ cognitive processes, and the study

unambiguously concludes that ‘brain activations related to memory, visual imagery, and language during the retrieval of specific information, as well as the deeper encoding of that information, were stronger in participants using a paper notebook than in those using electronic devices’. It seems that, despite the billions poured into product development by the likes of Apple, Google and Evernote, the best cognitive tool we have was invented hundreds of years ago. Having learned about Ocean’s relationship with his sketchbooks, and the results of his training on his mind, I was now much more confident in the existence of Giotto’s hypothetical sketchbook. This implied that Renaissance artists, skilled at depicting the world about them as their precursors had never been, were neurologically, as well as culturally, products of their time: for not only did paper sketchbooks give them new ways to work, they also changed the flow of blood around their brains, and the growth of their grey matter. The conclusion seemed clear. Use it enough, and a notebook will change your brain. * Ian Dury taught Ocean at Canterbury College of Art in 1971, and Ocean played bass in Dury’s pubrock band, Kilburn and the High Roads (who subsequently morphed – without Ocean – into Ian Dury and the Blockheads, gathering unlikely pop success). * By comparing their work with other studies, Chamberlain’s team could postulate that six months’ training would not be enough to build up this grey matter: three years of training and regular drawing practice would be. Typically, Renaissance artists were apprenticed for three to five years. * This is because you can type faster than you can handwrite. When it’s possible to keep up with a speaker and type verbatim notes, that’s what students do: but when using a ponderous pen or pencil, they have to develop alternative strategies to prioritise, organise, abbreviate and structure what they hear. This in turn leads to much better learning.

CONCLUSION

OTTO CARRIES A NOTEBOOK The extended mind, 1938–present My own pile of notebooks, to which I referred in the introduction, remains to hand beside my desk. After years spent filling them, then more years spent mining their contents, I’m intimately familiar with the pages, the notes, the ideas, the lists and the doodles. Beneath the desk, in sturdy boxes, are two decades of my diaries and sketchbooks, along with three tiny Letts diaries that my grandfather, Harald, kept in 1938, 1939 and 1940. He lived at their outset in Lithuania, where he worked for a merchant shipping line, and wound up back home in London where he enlisted in the British Army. With their pithy accounts of business, the growing threat of war, a busy, boozy social life and romances that were doomed to go nowhere, the diaries brought him strongly to life. I felt his frustration when his hat blew into the river Danë, sensed his relief at surviving a burst appendix, and read with tension the entries when he finally accepted the inevitable, leaving Klaipėda – already occupied by the Wehrmacht and declared a part of Germany – steaming home on the merchant ship Baltona. He cut it fine, arriving in London in August 1939. Reading his diary, which evoked so much in so few words, prompted me to keep my own, accidentally setting me on the trail that concludes here. When this book’s done, the notebooks will be retired into those same boxes, which are readily accessible, and handy for the door. If the flat ever catches fire, they’re the possessions I plan to rescue from the flames. That won’t surprise anyone who keeps a diary or journal. Each word we add increases its value: the tattier it gets, the more battered, the more precious it becomes. And this value goes far beyond what seems rational, for in truth I rarely refer to my old diaries or notebooks, and I suspect that few of us are ‘on nodding terms with the people we used to be’, as Joan

Didion put it. I would, however, be mortified if anyone else, however sympathetic, delved into those boxes, and exposed the diaries in public like Sir Politic Would-Be’s in Jonson’s Volpone. I’m not alone in that. Many of the people I interviewed for this book told me – when asked – that they kept their own private notebooks and diaries. One had filled dozens; several others wrote diaries intermittently, some just at difficult times in their life; and one told me of the distinction they – like Patricia Highsmith – make between an intimate, emotional journal and the creative, professional diary they kept in another notebook. A couple of interviewees admitted to holding onto their teenage diaries despite being hugely embarrassed every time they open them. Another told me, movingly, of the notebook they kept which preserved their last conversations with a dying parent. When I asked to see these notebooks, as I occasionally did, all but one politely refused. The one to cheerfully break that code of privacy was Michael Rosen – who, of course, had not written his patient diary himself. Ben Jonson was smart to play upon the exquisite torture of seeing your diary read, and the irony that such mental torment is inflicted only by the victim’s own words. It’s a powerful mental phenomenon – though I wonder if psychology is the only way of explaining it.

The infinite potential of the blank page.

As the preceding chapters of this book may have shown, I’m most comfortable thinking about material things, physical processes and transactions. Notebooks interest me as a technology that has had tangible effects on the world around us. Abstract questions of ontology or epistemology grab me less strongly. So I was surprised to find one of the most interesting recent takes on the notebook coming not from a historian, or a psychologist, but from a pair of philosophers.

It was the English philosopher Andy Clark who started the ball rolling. In the late 1980s he was reflecting on the kinds of thinking that weren’t possible without a physical support. Pen and paper, for instance, make complicated calculations possible. They also feature in the loop of drafting, reading and redrafting which all writers know, and the analogous process by which artists place a line on paper and then react to it. You could file calculators, slide rules and computers alongside the pen and paper, or any

device that enables us to think in ways which our brains alone are not up to. Such things have usually been considered to be external aids to thought, supports which allow the neurons firing around our brains to do their thing: but for Clark this didn’t ring true. Certain kinds of thought – writing a novel, multiplying ten-digit numbers together, calculating a planet’s orbit – only became possible with these external tools and, that being the case, surely those indispensable things should share the credit with the brain? This insight seemed like it might have interesting implications. So Clark drafted a paper exploring them, and shared it with the Australian philosopher David Chalmers. They bounced it between them, testing Clark’s original hypothesis and refining it, until in 1998, a paper titled ‘The Extended Mind’ was ready, addressing the question that it opened with: ‘Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?’ Clark and Chalmers first collected a concise series of examples and thought experiments that explored and confirmed ‘the general tendency of human reasoners to lean heavily on environmental supports’. They referred to ‘the use of pen and paper to perform long multiplication, the use of physical re-arrangements of letter tiles to prompt word recall, the use of instruments such as the nautical slide rule, and the general paraphernalia of language, books, diagrams and culture’. And they pointed to the difference between epistemic actions, like writing on a blackboard, which help us to think or gather information, and pragmatic actions, like laying cement, which do not. Two pages in, Clark and Chalmers summarised their position: Epistemic action, we suggest, demands spread of epistemic credit. If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head! They called this idea ‘active externalism’ and pointed out that it offered a ‘natural explanation of all sorts of actions’, including rearrangement of Scrabble tiles on their rack to help the player find the highest-scoring word. ‘This is not part of action,’ they state: ‘it is a part of thought.’ The pair then pressed on with their logic, pointing out that it challenged the conventional view that a person’s mind exists within their brain, and

nowhere else. It would challenge it still further, if they could show externalism to apply not just to our thought processes but also to our beliefs – understood in the wide, philosophical sense: what we take to be the case, or regard as true. (As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy clarifies: ‘Many of the things we believe, in the relevant sense, are quite mundane: that we have heads, that it’s the 21st century, that a coffee mug is on the desk.’) Our beliefs and minds are inextricably intertwined, so if the former found themselves (in part) outside our skulls, so would (in part) the latter. To explore that possibility, they hypothesised a New Yorker named Otto, determined to live a full life in the face of misfortune: Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and like many Alzheimer’s patients, he relies on information in the environment to help structure his life. Otto carries a notebook around with him everywhere he goes. When he learns new information, he writes it down. When he needs some old information, he looks it up. For Otto, his notebook plays the role usually played by a biological memory. Today, Otto wants to go to the Museum of Modern Art, so he consults his notebook, which reminds him of the 53rd Street address, and he goes there. So too does his friend Inga, who retrieves the address from her brain’s healthy memory. Clark and Chalmers then compare the two processes, reasoning that ‘the notebook plays for Otto the same role that memory plays for Inga’. It just happens that Otto’s belief that the museum is on 53rd Street ‘lies beyond the skin’, and there is no difference between his belief and Inga’s, for ‘the information is reliably there when needed, available to consciousness and available to action, in just the way that we expect a belief to be’. Whether the belief that MoMA is on 53rd Street is sited in the notebook or in the brain doesn’t, therefore, matter. So long as one trusts the information stored in the notebook, relies upon it, and uses it, there is – philosophically speaking – no meaningful difference between the notebook and the mind. Therefore, Otto’s mind has expanded to include his notebook, and your notebook – if you use it as Otto does – may become a part of yours. Clark and Chalmers found it difficult to find an academic journal willing to publish their paper, but when it finally appeared in the pages of Analysis in 1998, it rapidly found a wide readership: lucid, convincing, and written

in the closest that academic philosophers ever come to everyday language, ‘The Extended Mind’ became the most-cited philosophy article of the 1990s. It prompted scores of responses, many of which Clark responded to in a more technical follow-up article titled – obviously – ‘The Extended Mind, Extended’. Books followed, as did professorships for both men, and their hypothesis of the extended mind gained wide acceptance.*

It helped that the simultaneous development of digital technology made it easier for people to accept the idea that we can enter into a cognitive partnership with an object. Smartphones, tablets and the internet all blur the ‘skull and skin’ boundary, and the Australian philosopher Ned Block, according to Chalmers, ‘likes to say that the thesis was false in 1995 when we wrote the article, but it has since become true’. Under its umbrella, specialisms have developed: embodied cognition looks at how our minds and bodies interact, situated cognition looks at how our minds and environments interact, and distributed cognition examines how multiple minds interact with each other. The last paragraph of ‘The Extended Mind’ anticipated this, noting that the ‘reconception of ourselves’ that the hypothesis demanded would have ‘significant consequences’, not least moral and ethical implications. ‘In some cases,’ it said, ‘interfering with someone’s environment will have the same moral significance as interfering with their person.’ Ripping a page out of Otto’s notebook, in other words, could hurt him much as a blow to the head would hurt Inga. What would traditionally be seen as property crime may instead count as a crime of violence. And it helps to explain the strange strength of the bonds that we form with our notebooks and diaries if we understand them to be extensions of our minds, parts of our belief and cognitive systems that happen to reside outside our skulls but are otherwise integral to the business of thinking and living. In reading my diary, you read my mind, and in my hypothetical dash to the diary boxes through the smoke, I’m not protecting my property, but rescuing a part of my self. Encouraged by Clark’s thought experiments, which often start with a phrase like ‘sometime in the cyberpunk future’ and involve hypothetical brain implants endowing surprising new abilities, the extended mind thesis attracts futurologists and technophiles. Clark’s own interests include AI,

robotics, cyborgs and other forward-looking phenomena. But I would like to create a thought experiment of my own by instead looking backwards in time through the prism of the extended mind. Imagine a human life to which no object brings cognitive affordances (psychologically speaking) or allows epistemic action (philosophically speaking): that is, life in a primitive world with nothing to help you think. No radios, no computers, certainly no smartphones – and no abacuses, no rulers, no books, no pen or ink. Such a life would be immeasurably poorer than ours, and you’d have to go a long way back – or into maximum-security solitary confinement – to encounter a human in that sad condition. But we can easily picture a world in which there are very few such things. What objects in the everyday life of an early medieval peasant allowed them to extend their minds? The parish Bible, a measuring stick or string, perhaps; the counting board in a shop, a dice game, a sundial. With such limited opportunities, it’s no surprise that this environment threw up so few thinkers of note, and that the church, with its near-complete monopoly over books and writing materials, attracted the most inquisitive souls. Now imagine how it must have felt to grow up in that world, and then to see pen and paper in use for the first time, making baffling ideas simple, defying memory’s inherent slipperiness, and allowing for complicated sums, lifelike drawings, gripping verse, lengthy memoirs, and surprising harmonies. You could say that the arrival of the notebook gave us a way to extend our minds, or you might go further, and say that it blew them completely. I see the story of Europe’s adventure with the notebook as one of enlargements – intellectual, economic, creative, emotional – as curious minds expanded to interact with, and fill, the blank pages that notebooks presented. Maria Sebregondi asserts that the Moleskine’s material simplicity – compared to its digital competitors – is a constraint which prompts creativity. But to the early adopters, those blank pages represented unconstrained horizons. They had no finer cognitive technology. It challenges us to create, to explore, to record, to analyse, to think. It lets us draw, compose, organise and remember – even to care for the sick. With it, we can come to know ourselves better, appreciate the good, put the bad in perspective, and live fuller lives.

In that context, it’s hardly surprising that more and more of us turn to the paper notebook even as digital gadgets become cheaper, slicker and richer with features. Upmarket stationery manufacturers flourish internationally; European notebookers adopt Japanese brands even as Moleskine attempts to crack the Chinese market. Connoisseurs keep stationery blogs and online stores humming with impressively pedantic reviews, not just of notebooks but of the instruments – pens and pencils – that bring them to life. They look for lighter, smoother paper; environmental credentials; stronger binding; the right balance between blank page and helpful content; a line spacing that suits the user’s hand. They are the heirs to the shoppers on the Via dei Librai in Florence, who must have stroked the paper stocks, looking for the finest, smoothest product for their giornale, zibaldoni and libri di famiglia. These aficionados should be grateful to the Chiavelli and Letts families, to Maria Sebregondi and Francesco Francheschi, and every other entrepreneur who ever found a new or useful or beautiful way to bind blank pages together. And we should all be grateful to their customers, who realised the notebook’s affordances, and who understood implicitly that by taking the time and effort to externalise their thoughts, to draw a line, to work out a sum or manipulate an equation, they were expanding their minds. To do so, to open up to the blank page and interact with it, takes energy and sometimes a little courage. But the rewards may surprise. * Based at New York University, Professor Chalmers (who looks like he fell out of the back of an ACDC concert) now specialises in the philosophical questions posed by virtual reality. Professor Clark (who looks like he’s heading for a rave) has continued examining the interface between the world and the mind and works at the University of Sussex in Brighton.

APPENDIX

NOTES & REFERENCES This is not a formal history and a full scholarly apparatus wouldn’t be appropriate, but the curious reader will find directions to the principal primary and secondary sources below, along with grateful thanks to the many specialists who were kind enough to help me along the way. I have omitted ‘www’ from website addresses and do not duplicate written sources that are clear in the main text. While completing this book’s last chapter I came across ‘Noted’, the Substack blog of Dr Jillian Hess, which she had started only a few months earlier yet had already turned into a varied and sophisticated resource. If you have enjoyed this book, you will find much there to interest you. Introduction The Moleskine story has been told many times, by Sebregondi and others. The fullest, and best, account is in David Sax’s excellent The Revenge of Analog (New York, 2016), although I have also referred to other print sources including Adrienne Raphel’s ‘The virtual Moleskine’ (The New Yorker, 14 April 2014), Hannah Roberts’s ‘Maria Segrebondi, Moleskine founder, takes note of the digital age’ (Financial Times, 24 November 2017), James Harkin’s ‘Resurrecting Moleskine notebooks’ (Newsweek, 12 June 2011), Brittany Shoot’s ‘Moleskine turns the page with expanded brick-andmortar stores’ (Fortune, 18 November 2014), and Katherine Cowdrey’s ‘Vintage and Moleskine to release 30th anniversary Chatwin edition’ (The Bookseller, 10 July 2017). There are several online interviews: one from 2015 at ueberbrands.com and one from 2014 at 2014.sfuitaliadesign.com/interviews are representative, and the official version is available at moleskine.com. Where accounts differ in the detail, as they frequently do, I have tended to go with Sax’s version. Karl Rove’s comments were reported in the Yale Daily News, 18 September 2010. The stationery blog notebookstories.com showcases Moleskine’s packaging going back to the very beginning, and a photo there yielded the original leaflet copy, which reads thus in the original Italian: ‘Il Moleskine è l’esatta riproduzione del leggendario taccuino di Chatwin, Hemingway. Anonimo custode di una straordinaria tradizione, il Moleskine è un distillato di funzionalità e un accumulatore di emozioni che libera la sua carica nel tempo. Dal taccuino originario è nata una famiglia di tascabili essenziali e fidati. Copertina rigida rivestita in moleskine, chiusura a elastico, rilegatura a filo refe. Soffietto portanote interno in cartoncino e tela. Scheda mobile con la storia del Moleskine. Formato 9 x 14 cm.’ Today, the same leaflet carries a similar message in eight languages.

Chapter 1: BEFORE NOTEBOOKS I am most grateful to Professor Jonathan Bloom, whose work on Islamic paper has made him a leader in the field and who considered my question of Islamic notebooks – and their surprising rarity. The brief account in this chapter draws on his work and in particular his book Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT and London, 2001). I find it impossible to believe that notebooks of some kind did not play some part in the vibrant intellectual and commercial life of the Islamic world, but it’s hard to identify surviving manuscripts that fit the bill. When I asked him, Bloom himself could only point to a couple of examples of ‘working’ manuscripts, both from much later than the period under discussion here. Paper was recycled in those days at least as assiduously as it is today: maybe it was the norm to destroy your rough work once the neat copy existed. Notebooks of some kind may survive in Timbuktu’s incredible troves of Arabic, Songhay and Tamasheq manuscripts, currently being scanned and catalogued, and I would welcome any account of early Arabic, Persian or African notebooks to fill this gap in our knowledge. For a fascinating account of the discovery and analysis of the Ulu Burun shipwreck, see Cemal Pulak and Donald A. Frey’s ‘The Search for a Bronze Age Shipwreck’, Archaeology (1985). For a detailed analysis of the diptych, see Robert Payton’s ‘The Ulu Burun Writing-Board Set’, Anatolian Studies (1991). The account of Pompeii’s tablets draws on Elizabeth A. Meyer’s ‘Writing Paraphernalia, Tablets, and Muses in Campanian Wall Painting’, American Journal of Archaeology (2009). For the story of Jaume and Xátiva, see Robert I. Burns, ‘The Paper Revolution in Europe: Crusader Valencia’s Paper Industry: A Technological and Behavioral Breakthrough’, Pacific Historical Review (1981). I recommend The Book by Keith Houston (New York, 2016), The Paper Trail by Alexander Monro (London, 2014), and (although I disagree with many of the author’s conclusions) Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky (New York, 2016). All cover Fabriano and the spread of paper manufacture, although none discuss the role played by the notebook. More specialist accounts include Peter F. Tschudin, Grundzüge der Papiergeschichte (Stuttgart, 2012) and Józef Dąbrowski, ‘Paper Manufacture in Central and Eastern Europe Before the Introduction of Paper-making Machines’, (2008, available at www.paperhistory.org and far more readable than its title suggests).

Chapter 2: RED BOOK, WHITE BOOK, CLOTH BOOK I am most grateful to Dr William R. Day of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, who shared his expertise in several long emails, and Professor Alan Sangster of the University of Aberdeen. The Farolfi ledger made its way (back?) to Florence and is now in the city’s Archivio di Stato, catalogued Carte Strozziani, 2a Serie, n.84 bis. I have drawn on Geoffrey Lee’s article, ‘The Coming of Age of Double Entry: The Giovanni Farolfi Ledger of 1299–1300, The Accounting Historians Journal (1977); Mikhail Kuter and Marina Gurskaya, ‘The Reconstruction of the Head Office Account in the General Ledger of Giovanni Farolfi’s Company (1299–1300)’, Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research (2018); Edwin S. Hunt, The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence (Cambridge, 1994), John F. Padgett, ‘The Emergence of Corporate Merchant-Banks in Dugento Tuscany’, in John F. Padgett and Walter W. Powell, The Emergence of Organizations and Markets (Princeton, 2012). The comparison of paper and parchment manufacture draws from Tschudin, cited above. For more about the impact of accountancy, see Jane GleesonWhite Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (Sydney, 2011); Jacob Soll, The Reckoning (New York, 2014); Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (New York, 1982); and Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250– 1600 (Cambridge, 2010).

Chapter 3: SLIGHT STROKES IN A LITTLE BOOK I am most grateful to Dr Richard Plant, who told me a great deal about thirteenth-century art. I also referred to Harold Farnsworth Gray, ‘Sewerage in Ancient and Medieval Times’, Sewage Works Journal (1940); Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art (Oxford,1978); John Mortimer’s interview with David Hockney, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Naughty Boy’, in Mortimer’s In Character (London, 1983); Francis Ames-Lewis, ‘Benozzo Gozzoli’s Rotterdam Sketchbook Revisited’, Master Drawings (1995); Joseph Manca, ‘Cenni Di Pepo as Cimabue: Personality, Appearance or Activity?’, Notes in the History of Art (2005); Norman Land, ‘Giotto’s Fly, Cimabue’s Gesture, and a “Madonna and Child” by Carlo Crivelli’, Notes in the History of Art (1995); Betty Edwards, Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence (New York, 1989); and Cesare Gnudi; L’arte gotica in Francia e in Italia (Turin, 1982).

Chapter 4: RICORDI, RICORDANZI, ZIBALDONI Dr Lisa Kaborycha of the University of New Haven was kind enough to send me her PhD thesis, ‘Copying Culture: Fifteenth-Century Florentines and Their Zibaldoni’, which proved invaluable and is by far the best single resource on these remarkable notebooks. Unless otherwise noted, all this chapter’s references to zibaldoni, apart from Boccaccio’s, are drawn from it. Dr Kaborycha is currently preparing a book on the subject, which I imagine will be definitive. Iris Origo’s classic The Merchant of Prato (London, 1957) is an excellent introduction to Florentine life and literacy. I also referred to Gene A. Brucker, Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: The Diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati (San Francisco, 1967); Eric Ketelaar, ‘The Genealogical Gaze: Family Identities and Family Archives in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries’, Libraries & the Cultural Record (2009); Duccio Balestracci, The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a FifteenthCentury Tuscan Peasant (Pennsylvania, 1999), the opening line of which supplied the quotation on p. 61 about ‘writing fever’; Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture (New Haven, CT, 1995); David Parker, ‘The Importance of the Commonplace Book: London 1450–1550’, Manuscripta (1996); Piero Boitani, ‘Boccaccio’s Triumph’, Medium Ævum (1978); Ronald Witt, ‘What Did Giovannino Read and Write? Literacy in Early Renaissance Florence’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance (1995).

Chapter 5: PEPPER IN ALEXANDRIA I am hugely grateful to Pam Long, David McGee and Alan Stahl, each of whom was good enough to tell me their own part of the story. David McGee was also kind enough to supply the photos. The authors’ three-volume edition of The Book of Michael of Rhodes (Cambridge, MA, 2009) is my main source. Thanks also to Richard Fattorini and Julian King of Sotheby’s.

Chapter 6: WICKED WIVES AND MOUTHS STOPPED WITH WOOL I’m grateful to Professor Orietta da Rold, whom I interviewed and whose book Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions (Cambridge, 2020) gives an illuminating and thought-provoking account of the arrival of paper in England. I also referred to Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, NJ, 2019), and David Parker, ‘The Importance of the Commonplace Book: London 1450–1550’, Manuscripta (1996). John Colyns’s notebook is today known as BL MS Harley 2252 and is digitised on the British Library website.

Chapter 7: THE LONG LIFE OF LHD 244 I am grateful to Jason Stoessel for sending me his article, ‘The Making of Louise Hanson-Dyer Manuscript 244’, and Denis B. Collins for sending me his, ‘Instructions for Keyboard Accompaniment in Music Manuscript LHD 244 of the University of Melbourne’, both of which appear in the journal Musica Disciplina (2015).

Chapter 8: ALAS, THIS WILL NEVER GET ANYTHING DONE On Pacioli: I’m grateful to Alan Sangster for answering my questions about Pacioli, and referred to his article ‘The Printing of Pacioli’s Summa in 1494: How Many Copies Were Printed?’, The Accounting Historians Journal (2007). I also referred to Nick Mackinnon’s exhilarating article ‘The Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli’, The Mathematical Gazette (1993). You can learn more about De Ludo Scachorum at leonardochess.com. All Pacioli quotations are from Jeremy Cripps’s Particularis de Computis et Scripturis: A Contemporary Interpretation (Seattle, 1994). I also referred to Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (Sydney, 2011). On Leonardo: I am extremely grateful to Professor Martin Kemp, whom I interviewed and who shared a lifetime’s erudition most generously. I referred to his books Leonardo (London, 2011), Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (London, 2006), and Living with Leonardo (London, 2018). The young Leonardo’s connection to Florence’s book trade was revealed by Christina Neilson in Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Verrocchio and the Epistemology of Making Art (Cambridge, 2019). I also referred to Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography (New York, 2017); Ritchie Calder Leonardo and the Age of the Eye (New York, 1970); and Irma A. Richter’s edition of the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, reissued with an introduction by Martin Kemp (Oxford, 2008).

Chapter 9: O THE PAINS AND LABOUR TO RECORD WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE SAID! I am hugely grateful to Professor Angus Vine, who not only consented to multiple interviews but generated a torrent of common-placing ideas. His publications also proved invaluable: ‘Note-Taking and the Organization of Knowledge’, in D. Jalobeanu, C. T. Wolfe (eds), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (Cham, 2018); ‘Commercial commonplacing: Francis Bacon, the Waste-Book, and the Ledger’, in Richard Beadle (ed.) Manuscript Miscellanies: c.1450–1700 (London, 2011). I’m equally to grateful to Professor Paul Dover, who also spoke to me and to whose articles I referred: ‘Varieté et abondance. La copia e l’histoire de l’Europe des débuts de l’epoque moderne’, Cahiers d’histoire (2021) and ‘Reading Dante in the Sixteenth Century: The Bentley Aldine Divine Comedy and its Marginalia’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History (2020). Thanks also to Dr Eric Nils Lindquist. I also referred to Ann Blair’s essay ‘Early Modern Attitudes toward the Delegation of Copying and Note-Taking’, in Alberto Cevolini (ed.), Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016); to her book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT, 2010); Richard Yeo ‘Thinking with Excerpts: John Locke (1632–1704) and his Notebooks’, History of Science and Humanities (2020); and Hannah Jeans’s PhD thesis, ‘Women’s Reading Habits and Gendered Genres, c.1600–1700’ (University of York, 2019). For the impact of common-place books in England, I draw on Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare (London, 2001) and I refer to Dana Sutton’s account of the life of John Brownsword at philological. bham.ac.uk/brnswrd. Elizabeth Browne (later Lyttelton)’s common-place book is now MS Add 8460 at Cambridge University Library.

Chapter 10: FROM ONE MOUTH TO ANOTHER RUNS EAST AND WEST Albo’s logbook is now in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville. I quote from Henry Stanley’s translation, The First Voyage Round the World, by Magellan (London, 1874), which also includes Pigafetta’s account. I also referred to D. Varona Aramburu, M. Pérez-Escolar, G. Sánchez Muñoz, ‘Framing Theory and Proto-journalism: A Study of the Attributes Associated with the Character of Magellan in the Diaries of Pigafetta and Francisco Albo’, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social (2019). For clarity I have used today’s place names.

Chapter 11: KING OF THE HERRING I am hugely grateful to Jeroen Vandommele for sharing his expertise with me. The entire Visboek, in line with the enlightened policy of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, is online at Wikimedia Commons: what an online rabbit hole to wander down. I also referred to Richard Unger, ‘Dutch Herring, Technology, and International Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, The Journal of Economic History (1980).

Chapter 12: A DULL DUTCH FASHION Once again, this chapter owes much to Jeroen Vandommele and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek: the Heyblocq album is online in full at Wikimedia Commons, as are pages from the other Dutch alba mentioned. I refer to Sophie Reinders and Jeroen Vandommele, ‘A Renaissance for Alba Amicorum Research’, Early Modern Low Countries (2022). Other sources are Werner Wilhelm Schnabel, Das Stammbuch: Konstitution und Geschichte einer textsortenbezogenen Sammelform bis ins erste Drittel des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2003); and Thomas Fuller, The Holy State, and the Profane State (London, 1642). The play mentioned was Sir Politick Would-be, written in the 1660s by Charles de Saint-Évremond, and is cited in Bronwyn Wilson’s ‘Social Networking: The Album Amicorum and Early Modern Public-making’, in M. Rospocher (ed.), Oltre la sefra pubblica/Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe (Bologna, 2012).

Chapter 13: SEVERAL GEMS David McGee, who told me about Michael of Rhodes, pointed me towards Professor Markus Popplow, who kindly spoke to me about Schick hardt and his legacy. The four notebooks have all been digitised and are viewable online as the Reiseaufzeichnungen – Cod. hist.qt.148: Band A, Band B, Band C and Band D. They are all fascinating, although hard to read: I referred to the transcript by Guting and Pfieffer, Handschriften und Handzeichnungen des herzoglich Württembergischen Baumeisters Heinrich Schickhardt (Stuttgart, 1902). I also referred to Edward Rosen’s ‘The Invention of Eyeglasses’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1956); Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago, 1996); Pamela O. Long, ‘Picturing the Machine: Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo da Vinci in the 1490s’, in Wolfgang Lefevre (ed.) Picturing Machines, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, 2004); and Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (London, 2016).

Chapter 14: LET HIM NOT STAY LONG I thank Professor Dan Wakelin for his help. I referred to Angus Vine’s ‘Francis Bacon’s Composition Books’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society (2008). William Worcester’s Itineraria is now MS 210 in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The whole manuscript is online at parker.stanford.edu. I quote from Frances Neale’s translation in William Worcestre: The Topography of Medieval Bristol (Bristol, 2000). I referred to Luigi Monga’s ‘Crime and the Road: A Survey of Sixteenth-Century Travel Journals’, Renaissance and Reformation (1998); D. S. Chambers, ‘Isabella d’Este and the Travel Diary of Antonio de Beatis’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (2001); Howard C. Horsford and Lynn Horth’s edition of Herman Melville’s Journals (Chicago, IL, 1989); Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston, MA, 1883); Nora Wilkinson’s blog post ‘Copycat Copiers? Frederick Folsch, Ralph Wedgwood, and the “Improved Manifold Writer”’ on the Bodleian Library’s ‘Conveyor’ blog; A. E. Hotchner, ‘Don’t Touch “A Moveable Feast’”’ (New York Times, 19 July 2009); Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York, 1961); Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin (London, 2000); and Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London, 1987). Elizabeth Chatwin’s interview is on Moleskine’s YouTube channel. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s 1933 travel journal is held by the National Library of Scotland and is digitised: you can get lost in it at digital.nls.uk.

Chapter 15: THE WASTE BOOK As MS Add. 4004, the Waste Book is online – along with much useful information – at cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk. The Pocket Memorandum Book is held by the Morgan Library in New York as MA 318, and is digitised on their website, themorgan.org. Niccolò Guicciardini and Scott Mandelbrote introduce the Waste Book’s mathematics – and Newton’s claims – in their film, ‘The Origins of Mathematics’ on Cambridge University Library’s YouTube channel. I also referred to Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, MA, 1968); Joel Levy, Newton’s Notebook (Philadelphia, 2009); K. R. H. Treadwell and P. C. Kendall, ‘Self-talk in Youth with Anxiety Disorders: States of Mind, Content Specificity, and Treatment Outcome’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (1996); and P. Muris et al., ‘The Relationship between Anxiety Disorder Symptoms and Negative Self-Statements in Normal Children’, Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal (1998).

Chapter 16: A TALE OF TWO NOTEBOOKS The account of Fouquet’s cassette draws on Adolphe Chéruel, Mémoires sur la vie publique et privée de Fouquet, Surintendant des Finances (Paris, 1862), and the story of Colbert’s record-keeping depends on Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor, MI, 2009). I also referred to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, publiés d’après les ordres de l’empereur sur la proposition de son excellence M. Magne, ministre secrétaire d’Etat des Finances par Pierre Clément, membre de l’Institut (Paris, 1861), and Charles Elmé Francatelli, The Modern Cook: A Practical Guide to the Culinary Art in All Its Branches (London, 1846). Neither the cassette nor the golden notebooks are online, but you can see a spectacular naval notebook illuminated by Nicolas Jarry for Louis at gallica.bnf.fr: look for Bibliothèque municipale du Havre, Ms 274.

Chapter 17: BUT 18 PENCE IN MONEY I’m grateful to Dr John McQuillen of The Morgan Library & Museum and Melanie Leung of the Folger Shakespeare Library. The best English account of table-books is Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery and Heather Wolfe, ‘Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly (2004). ‘Writing tables with a kalender for xxiiii. yeeres, with sundry necessarie rules’ may be viewed online at luna.folger.edu. Diary entries are taken from pepysdiary.com. Also referred to were Ernst van der Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Amsterdam, 1997); Marieke de Winkel, Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings (Amsterdam, 2006); and Laura Cumming, ‘Rembrandt and Saskia: a love story for the ages’ (The Guardian, 30 December 2018)

Chapter 18: ALBETROSSES I’m grateful to Margaret Makepeace of the British Library and Dr Matthew Heaslip. The Rook’s journal and ledger are in the British Library’s collection, and have been digitised by the Qatar Digital Library and can be seen here online: qdl.qa/.

Chapter 19: I THINK… I am extremely grateful to Dr John van Wyhe, custodian of darwin-online.org.uk and, I discovered when we spoke, a stationery buff to boot. With Gordon Chancellor and Kees Rookmakker, van Wyhe edited Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the ‘Beagle’ (Cambridge, 2009), in which I got lost for several days. Conrad Gessner’s botanical notebooks are held by the University Library of Erlangen-Nürnberg as UER MS 2386-1 and MS 2386-2. They are both digitised and you can explore them via ub.fau.de/en/history/botanical-literature/. Many of Linnaeus’s manuscripts, including the Iter Lapponicum, have been digitised by the Linnaean Society and are online at linnaean-online.org. I also referred to S. Kusukawa, ‘Drawing as an Instrument of Knowledge: The Case of Conrad Gessner’, in Alina Payne (ed.), Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe (University Park, PA, 2015); Staffan Müller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier, ‘Natural History and Information Overload: The Case of Linnaeus’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2012); and Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (London, 1995).

Chapter 20: ONE WAY TO IMMORTALITY I’m hugely grateful to Anthony Letts, the last of the line to have worked on the diaries, for the interview, and the in-house history, that he gave me. Thanks also to Dr Polly North, Director of the Great Diary Project, Dr Ruth Frendo of the Stationers’ Company, and Dr Ewa Wiatr for answering my questions about the quadrilingual diary of Abram Icchak Łaski – and her remarkable detective work, seventy years after the teenager’s death. I also referred to Philippe Lejeune, On Diary (Hawaii, 2009); D. J. H. Clifford (ed.), The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (London, 2003); Andrew Hopper, ‘Social Mobility during the English Revolution: The Case of Adam Eyre’, Social History (2013); Joe Moran, ‘The Private Diary and Public History’, a talk given at the Museum of London, 29 October 2013, now hosted on YouTube; Leah Ingle, ‘Witness and Complicity: The Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando’ (masters thesis, Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA, 2019); Ewa Wiatr, ‘“Czy w ogóle ktoś je czytać będzie” – nowe spojrzenie na dziennik Abrama Łaskiego z getta łódzkiego’, Zapisywanie wojny (Warsaw, 2020).

Chapter 21: YOU’RE SPOT ON I’m grateful to Chris Williams of the Open University, whom I interviewed for the first half of this chapter. His book Police Control Systems in Britain, 1775–1975: From Parish Constable to National Computer (Manchester, 2015) also provided useful background. I also referred to Tim Kaye’s Unsafe and Unsatisfactory?: Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Working Practices of the West Midlands Police Serious Crimes Squad (London, 1990) and Part 11 of The Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (London, 2012). Bob Dartnell of Foster & Freeman spoke to me about the development of the ESDA machine – and, for the record, scrupulously avoided commenting on its use by the police, or in any criminal case whatsoever. Frank Serpico was kind enough to answer my emailed queries. The account of New York’s move away from notebooks draws on Corey Kilgannon’s article ‘Why the N.Y.P.D. dropped one of its oldest crime-fighting tools’ (New York Times, 5 February 2020).

Chapter 22: YES, BETTER IF DENTIST IS DEAD I am most grateful to Jonathan Buckley, who suggested several of the subjects of this chapter. I refer to The Notebooks of Henry James, edited by F. O. Mathiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (Chicago, 1981) and James’s own preface to The Turn of the Screw (New York, 1907). Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks have been edited by Brenda R. Silver (Princeton, NJ, 1983). Paul Valéry’s Tel Quel (Paris, 1944) makes much more digestible reading than the twenty-nine-volume complete edition of his Cahiers. Patricia Highsmith’s parallel series of notebooks have been revealingly selected and interleaved in Anna von Planta’s Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks (New York, 2021). Joan Didion’s essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ is anthologised in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York, 1968), although South and West: From a Notebook (New York, 2017) gives a better idea of her actual process. John Curran’s first book about Agatha Christie, from which all the quotations in this chapter come, is strongly recommended (but packed with spoilers): Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks (London, 2010). Readers who want to hear from even more writers are directed to Sheila Bender’s The Writer’s Journal: 40 Contemporary Authors and their Journals (New York, 1997) and Diana M. Raab’s Writers and their Notebooks (Columbia, SC, 2010).

Chapter 23: PRESERVING AND COOCKERY I’m most grateful to Andrea Nguyen for sharing her family’s story in a fascinating interview. The wonderful online resource manuscriptcookbookssurvey.org – my gratitude to Dr Szilvia SzmukTanenbaum, one of the team who run it – led me to Katherine Packer’s cookbook, which is held by the Folger Institute. You can see it online: search for ‘A boocke of very good medicines’ at luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet.

Chapter 24: EXPRESS YOURSELF Professor Jamie Pennebaker was extremely generous with his time and expertise: many thanks to him, and also to Professor Elizabeth Broadbent. Pennebaker has written or co-written a huge amount on this subject; the best summaries of his work, and related research, are ‘Expressive Writing in Psychological Science’, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2018): and, with Cindy K. Chung, ‘Expressive Writing, Emotional Upheavals, and Health’, in H. S. Friedman and R. C. Silver (eds), Foundations of Health Psychology (Oxford, 2007). I also referred to Elaine Duncan and David Sheffield, ‘Diary Keeping and Well-Being’, Psychological Reports (2008); and Heidi E. Koschwanez, Elizabeth Broadbent et al., ‘Expressive Writing and Wound Healing in Older Adults’, Psychosomatic Medicine (2013).

Chapter 25: BLUE, GREEN, RED, YELLOW My principal source was Shirish Dáte’s excellent Quiet Passion: A Biography of Senator Bob Graham (New York, 2004). I also referred to Nick Anderson’s profile in the Los Angeles Times (29 June 2003); to Maureen Dowd’s (8 January 1987), Todd S. Purdum’s (4 March 2003) and Carl Hulse’s (4 June 2003) profiles, all in the New York Times; to Rich Mayfield’s article ‘Bob Graham has time to write down all the details’ in Summit Daily (7 June 2003); and the Associated Press article ‘More errors in CIA interrogation briefing list’ (21 May 2009).

Chapter 26: NON-TRIVIAL I’m most grateful to Michael Purves for speaking to me, and in a wider sense deeply appreciate the valuable work that he and the rest of the Old Weather team do, including Joan Arthur, Randi Heikes, Michael Purves, the late Dr Kevin Woods, Bob Light and others. Thanks also to Dr Ricardo Garcia Herrera of the Complutense University of Madrid (who steers a similar project using a different corpus of logbooks). My sources on the carbon footprint of your average notebook are Tomberlin et al., ‘Life Cycle Carbon Footprint Analysis of Pulp and Paper Grades in the United States Using Production-line-based Data and Integration’, BioResources (2020); and Poore and Nemecek, ‘Reducing Food’s Environmental Impacts through Producers and Consumers’, Science (1 June 2018).

Chapter 27: ATTENTION DEFICIT Many thanks to Ryder Carroll for speaking to me about his life and ingenious bullet-journaling system. I also referred to his book The Bullet Journal Method (New York, 2018).

Chapter 28: IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME I am most grateful to Michael Rosen and Dr Christina Jones for the interviews they gave me: if you would like to know more about the crucial area of post-ICU care then you should head to ICUSteps.org. I also referred to F. E. Kelly et al., ‘Intensive Care Medicine is 60 Years Old: The History and Future of the Intensive Care Unit’, Clinical Medicine (2014); Hannah Wunsch, ‘The outbreak that invented intensive care’ (Nature, 3 April 2020); Bradley M. Wertheim, ‘How a polio outbreak in Copenhagen led to the invention of the ventilator’ (Smithsonian Magazine, 10 June 2020); A. Marra et al., ‘Intensive Care Unit Delirium and Intensive Care Unit-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder’, Surgical Clinics of North America (2017); C. Jones et al., ‘A Case of Capgras Delusion Following Critical Illness’, Intensive Care Medicine (1999); Emily Buder et al., ‘COVID19 is a delirium factory’ (theatlantic.com, 8 May 2020); Ingrid Egerod et al., ‘Intensive Care Patient Diaries in Scandinavia: A Comparative Study of Emergence and Evolution’, Nursing Inquiry (2011); Ingrid Egerod and Doris F. Christensen, ‘A Comparative Study of ICU Patient Diaries vs. Hospital Charts’, Qualitative Health Research (2010); Peter Nydahl et al., ‘How Much Time Do Nurses Need to Write an ICU Diary?’ Nursing in Critical Care (2013); B. B. Barre to et al., ‘The Impact of Intensive Care Unit Diaries on Patients’ and Relatives’ Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Metaanalysis’, Critical Care (2019); I. Bergbom et al., ‘Patients’ and Relatives’ Opinions and Feelings about Diaries Kept by Nurses in an Intensive Care Unit: Pilot Study’, Intensive Critical Care Nursing (1999); and Michael Rosen, Many Different Kinds of Love (London, 2021).

Chapter 29: NOTHING ON THIS EARTH BETRAYS OUR OWN KARAKTER SO Martin Kemp spoke to me about Leonardo’s notebooks and the Richters’ work on them: his own edition of Irma Richter’s selections from the notebooks is an invaluable source (see note above, in Chapter 8). Orietta da Rold unpacks the concept of affordance in her book Paper in Medieval England: from Pulp to Fictions (Cambridge, 2020). I am also grateful to Professor Anke te Heesen, Roy Peter Clark and Aaron Draplin. An incomplete list of other academics who have looked at the role of the notebook includes economists such as John Padgett, Jane Gleeson-White, Alan Stahl and Jacob Soll; historians Ann Blair, Richard Yeo, Markus Popplow, Pam Long, David McGee; professors of literature Angus Vine, Paul Dover and Daniel Wakelin; and social historians Elisabeth Bourcier, Pierre Lejeune and Joe Moran. I refer to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York, 1991). Paul Klee’s notebooks can be seen online at www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org: Frida Kahlo’s painted journals were published in their entirety in 2006. I refer to David Taylor Nelson’s article ‘Béla Bartók: The Father of Ethnomusicology’, Musical Offerings (2012). Vivien Goldman described Brian Eno’s notebooks in her 1977 Sounds article ‘Extra Natty Orations’, archived at www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_interviews. I refer to David Allen, Getting Things Done (New York, 2001). I’m hugely grateful to Oliver Burkeman, who spoke to me at length and entertainingly about his own notebook use: his columns may all be accessed at www.guardian.com. I refer to Julia Cameron’s The Miracle of Morning Pages: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about the Most Important Artist’s Way Tool (New York, 2013). And I’m grateful to Professor Ken Kiewra of the University of Nebraska, who spoke to me about his research career.

Chapter 30: A DIFFERENT PART OF THE BRAIN I’m most grateful to Professor Humphrey Ocean for welcoming me into his studio and showing me his sketchbooks. I also thank Dr Nicola Neumann. I referred to: Robert L. Solso, ‘Brain Activities in a Skilled versus a Novice Artist: An fMRI Study’, Leonardo (2001); R. C. Miall and John Tchalenko, ‘A Painter’s Eye Movements: A Study of Eye and Hand Movement during Portrait Drawing’, Leonardo (2001); R. Chamberlain et al., ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Voxel-based Morphometry Analysis of Observational Drawing’, Neuroimage (2014); Tudor Popescu et al., ‘The Brain–Structural Correlates of Mathematical Expertise’, Cortex (2019); B. Shi et al., ‘Different Brain Structures Associated with Artistic and Scientific Creativity: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study’, Scientific Reports (2017). K. Sato et al., ‘A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study of the Brain of University Students Majoring in Music and Nonmusic Disciplines’, Behavioural Neurology (2015); H. Takeuchi et al., ‘Regional Gray Matter Density Associated with Emotional Intelligence: Evidence from Voxel-Based Morphometry’, Human Brain Mapping (2011); P. A. Mueller et al., ‘The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking’, Psychological Science (2014); K. Umejima et al., ‘Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval’, Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience (2021).

Conclusion: OTTO CARRIES A NOTEBOOK Thanks to Max Egremont, and via him Gerfried Horst and Viktor Haupt, who looked into German archives for traces of the characters in my grandfather’s diaries. I’m also grateful to Professor Frances Karttunen for corresponding about her late husband Alfred W. Crosby’s work, which suggested my time-travelling thought experiment. Although I don’t refer to it directly, his book The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Europe, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 1996) made me look at this fascinating period in an entirely new way. I referred to Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis (1998); Andy Clark, ‘Memento’s Revenge: The Extended Mind, Extended’, in Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Larissa MacFarquhar, ‘The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark’ (The New Yorker, 2 April 2018); Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (New York, 2021).

APPENDIX

IMAGE CREDITS While every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of illustrations, the author and publisher would be grateful for information about any images where they have been unable to trace them, and would be glad to make amendments in further editions. p.12. Maria Segrebondi, 2007. Bill Hogan/Getty Images. p.15. Moleskine notebooks. Moleskine advertising. p.20. Chatwin’s Black moleskine notebook, Oct. 1973, Oxford Bodleian Libraries, MS. Eng. e. 3681. Photo: Crista Leonard. p.22. The Ulu Burun diptych. Photo: Roland Allen. p.25. ‘Sappho fresco’ from Pompeii. Naples National Archaeological Museum/Wikimedia Commons. p.33. Ledgers in 1330s Genoa. Treatise on the vices, British Library Add MS 2769. British Library/Wikimedia Commons. p.34. The Farolfi Ledger, ASFi, Carte strozziani, serie II, 84bis. Italian Ministry of Culture/Florence State Archives. p.38. Jost Amman, woodcuts of parchment- and paper-making, from a book of trades, 1568. Wikimedia Commons. p.47. Top Left: Madonna by an unknown artist. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/Wikimedia Commons. p.47. Top right: detail of Cimabue’s Santa Trinita Maestà. Uffizi Gallery/Wikimedia Commons. p.47. Below: detail of Cimabue’s Santa Trinita Maestà. Uffizi Gallery/Wikimedia Commons. p.49. Giotto, Lamentation. The Yorck Project/Wikimedia Commons. p.55. Pisanello and others, from the Codex Vallardi. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. p.60. Two notebooks of Francesco Datini. Archivio di Stato di Prato. p.65. Boccaccio’s zibaldone. DeAgostini/Getty Images. p.67. Bonaccorso Ghiberti’s zibaldone. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze: Banco Rari 228 Museo Galileo, Florence. p.75. The Book of Michael of Rhodes. Photo: David McGee. p.79. Maths in the Book of Michael of Rhodes. David McGee. p.85. Class discontent, and Capricorn, in the Book of Michael of Rhodes. David McGee. p.92. Ellesmere Manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. Pictorial Press/Alamy. p.95. Christine de Pizan, from Cent balades d’amant et de dame, folio 1r., Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Français 835. Gallica. p.99. LHD 244. Hanson-Dyer Collection, Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library Rare Collections, University of Melbourne Library.

p.108. Jacopo de’ Barbari, Portrait of Luca Pacioli, National Museum of Capodimonte, inv. Q 58. Jarekt/Wikimedia Commons. p.113. Leonardo Da Vinci, Codex Trivulzanus Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Universal Leonardo/Wikimedia Commons. p.115. Leonardo Da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Italstenda/Wikimedia Commons. p.119. Luca Pacioli, De Ludo Scachorum. Photo: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy. p.132. Page from the Commonplace-Book of John Milton, British Library Add MS 36354, p. 112. p.135. Commonplace Book of Elizabeth Lyttleton, University Library, Cambridge, MS Add. 8460 (44). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. p.137. Pages from the anonymous Norfolk common-placer, in a copy of Bell’s common place book, British Library BLL01018056123. p.143. Albo’s log, 1519. General Archive of Indies, Seville. Whpics/Dreamstime. p.147. Pigafetta’s Journal. Getty Images. p.152. Adriaen Coenen, Visboek, folios 205v, 257r and 028v-029r, 210, Koninklijke Bibliotheek KW 78 E 54. Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Wikimedia Commons. p.155. Adriaen Coenen, Visboek, folios 053v-054r, Koninklijke Bibliotheek KW 78 E 54. Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Wikimedia Commons. p.159. Valentin Winsheim’s Stammbuch. Stiftung Luthergedenkstätten in Sachsen-Anhalt/Uwe Schulze. p.161. Juliana de Roussel’s album amicorum (p.17), Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 79 J 50. Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Wikimedia Commons. p.163. Heyblocq’s album amicorum (p.237), Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 131 H 26 Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Wikimedia Commons. p.167. Schickhardt’s drawings from Reiseaufzeichnungen, Wuertembergische Landsbibliothek Cod. hist. qt. 148, a–d. p.170. Schickhardt’s drawing from Reiseaufzeichnungen, Wuertembergische Landsbibliothek Cod. hist. qt. 148, a–d. p.177. Albrecht Dürer sketchbook (1521), Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, KdZ 33 verso. Google Arts and Culture/Wikimedia Commons. p.179. Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea. Kazvorpal/Wikimedia Commons. p.182. One of Mark Twain’s tabbed notebooks (1884), Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. p.185. Travel journal of Patrick Leigh Fermor (1934). National Library of Scotland Acc.13338/471, p257. p.188. Bruce Chatwin, 1983. Gerrit Alan Fokkema/Fairfax Media/Getty Images. p.196. Isaac Newton’s Pocket Memorandum Book, The Morgan Library & Museum MA 318, fols. 10v–11r. p.202. Isaac Newton, On the Quadrature of Curves (c.1700-06), University Library Cambridge MS Add.3962 (1r). By kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. p.211. Charles le Brun, portrait of Nicolas Fouquet. Getty Images. p.216. Louis XIV’s notebook, Bilbiothèque Municipale du Havre MS 274. p.224. ‘Writing tables with a kalender for xxiiii. yeeres, with sundry necessarie rules’, Folger Shakespeare Library STC 26050.6. p.227. Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Saskia, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. Wikimedia Commons. p.232. Rooke’s journal. British Library, IOR/L/MAR/A/CXXXIII, fol.13r. and 14v. British Library/Qatar Digital Library. p.234. Rooke’s journal. British Library, IOR/L/MAR/A/CXXXIII, fol.13r. and 14v. British Library/Qatar Digital Library.

p.242. Conrad Gessner’s Historia plantarum, Collections of the University Library ErlangenNürnberg, MS 2386-1, 17v. p.245. Linnaeus’ Iter lapponicum (1732) Linnaean Society LM/LP/TRV1/2/1, p.53. p.248. Augustus Earle (presumed), Quarter Deck of a Man of War on Diskivery (1832). Sotheby’s/Wikimedia Commons. p.254. Darwin’s ‘B’ Notebook. Mario Tama/Getty Images. p.258. 1812 Letts Diary. Letts Archive. p.260. The Merer Papyrus. Courtesy of Wadi el-Jarf archaeological mission. p.264. Jan van Belcamp, The Great Picture, Lakeland Arts Trust, Kendal. Google Arts and Culture/Lakeland Arts Trust. p.270. Emma Darwin’s diary for 1824. Cambridge University Library, CUL-DAR242. By kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. p.273. Victor Klemperer’s wartime exercise books. 1933–1945. BTEU/Gerfototek/Alamy. p.279. St Albans City Police, Herts Advertiser 13 January 1965. p.286. Paul Valery, Bloodaxe Press. p.288. Patricia Highsmith’s diaries and journals. Diogenes Verlag/Simon Schmid. p.292. Agatha Christie. INTERFOTO/Alamy. p.296. Clara Nguyen’s recipe book. Courtesy Andrea Nguyen, Vietworldkitchen.com. p.299. ‘A boocke of very good medicines for seueral deseases, wounds, and sores both new and olde’, Folger Shakespeare Library V.a.387, p.176. p.305. Austin Kleon’s visual notebook. Photo: Austin Kleon. p.311. Jefferson’s Ivory Notebooks. Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. p.315. Bob Graham’s official Governor’s portrait by Marshall Bouldin III, Collection of the Museum of Florida History. p.322. Detail from the log of the US Steamer Omaha. Photo courtesy of Michael Purves. p.328. Bullet journal instructions. Photo: Roland Allen. p.334. Bullet journal. Photo: Matt Ragland/Unsplash p.341. An ICU patient’s diary. Photo: shop3002.carlsplace.org. p.343. Michael Rosen’s patient diary. Photo courtesy of Michael Rosen (letter by Louise Hayes). p.351. Marie Curie’s lab notes. Lindsey Simcox/Aurora Health Physics Services. p.355. Bela Bartók with notebooks and phonograph. Budapest Bartók Archive, Hungary. p.358. Bob Dylan recording Highway 61 Revisited. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images p.365. Humphrey Ocean in his studio. Photo: Roland Allen. p.374. Black and silver retractable pen on blank book. Mike Tinnion/Unsplash.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS One of the unexpected joys of writing this book has been finding it gave me an excuse to approach, and ask questions of, a fascinating collection of people: the specialists, practitioners and academics whose expertise I have drawn upon throughout, and without whose participation this book would be thin indeed. I thank them individually in the preceding endnotes, and reiterate here how hugely grateful I am to all for sharing their inspiring erudition and enthusiasm. My friends Simon Gwynn, Daniel Bouquet and Jonty Claypole told me to press on with my inquiries in their early stages, and probably have no idea how much that encouragement meant. Another, Zara Larcombe, first shared her knowledge of Italian art and then, along with Sophy Thompson and Christian Frederking, employed me on remarkably understanding terms while I finished the manuscript. Thank you all. I am also grateful to the staff of the British Library, the library of the University of Sussex, and Brighton and Hove’s public libraries; and the custodians of the Internet Archive, truly invaluable for discovering and enjoying obscure out-of-print titles. A generous financial grant from the Moster Randi Legat proved lifesaving at a time of horrible need: tusind tak to Mette Kryger and MarieLouise Ejlers. Karolina Sutton, my first agent, gave the initial proposal much-needed focus and confidence: my thanks to her, to her sage successor Gordon Wise, and the rest of the Curtis Brown team. I’m equally grateful to Helen Conford, who brought the raw concept to Profile, and even more so to Mark Ellingham, who subsequently took it on and whose soft-spoken expertise transformed it top to bottom. As editor, Jonathan Buckley first tamed my ‘highly idiosyncratic’ punctuation (reader, be grateful) then interrogated every idea, tightened every sentence, and brought an erudite perspective to places where it was sorely needed. Neither he nor Mark appear to have any

concept of weekends; I took advantage – sorry. I’m also grateful to editor Jon Petre for picture rights and proofreader Susanne Hillen, indexer Bill Johncocks, text layout artist and image wizard Henry Iles, designer Louis Gabaldoni, and the rest of the Profile team, including Andrew Franklin, Alex Elam and Mehar Anaokar. Such errors of fact or interpretation as remain in the text are, of course, mine alone. But I incurred the greatest debts at home. Without the unstinting love and generosity of Jules Hau, I would be nowhere: thank you, from the bottom of my heart. The same applies to my family – Sid and LB, Andrew and Ellie, Dulce and Anjam. How lucky I am.

INDEX Note: The index covers the main text but not the Notes and references. Italic page references indicate relevant material in an illustration. Uninformative words at the beginning of most book titles have been ignored for alphabetisation.

A A–to–D emotion theory 307 abaco schools 63, 78, 103–4, 110 Abbasid Caliphate 26–7, 176, 298 abbreviations, Darwin’s 247, 248, 250–1 the ‘abundant style’ see De Copia accents, regional 198 Acciaiuoli family, bankers 35 accountancy government accounting 121 legacies of Florentine 41–2 paper metaphors in 29–30 spread of 103, 120–1 use as a metaphor 91 accounting entities/periods 33 actions, epistemic and pragmatic 375, 378 ‘active externalism’ 376 Addison, Paul 352 ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) 327, 331 Advice to a Young Poet, by Jonathan Swift 132 affordances 349, 353, 378, 380 Agile web design 331–2 AI (artificial intelligence) 353, 378 alba amicorum 156, 160–4, 161, 266, 315, 350 distinction from modern autograph books 164 see also autograph books albatrosses 233–4, 234, 237, 239 Alberti, Leon Battista 104–5, 109, 114 Albo, Francisco 141–8, 231–2 algebra 79, 197, 202 algebraic opposition concept 33 almanacs 225, 272 described as diaries 257 in Letts diaries 259 within table-books 221–2, 276n Alzheimer’s disease 317, 376

American recipes 297–8, 300 America’s founding fathers 310 Amman, Jost 38 Amontons, Guillaume 125 anatomy, Leonardo’s interest in 112, 125 Andrews, Thomas 232, 233, 238 animal design flaws 250 Anna von Köln, Liederbuch 101 anthologies 64, 70, 92, 94, 133, 178 see also zibaldoni aphrodisiacs 298 armies, use of notebooks 172 art see drawing; painting artists’ brains, characteristics 369–70 Astor, Margaret, on diaries 272 attention spans 327, 335 see also ADHD Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) 138 Auschwitz 275 Austen, Jane 294, 351 autograph books (Stammbücher) 158–9, 163–4, 266

B Babbitt, Isaac 125 Bäckman, Carl 341–2 Bacon, Francis 129, 131, 178, 191, 243 aphorism on reading and writing 255 twenty-eight book system 173, 239n, 255 Baker, Nicholson 138 Baldovini, Bacchera 30–1 Baldwin, John, of Windsor 101 Balestracci, Duccio 62 Ballard, Martha 352 bankers Fugger family 177 nations reliant on 35, 41 the super companies 35, 36–7, 41 Bardi bankers 35, 64, 69, 89, 106 see also Boccaccio Barnes & Noble 15, 16, 138 Bartók, Béla 355 basso continuo 100, 101 Bauhin, Caspar 243 Beard, Peter 327 The Beatles 357 beats, checking constables’ progress 278 Bec, Christian 70–1 Beethoven, Ludwig van 163, 351 Bell, John 134–6, 138, 139

Benedetto del Massarizia 62 Berezovskaya, Zinaida 275 Beskendorf, Peter 157–8 ‘better if dentist is dead’ 293 Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor 185 biological classification 243–4 birds On the flight of 119, 124 intoxicating 196 mentioned in the Rook’s log 233–5 the Black Death 42, 58, 89 Blair, Ann 130 Block, Ned 378 Blood on the Tracks, by Bob Dylan 357 Bloom, Jonathan 26 boat lifts 168 Boccaccio influence on Chaucer 88–9, 97 influence on Shakespeare 131 writing in the vernacular 66 zibaldoni of 64, 65, 69, 284 Bologna 100, 102, 120, 169 Bondioli, Mauro 84 Boniface VIII, Pope 30, 48, 99 book-copying 70 book-keeping as an unfair advantage 37 spread of 103, 120–1 book-keeping, double-entry first example 35 Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s skills 212–13 in Pacioli’s Summa 106–7, 120 Book of Domesticity, by Clara Nguyen 297, 300, 301 book ownership in Florence 89–90 bookbinding folio and quarto volumes 31n history of LHD 244 97–8 invention of the codex 25–6 books capacity and navigability of the codex 26 importance in accountancy 29–30, 31 interleaved blank pages 244 booksellers 68 Cartolai and Librai 41, 89, 93, 110 offering largely blank notebooks 136, 138–9 offering table-books 222–3, 224–5 offering travel writing 178 Bosch, Hieronymus 177 Bouldin, Marshall, III 315 Bourcier, Elisabeth 262–3

the brain grey and white matter 369–70 regions involved in portraiture 366–7 brand messaging 13 Brechtgirdle, John 130–1 brewing 136–7 Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding 271 Broadbent, Elizabeth 307–8 Browne, Mary and Elizabeth (daughters of Sir Thomas) 134, 135 Brownsword, John 130–1 Brunelleschi, Filippo 67 bullet journals (BuJo) 266, 334–6 bullet points and symbols 327, 328–9 Burkeman, Oliver 360–1 business journal, oldest 259–60 bycatch, herring fishery 151 Byzantine art 44–5, 47, 367

C Cai Lun 26 calculus / fluxions 202, 204 the Caliphate (Abbasid) 26–7, 176, 298 Cameron, Julia 361–2 canals, machine for deepening 167, 168 Cantacuzène, Balasa 184 Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer 88, 91, 92, 97, 262 The Wife of Bath’s Tale 91, 92, 96 Capgras delusion 339 capitalism’s debt to accounting 41–2 carbon paper inserts 182 career summaries 75–6, 80 Carroll, Ryder 326–36, 328 Cartagena, Juan de 146 cartolai 41, 89, 93, 110 Casale Monferrato 168, 169, 172 Casaubon, Isaac 262 Cats, Jacob 162, 163 Cennini, Cennino 50 Chalmers, David 375–8 Chamberlain, Rebecca 369–70 character references, effectiveness 158 character’s names, ideas for 182, 284 Charles I, King of England 123 Charles I, King of Spain 141, 146 Charles V, Emperor 141, 146, 147 Charmantier, Isabelle 244 Chatwin, Bruce 188 final illness and death 190 friendship with Patrick Leigh Fermor 186–7, 190

moleskines used by 10–11, 13, 20, 187, 190–1 The Songlines, by 10–11, 15, 189–90 Chatwin, Elizabeth 187, 190 Chaucer, Geoffrey Canterbury Tales 88, 91, 92, 97, 262 diplomatic career 88–9, 91 influence of Boccaccio 88–9, 97 chess problems 118, 119 Chiavelli family 40, 380 China, first impressions of Amoy 236 Christie, Agatha 291–3, 292 Christine de Pizan 94, 95 Christoffels, Jan Ympyn 121 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency, US) 318 Cimabue (Bencivieni di Pepo) 46–8, 47, 51 cinema 358 circumnavigation of the world 141–4 citizen science (OWP) 320–1, 323–5, 352 Clark, Andy 374–8 Clement IV, Pope 48 Clement VIII, Pope 169 Clifford, Lady Anne 263–5, 264 climate change 319–23, 325 coach design, with suspension 170 coats of arms 82, 85, 160 Cobbett, William 268 the codex, invention and advantages 25–7 Codex Atlanticus, by Leonardo 115 Codex Sinaiticus 26 Codex Trivulzanus, by Leonardo 113 Codex Urbinas, by Francisco Melzi 122 Codex Vallardi 53, 55 Coenen, Adriaen 150–6 cognitive processes 375–6, 378 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 207–17 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 9, 252 colour-coding of notebooks 314 Columbus, Christopher 140–1 Colyns, John 94–5 comas, medically-induced 337, 338 Common-Place Book …, by John Bell 135 common-place books anonymous, from Norfolk 136–8 blank 136, 138–9 guides to keeping 129–30, 135 near-contemporary writers 138–9 other documents described as 72, 75 use in Shakespeare’s time 131, 132 compulsive record-keeping 313–14, 317 Confessio Amantis, by John Gower 93

‘Contemporary nomad’ market segment 10, 12, 13 Cooke, Edward 179 cookery books (recipe books) 139, 295–8, 296 Cool, Joannes 162, 163 Coppola, Francis Ford 358–60 copying, effects of 67, 68 ‘cornucopias’ 52 corporate gifts, notebooks as 272, 313 correspondence, on paper 41, 276 corruption under Louis XIV 210–13 police corruption 280–2 Coryat, Thomas 176, 178 Cosmographia, by Sebastian Münster 153 Covid-19 337, 339, 344–5 creative benefits of keeping a diary 18–19 cuneiform 23 Curie, Marie 351 curiosities, chambers of 154–5 Curran, John 293 currency ecus, livres and pistoles 209n foreign, circulated in Britain 220 Newton’s reforms 205 stability of the Florin 36 the Venetian ducat and lira 78n, 109n currency conversion 66, 106, 229 currency exchanges 32 curricula vitae 76, 80

D Da Rold, Orietta 41, 174, 349–50 Dante Alighieri Divine Comedy 54, 68, 70n, 89, 93, 104, 114 influence on Chaucer 89 writing in the vernacular 66 Darnton, Robert 139 d’Artagnan, Charles 208, 217n Darwin, Charles field notes and diary entries 251, 255–6 and HMS Beagle 246–9 range of different notebooks 254–5 secrecy myth 255 Darwin, Emma (née Wedgwood) 270 Dáte, Shirish 313, 316 date discrepancies, on circumnavigation 145 datebooks, Letts diaries as 258–9, 271–2 Dati, Gregorio 59–62, 60, 261 de Beatis, Antonio 176–7

De Copia (De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia), by Erasmus 128–30, 133–4 De Divina Proportione, by Pacioli 117, 120 De Lionne, Hugues 210 De Ludo Schaccorum, by Pacioli 118, 119 de Menneville, Mademoiselle 209–10 De Pictura, by Leon Battista Alberti 105, 114 De Viribus Quantitatis, by Pacioli 118 debating 131n Decameron, by Boccaccio 69, 88–9, 131 Defoe, Daniel 179–80, 286 Delacroix, Eugène 348 Delightes for Ladies, by Sir Hugh Platt 299 delusions, arising from Intensive Care 339 democratisation of knowledge 69, 156 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Picasso 353 Denmark 121, 324, 340, 346 depreciation concept 34 Descartes, René and Newton 200, 204 The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman 349 ‘the devil in music’ 101 Devotio Moderna movement 70, 128 diaries advice to travellers 173 also as ‘journals’ 262n Darwin’s field notes and 251 encoded 199 first dated diary 257 libri di famiglia distinguished 58n national collections in Europe 352 notebooks as 18, 58n, 60 patient diaries 340–6, 341, 343, 373 as a priority for rescue 373 special interest 271 teenage 373 diary-keeping beneficial effects 333 growth 259, 266–7, 268n motivation for 302, 308–9 and Nazi persecution 273–5 television and 276 Diary of a Madman, by Nikolai Gogol 271 Dibner Institute of the History of Science 72–4, 76–8, 82, 84, 87 Didion, Joan 289–90, 373 digital tools analogue alternatives 17–18, 370–1, 379–80 and the extended mind 377 diptychs 21–4 The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri 54, 68, 70n, 89, 93, 104, 114 drawing advantages to painters 49–51

brain structures involved 366–7, 369 eye movements during 368 hatching, to suggest depth 50, 55 drawings in Adriaen Coenen’s Visboek 151 by Conrad Gessner 241–3, 242 by Leonardo 111–12 by Michael of Rhodes 81 Ocean’s dot books 364–5 technical drawings 165, 171 Drexel, Jeremias 130, 133 Dürer, Albrecht 108, 177 Dury, Ian 367 Dylan, Bob 357–8, 362, 364

E Earle, Augustus 248 East India Company 230 Ebert, Vivi 338 economic collapse, late Bronze Age 23–4 educational psychologists on note-taking 350 ‘egodocuments’ 351, 353 Elcano, Juan Sebastián 148 electronic devices see digital tools embezzlement, safeguards against 38 emissions from notebook manufacture 325n emotional disclosure writing 307 emotions, willingness to express 261, 306 England, reliance on bankers 35, 41, 88–9 ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ 318 Eno, Brian 356 environmental supports for human reason 375 enzymes, proteolytic 150 ephemerides 260, 262 epistemic actions 375, 378 Erasmus of Rotterdam 127–31, 141n distrust of mathematicians 127 influence on education and common-placing 133–4, 181, 192, 243 misogyny 134 neglect of the sciences 139 ESDA (ElectroStatic Detection Apparatus) machine 280–1 Euclid Newton and 200 Pacioli on 106, 108, 120 Evelyn, John 123, 265–6, 268 evidence, acceptability as 38, 280 ‘expressive writing’ 306–9 The Extended Mind, by Clark and Chalmers 375, 377–8 externalising thoughts 114, 255, 331, 376, 380

eye trackers 367–8 eyewitness testimony, in police notebooks 279 Eyre, Adam 264–5

F Fabriano 40–1, 51, 104 facial recognition, brain area for 366 Falchetta, Piero 82 falsified confessions 280–1 family history 58 farmers’ use of notebooks 313 Farolfi, Giovanni 30–5, 39 the Farolfi ledger 32, 34, 39, 42 Felton, Henry 133 feminist historians 352 Fibonacci (Leonardo Bonacci) 106, 117, 120 Fielding, Basil 215, 219–20, 229 Fielding, Christopher 220, 229 figures of speech 128 the Filofax 276 fish nomenclature 152, 153 fish processing 149–50 FitzRoy, Robert 246–7, 251, 253, 256 Fitzwilliam (College) notebook 199, 204 Fletcher, Harold 350 Florence home account books 57 Papal Court at 68 reception of new paintings 44, 46, 48 sanitation 43 status 36, 37n, 43, 66, 71 writing fever in 61 Florentines, ubiquity of 30 fluxions (calculus) 202, 204 flying machines 114 Folger Shakespeare Library table-book 221–4, 224 Foligno di Conte de’ Medici 58, 68n folio format folding into ‘holster books’ 174, 176 and quarto 31n folk melodies, recordings 355–6 forgeries see tampering Forster, Mark 360 fortifications 168–9, 172 fossils 124–5, 154, 249 Foster, Doug 281 Foster, John 224–5 Fouquet, Nicolas 206–13, 211, 217 4.50 from Paddington, by Agatha Christie 293

France corruption, under Louis XIV 210–13 naval statistics 215, 216 reformed national accounts 213 Franceschi, Francesco 9–11, 13–15, 380 Francesco di Giorgio 114 Franci, Raffaela 78–9 Franciscan order 100, 102, 104, 105 Frank, Anne 267, 275 Franklin, Benjamin 72, 310–11 Frankopan, Peter 171 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor 27 Freeman, Bob 281 Freyenhagen, Dietrich 157 friction, Leonardo on 115, 125 Frobisher, Martin 154 Fuller, Thomas 162 futures markets 32

G Gabriel (Quốc Hoàng) 295–6 gambling debts 210 Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch 177 Genoa 27n, 33, 36, 42, 61, 106, 169 Chaucer in 88–90 Marco Polo’s imprisonment 70n, 178 as Venice’s rival 75, 77, 83 ‘Gentleman’s Diary’ 257n geology, Darwin’s responsibilities 246, 253 geometry origins 202 the Platonic solids 117 Gessner, Conrad 240–3, 242 Ghiberti, Lorenzo and Bonaccorso 66, 67, 111 Gibson, James J 349 Gildon, Charles 180 Giotto (di Bondone) 48–53, 49, 54, 56, 371 Gleeson-White, Jane 35, 121 The Godfather, by Mario Puzo 359 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 163 Gogol, Nikolai 271 Goldman, Vivien 356 Gombrich, Ernst 49, 54 The Good Huswife’s Jewell, by Thomas Dawson 299 government accounting 121 Gower, John 93 Gozzoli, Benozzo 52 Gradowski, Zalmen 275 Graham, D Robert ‘Bob’ 311–18, 315

Grant, Duncan 272 graphic designers 18, 328–9 ‘gratitude journaling’ 309n Great Pyramid project 259–60 Green, David Allen 17, 360 Green Diary, of Patrick Leigh Fermor 184–5 Greenwood, Isaac 325 grey and white matter 369–70 Grossmith, George and Weedon 271 Guicciardini, Niccolo 203 Guido d’Arezzo 101n2 the Guidonian hand 98, 99 Guinness, Alec 138 gunnery 166n gurnard 151 gymel 100

H Hakluyt, Richard 178 Hall & Co ‘Velvet Paper’ 252 hallucinations 271, 339 handwriting of Agatha Christie 291 of Bob Dylan 357, 358 of Charles Darwin 249 of Clara Nguyen 297 demise of the handwritten letter 276 effectiveness 18 of Leonardo 111, 114, 122, 348 of Newton 201 in the Rook’s log 231-2, 237 and typing speeds 370n of Virginia Woolf 286 Hanson-Dyer, Louise 97 see also LHD 244 notebook Harald (author’s grandfather) 18, 372 harbours, portolans for 81–3, 85–6 harmony, gymel 100 hatching, use to suggest depth 50, 55 Hawthorne, Nathaniel and Sophia 271 health benefits of expressive writing 307 Hemingway, Ernest 7, 183–4, 360 Hendrix, Jimi 356 Henry Frederick, first son of King James I 299 Henslow, John 253 herring fishery 149–51 Heyblocq, Jacobus 162–3 Hickok, William Orville 268 Highsmith, Patricia 287–9, 291, 294, 373

Hillsborough stadium disaster 282 Historia animalium, by Conrad Gessner 240–1 Historia naturalis, by Pliny The Elder 68 Historia plantarum, by Conrad Gessner 241, 242 Hockney, David 51 ‘holster books’ 174, 176 homosexuality 109 Hopper, Edward 354 ‘hormone poisoning’ 309 Hotchner, A(aron) E(dward) 183 The House of Fame, by Geoffrey Chaucer 89–90 humanism, in Renaissance Florence 71 humanist education 66, 129, 138–9 Hunnicombe, John 238 Hunt, Simon 131 Huygens, Christiaan 125

I iambic pentameter 89 Ibn Fadlan, Ahmad 176 Ibsen, Bjørn 338, 346 icons 329–30 see also bullet points Il Canzoniere, by Petrarch 69 Il milione, by Marco Polo (aka Travels) 70n, 178 illiteracy, and keeping a ricordanze 62 illustration see drawings The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis 70 Immelman, Aubrey 317 impetus 125 improvisation, musical 101 index card use 244 indexing 129, 214, 244, 329, 535 industrial development in Württemberg 171 industrial espionage, limits 166 Inga (Otto’s healthy counterpart) 376–8 ink, Renaissance recipe 223 inspector, police rank and role 278–9 Instagram 54, 335, 362 Intensive Care 337–9 International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Dataset 323 Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, by Andrea Nguyen 301 Inuit peoples 154 inventions, late medieval 165 Iraq, invasion 316 Isabella d’Este 118–19, 124, 176 Islamic civilisations’ use of paper 26–7 island endemism 249 ‘the Italian method’ 121, 126

Italian translation 9, 16 Itineraria, by William Worcester 174

J Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf 272 Jacopo de’ Barbari 108 James, Henry 284–5, 289–90 Jankyn (fictional character) 91–2, 96, 262 Jarry, Nicolas 214 Jaume, King of Aragon 28, 48 jazz musicians 356n Jefferson, Thomas 239, 310–11 John of Gaunt 90 Jones, Christina 339–40, 342, 345 Jonson, Ben 131, 262, 265–6, 273, 373 journals see diaries Joyce, James 294, 351 Julian de Jiaukama 161 Juliana de Roussel 161

K Kaborycha, Lisa 65–6 Kahlo, Frida 354, 362 Keaton, Diane 276n On Keeping a Notebook (essay), by Joan Didion 289–90 Kemp, Martin 111, 114–17, 122, 124, 126 Keynes, John Maynard 272 Kiewra, Ken 350, 362 King, Ross 67–8 King of the Herring 151 Klee, Paul 353–4 Klemperer, Victor 273–4 Kleon, Austin 304 Kodály, Zoltán 355 Kondo, Marie 334

L la Foy, Madame 209–10 la Valliere, Louise de 207, 215 laboratory notebooks 351 landscapes, Darwin’s reaction 250 Landucci, Luca 261 Langland, William 93 Łaski, Abram 274 late Bronze Age collapse 23–4 latitude estimates 141–4, 232 le Brun, Charles 209n, 211 lecture notes 350, 370

ledgers in accountancy 29, 350 use as sketchbooks 49–50 voyage of the Rook 237–8 Lee, Geoffrey A 32–4 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 204 Leiden Fair 154, 156 Leiden University 155, 160 Leigh Fermor, Patrick 184–7 Lejeune, Philippe 261 Lennon-McCartney collaboration 357 Leonardismo school 122 Leonardo da Vinci 43n, 177 contribution to Pisanello’s sketchbook 53 dispersal of his notebooks 122–5 influences on 53, 97, 109–12, 114 notebooks and Jean-Paul Richter 347 recommending sketchbooks 51 Schickhardt compared 170–1 scientific contributions 113, 125–6 use of notebooks 110–11, 116–17 Leoni, Pompeo 122–3 Les Fâcheux, by Molière 207–8 letters, interception 211 Letts, Harry and Norman 271 Letts, John 257–9, 267–8, 276 Letts, Thomas 269, 276 the Letts diary 258, 372 Leuchtturm 17, 19, 334 Levental, Zalmen 275 Levitin, Daniel 17 Lewis and Clark expedition 239 LHD 244 notebook 97–102, 99 Liber Abaci, by Fibonacci 106 librai 41, 93 libri di famiglia (family books) 58–9, 61, 90 libri di ricordi (memoirs) 58, 61, 71 libri di segreti (private ledgers) 57, 58n, 110 Il libro dell’Arte, by Cennino Cennini 50 Liederbuch der Anna von Köln 101 light, wave theory 125 Linnaeus, Carl 243–5 Lipsius, Justus 130 Lipszyc, Rywka 275 literacy in the Caliphate 27 in Florence 61, 71n, 83 in London 95, 134 The Literary Works of Leonardo, by Jean-Paul Richter 348 literature

democratised by notebooks xxxxxx 69, 93 with formal constraints 9, 16, 17 vernacular 66, 91, 106 The Little Red Notebook 357, 358 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, by Giorgio Vasari 45–6, 52 Livingstone, David 269 Locke, John 132, 135–6 log books see ships’ logbooks Long, Pam 72–4 Loredan, Pietro 75–6, 80, 82–3 Louis II de Bourbon 217 Louis XIV, King of France 206–8, 210–17 Lounsberry, Barbara 272 Luigi d’Aragona, Cardinal 176 Luther, Martin 157–8, 160 Lyttelton, Elizabeth (née Browne) 134, 135

M Machyn, Henry 261 Madden, Frederic 268–9 Maddow, Rachel 318 Magellan, Ferdinand 141, 146–8 expedition setbacks and losses 145–6 navigator, Albo 141–8, 231–2 Magellanic Clouds 232 Magenta, Giovanni 122 magnetic compass, arrival 141 magnetic variation 323–4 Magnus, Olaus 151 Mandelbrote, Scott 202, 204 The Manifold Writer (Francis’ Highly Improved) 182 Mantua 117–18, 169–70, 176 Manucci, Amatino ‘Matino’ 30–5, 37, 41–2, 106 Manuscript Cookbooks Survey 299 Manuscripta Medica, by Carl Linnaeus 243 manuscripts, photography 74 Manzoni, Domenico 120 Marco Polo 70n, 178 marital conflict 263–5 marital harmony 271 ‘Marsden Squares’ 323 Marshall’s Fashionable Repository … 270 Mass Observation unit 352 mathematics Erasmus on mathematicians 127 Michalli da Ruoda on 78–80 Newton’s contribution 197, 201–2 Pacioli’s Summa 106–7, 109–10, 114, 120–1 Maupassant, Guy de 271

Mazarin, Cardinal 207, 213 McCartney, Paul 357 McGee, David 73–4, 78 medically-induced comas 337, 338 Medici family book-keeping 35n Cosimo de’Medici 68 Foligno di Conte de’Medici 58–9 as patrons 68, 110 Melanchthon, Philip 129, 158–60 Melville, Herman 180–1, 189, 191 Melzi, Francisco 122, 124, 126 Melzi, Orazio 122 Mendoza, Luis 146 menus 217–18 the Merer papyrus 259–60 Metamorphoses, by Ovid 114, 131 the Meteorological Office, origins 256 Metropolitan Police 278, 280–1 Meyer, Elizabeth 24 Michalli da Ruoda / Michael of Rhodes 73–87, 104, 140 The Book of Michael of Rhodes 73, 83–7 career advancement 76, 80, 82, 83 mistakes by 82, 84 Milan 13–14, 91, 168–9 Leonardo and 109, 116–18, 120–3, 126 Milton, John 132 mindfulness 333, 361 MIT see Dibner Institute Moby Dick, by Herman Melville 181, 189 Modo & Modo 9–10, 14–15 molasses 300 Moleskine Foundation 16 Moleskine SpA 15 Moleskines amassed by Didion 290n appearance 13 author’s diary 19 Chinese manufacture 14 mockery of owners 17 original 10–11 rival products 16–17 as sketchbooks 12, 55 spread of 360 used by Chatwin 20, 187, 190–1 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 207–8 Mom’s Book of Domesticity, by Clara Nguyen 297, 300, 301 Mona Lisa 116, 119, 125 monasteries 68, 105–6, 260 monetary units, standardisation 33

see also currency money-lending interest rates 31 Strozzi family 58 monsters 153–5 Montaigne, Michel de 131 Moran, Joe 272 the Morgan (Library and Museum) notebooks 195, 198, 205, 358 Morning Pages 361 Mowery, Frank 222–3, 225 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 163, 351 MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans 339, 366–70 Müller-Wille, Staffan 244 multiplication tables 106, 221 Münster, Sebastian 153 muses 24, 25 musical notation 101n2 musicians unable to read music 356n musicology ethnomusicology 355 importance of LHD 244 98 sketchbooks and manuscripts 351 The Mysteries of Nature and Art, by John Bate 195

N naturalists’ use of notebooks 240 navies France 215, 216 Venice 75–6, 78, 80, 86 navigation, marine portolans 81–3, 85–6 sixteenth century improvements 141 Nazi persecution, diaries under 273–5 negative emotions 107, 333 the Netherlands accounting in 121 first university 160 herring catches and exports 149–50 Neville, Richard 268 New York Police Department 283 Newton, Hannah Ayscough 194 Newton, Isaac 194–205, 298 myth making 203–4 notebook pages 196, 202 problems with relationships 200 Nguyen, Andrea 295, 297, 300–1 Nguyen, Clara (Nguyễn Thi Tuyết) 295–6, 298, 300 Nimes 30, 32–3, 35 NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, US) 320–2

The Nomadic Alternative, by Bruce Chatwin 186–7 notaries, habits of 69 note-taking in lectures 350 notebook brands 356, 362, 380 see also Leuchtturm; Moleskines Notebook ‘B,’ by Darwin 253, 254 Notebook ‘E,’ by Darwin 255 notebooks arrival in London 96 climate impact of manufacture 325n Colbert’s golden notebooks 214, 216 democratisation of knowledge 69, 156 as diaries 18, 58n, 60 digital alternatives 370–1, 379–80 golden age 220–1 as ledgers 31, 33, 37, 42, 107 literary dissemination through 69, 93 modes of use by writers 293–4 origins 19–20 as part of the mind 377–8 recent concerns to preserve 348 secret 59–60 shapes and sizes 42 ‘Type 5’ notebooks 252 wax tablets as precursors 21–4 see also autograph books; police notebooks; ship’s logbooks; table-books; writers’ notebooks ‘Nothing On This Earth Betrays Our Own Karakter So’ 356 nurses, patient diaries and 346 ‘nutcracker’ portraits 112, 113

O Occurrence Book, police 279 Ocean, Humphrey 364–70, 365 eye-tracker studies 367–8 MRI studies 366–7 Old Weather Project (OWP) 320–1, 323–5, 352 Omaha, steamer 322 On Keeping a Notebook (essay) by Joan Didion 289–90 On the Black Hill, by Bruce Chatwin 187 On the Flight of Birds, by Leonardo 119, 124 One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, by Agatha Christie 293 Oplepo (Opificio di Letteratura Potenziale) 16 Orange, Princes of 121, 154 organ pipes and keyboard 99 On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin 256 orpiment 21–2 Otto (Alzheimer’s disease sufferer) 376–8 Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) 9, 16 (Leaves from the Journal of) Our Life in the Highlands, by Queen Victoria 269

Ovid 114, 131 Oxford, Melville on 180

P Pacioli, Luca 108, 119 background and early life 104–11 Erasmus compared 127–8 friendship with Leonardo 116–21 reputation compared with Leonardo 124, 126 Summa de arithmetica … by 106–10, 114, 120–1 system used by Colbert 212–13 writing in the vernacular 106 Packer, Katherine 299 Paganini, Paganino de 105, 108 page-numbering 37 pages, interleaved 244 Paintapic 332 painters, use of table-books 226–8 painting Alberti on 105, 114 Byzantine tradition 44 Dutch oil painting 97 Renaissance innovations 45–9, 47, 55–6 treatise on, after Leonardo 122 paintings Leonardo’s output 115–16 reception of new artworks 44, 46, 48 Palazzo Tursi, Genoa 169 paper advantages of 37, 50–1, 93 availability and cost 52–3, 134 folding endurance 134 invention and spread of 26–7, 349 resistance to 27, 93 ruled and music paper 268 paper-making 38, 39–40, 171, 268 paper source / quality Darwin’s notebooks 252 Fabriano and 40 moleskines 13, 17n today 380 Xátiva and 27–8, 40 papyrus 23, 25–6, 259 parchment 25–7 and paper-making 38 survival in Europe 27 as unsuitable for drawing 50 patient diaries 340–6, 341, 343, 373 Pelosi, Nancy 318

pencils, invention of 222 Pennebaker, Jamie 302–6, 308–9 Penny, Thomas 243 pentatonic scale 355–6 Pepys, Samuel 18, 137 author’s affection for 18, 265 diary first published 268 ‘journal’ or ‘diary’? 262n notebook purchase 257, 265 recording of his sex life 265–6 use of shorthand 199 as witness to a murder 219–20, 229 Perec, Georges 9 permanent records 23, 25, 37–8, 221 see also tampering perpetual motion devices 115 personal information, absence 259–61 personal organisers 276 Peruzzi bankers 35, 56n Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 66, 69, 89, 93, 191 Petrucci, Armando 66 Philippines, Magellan in 144 philosophy of notebooks 374–5 phonetic alphabets 197–8 Picasso, Pablo 12, 353, 360, 362 Piers Plowman, by William Langland 93 Pigafetta, Antonio 146–8 pilots, reaction speeds 349 Pires, Zuan 81–2, 85 Pisa, Leaning Tower 169 Pisanello 53, 55 Pitkeathley, R 132 Pitti, Buonaccorso 59, 61–2 placemarkers 182 the plague the Black Death 42, 58, 61, 89 Newton and 197, 201 plea bargaining 158, 164 Pliny The Elder 68, 129, 151, 241 Pliny The Younger 129 Plutarch’s Lives 131 poems, surviving from before printing 93–4 Poggio Bracciolini 68 police corruption 280–2 police notebooks 279 censorship 282 countersigning 278 investigative use 279–80 not available to the defence 280n original purpose 277–9

replacement 283 police phone boxes 278 polio 337–8 political use of notebooks see Graham, D Robert polyptychs 310 Pompeii 24, 25 Ponsonby, Arthur 272–3 Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci) 261 Popplow, Markus 166, 171–2 popularity, the role of zibaldoni 68 portolans 81–3, 85–6 Preserving and Coockery, by Katherine Packer 299, 300 Presser, Jacques 351 Principia, by Isaac Newton 203 printing buying books before the advent of printing 41n first Venetian printing press 104 prisoners at Pignerol 217n prompt books, derived from scripts 358 proprietor’s equity 34 psychology and diary-keeping 302 PTSD (post-traumetic stress disorder) 309, 342 pugillares (writing tablets) 24, 25 Purves, Michael 319–24, 325n

Q Queneau, Raymond 9, 16–17 Quesada, Gaspar de 146

R racism 287n rapiaria 70, 128 Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations, by William Lithgow 178 Ray, John 243 reading Erasmus’ prescription 128–9 Worcester’s records of 175n recipe books 139, 295–8, 296 The Red Notebook (Darwin’s) 252–6 Relation of a Journey, by George Sandys 178 relatives of ICU patients 339, 341, 345 Rembrandt van Rijn 162, 226–8, 365 the Renaissance realism in painting 45–9, 47, 55 technology of 171–2 The Revenge of Analog, by David Sax 17 Richter, Jean-Paul 347–8, 353, 362 ricordanzi 57–8, 61–2, 71, 90 Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of 179

Rohde, Mike 362 Le Roman de la Rose 94 Roman numerals, survival 221 Rome, use of wax tablets 24, 260 Rompiasi, Antonio 104 the Rook (East India Company vessel) 230–5, 237–8, 324n Rosen, Michael 337–8, 340–5, 373 Rossi, Franco 74 Rostang de Capre, Archbishop 31 Rove, Karl 17 Rucellai, Giovanni 64, 66, 111 ruled paper 268 Rustichello da Pisa 70n rutters (as portolans) 81–3, 85–6 Ryder (Carroll) 326–36, 328

S Sackville, Richard 263 Saint Christopher 84 Salai (protege of Leonardo) 109, 117 Salon-de-Crau 30, 32–3 Santa Trinita Basilica, altarpiece 46 Sanudo, Marco 105 Sanudo, Marin 261, 265 Saskia van Uylenburgh 226–8, 227 Sax, David 17 Schickhardt, Heinrich 165–72, 176 Schinne, Magdalena van 267 Schurman, Anna Maria van 162 scientific studies of drawing 366–8 Scrabble tiles 376 scrapbooks see alba amicorum; zibaldoni screenplays, notebooks and 358–60 script styles 68–9, 98, 114 see also handwriting sea ice extent 321, 323, 324 Sebregondi, Maria 9–15, 12, 17–18, 179–80, 360, 379–80 secrecy, health effects 303 Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, by Sue Townsend 271, 276 self-help genre 336, 360 Selkirk, Alexander 179 Serpico, Frank 283 sex life, in diaries 265–6, 272 sexual trauma and health 303 Shakespeare, Nicholas 188, 191 Shakespeare, William collected works 135 references to table-books 225–6 schooling 131

sources 131, 178 Shelton shorthand 199 ships’ logbooks 140, 230–5, 233, 239, 319 input to climate models 319–21, 325 shipwrecks 21–4, 146, 179 Sifton, Elisabeth 187–8, 189 The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan 171 Simenon, Georges 291n Simmons, George (Captain) 231, 237–9 Simmons, James 237–9 Sir Politic Would-be (fictional character) 262, 373 sizing 40 sketchbooks in the Codex Vallardi 53, 55 ledgers adopted as 49–50 Leonardo on 51 Moleskines as 12, 55 phases of Ocean’s use 364 of Picasso and Paul Klee 353 preservation 52–4, 122 studio model books 52–3 The Sketchnote Handbook, by Mike Rohde 362 Smith, Barnabas 192–5, 200–1, 204–5 social empowerment 63 social historians and notebooks 350–1 social networks, similarities to alba amicorum 159, 164 Soll, Jacob 41 Solso, Robert 366–70 The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin 10–11, 15, 189–90 South Yorkshire police force 281–2 spatial awareness, brain area for 366 speech, Newton on 197 spiral bindings 287 spiral staircases 43n spiritual diaries 261–2 Spolia Botanica, by Carl Linnaeus 244 Stahl, Alan 73–4, 77, 78n, 86 Stallybrass, Peter 225 Stammbücher (autograph books) 158–9, 163–4, 266 popularity with classical composers 163 see also alba amicorum stationers 41 the Stationers’ Company, London 225, 257n status symbols 17, 44, 58 Stevin, Simon 121 Stoessel, Jason 100–1 Stokes, Pringle 246 The Story-Teller, by Patricia Highsmith 289 Straits of Magellan 143, 246 stresses

of exploration 246 relived by diary-keeping 333 twentieth-century life 304, 306, 335 and working memory 308 striking through 69n, 251, 294 Strozzi family 58 suicides 184, 218, 232, 246, 256, 287 Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita, by Luca Pacioli 106–7, 109–10, 114, 120–1 Sundays, omission of 259 the super companies 35, 36–7, 41 ‘SuperFocus’ system 360 Swift, Jonathan 132 Systema Naturae, by Carl Linnaeus 244

T table-books 215, 219, 220–9, 224, 227, 276n popularity and usefulness 223–4 reference in Hamlet 225–6 tablets, electronic see digital tools tablets, wax see writing tablets tampering police notebooks 280, 281–3 tamper-proof writing 23, 24, 37 task-lists, as transformative 360 tax fraud 210 tax returns, obligation 63, 71 taxonomy see biological classification Tchalenko, John 367–8, 370 technical drawings 165, 171 technology, notebooks as 374 Tel Quel, by Paul Valéry 287 television and diary-keeping 276 testimony, diaries as 275 Tetlow, John 268 Theory of the Earth, by James Hutton 125 Thien (Clara Nguyen’s sister) 296–7 Thirty Years’ War 134, 172 Thomas à Kempis 70 Thomson, Stackhouse 137–8, 298 tide tables 259 A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor 185 Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de 243 town planning and construction 171 tracheostomies 338, 342 ‘transmutation notebooks’ 254, 255 traumatic experiences 303–4 travel diaries 245, 261 On Travel (essay), by Francis Bacon 173

travel sketchbooks 364 Travels, by Marco Polo 70n, 178 travels, educational as perilous 176, 178 Stammbüch role 159 for technical education 166 Treatise on Painting, by Melzi after Leonardo 122, 124, 354 ‘tree of life’ diagram 253, 254, 255 tripsin, in fish processing 150 tritones, avoiding 101 Tschudin, Peter 39 The Turin Shroud 177 The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James 285 Turner, JMW 252 Turner, Marion 89, 91 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) 181–2

U Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher 352 Ulu Burun shipwreck 21–4 ‘unfair advantage’ concept 37, 41 urban topography 174–5 USS Bear 321 Utz, by Bruce Chatwin 190

V Valery, Paul 286–7 van Schooten, Franciscus 204 van Wyhe, John 249, 252, 253–4, 255 Vandommele, Jeroen 151, 153–6, 158–60, 162–3 Varchi, Benedetto 49 Vasari, Giorgio 45–7, 49, 52, 122 Vatel, François 207, 217–18 VBM (voxel-based morphometry) 368–9 ‘Velvet Paper’ (Hall & Co) 252 Venice galley crews 75–6, 78, 80, 86 rivalry with Genoa 75, 77, 83 status 104 vernacular, writing in 66, 91, 106 vernacular knowledge networks 156 Verrocchio, Andrea del 110, 115 Versailles, Palace of 214, 217 Vespasiano da Bisticci 68 Via dei’ Librai 41, 93, 380 The Viceroy of Ouidah, by Bruce Chatwin 187 Victoria, Queen 269, 348 Vikings 37 Villard de Honnecourt 52

Vine, Angus 130–1, 133 Visboek, by Adriaen Coenen 151, 154–6 Visconti family 91 visual journals 354 Volpone (play), by Ben Jonson 262, 373 von Burgckstorff, Alexander 161 A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, by Edward Cooke 179

W ‘waste books’ 107, 200, 255 Newton’s Waste Book 200–4 water Leonardo’s interest in 112, 121–2 water displacement machines 166–7 a water-powered pipe organ 169 waterboarding 318 watermarking 28 waterproof writing 252 The Waves, by Virginia Woolf 286 wax, in writing tablets 21–2, 24 web design 18, 331–2 Wedgwood, Emma 269–70 Weiss, Ben 72–3 West, Mae, on diaries 272 West Midlands Serious Crime Squad 280 whalers 321, 323–4 whales Adriaen Coenen and 151, 154, 155 described 233 fossil 125, 151 wheelchairs 169 wicked wives 91 Williams, Chris 277–9 Williams, Robert 239n Winfrey, Oprah 309n Winsheim, Valentin 158, 159 wipe-clean surfaces 222, 310 Witt, Ronald 71n the Wolfenbüttel Musterbuch 52 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas 94 women attending universities 162 and autograph books 158, 161, 163–4 first cookbooks for 299 first professional writer 94, 95 keeping common-place books 134 libri di segreti 58 tracking periods 271 women’s diaries 259, 262–3, 270, 352

Wood, Kevin 320–1, 323–4 ‘woodfree’ paper 325n Woolf, Virginia 272, 285–6 Worcester, William 174, 176, 191, 348 working memory and stress 308 Would-be, Sir Politic (fictional character) 262, 373 wrecks (shipwrecks) 21–4, 146, 179 writers’ notebooks, preserving 143, 284 writing tablets 21–4, 22, 25 Wunderkammern 154–5

X Xátivan quality paper 27–8, 40

Z zibaldoni 65–8, 68–71, 87, 350 of Boccaccio 64, 65, 69, 284 Chaucer and 90–3, 262 English examples 92, 94 Erasmus and 128–9 LDH 244 and 100, 102 Leonardo and 110–11 modern equivalents 138, 190 and recipe books 298