A notebook is a record of both solitude and connection. It’s a place for making real the quiet, flickering thoughts that otherwise might pass unnoticed, where words and sketches can stumble and fail. In a notebook, failure is less consequential because it’s not failure at all; it’s a necessary part of the messiness of exploration, of letting the unknown and the uncertain find form.
Look no further than the notebooks of the famous authors and artists whose relationships with these indispensable creative tools are chronicled by Roland Allen in THE NOTEBOOK: A History of Thinking on Paper (Biblioasis, 416 pp., paperback, $19.95). Beginning with a wax tablet recovered from a ship wrecked around 1305 B.C., Allen traces how notebooks, and their many permutations, have been used by a vast range of people — including politicians, mathematicians and sailors — from across the world.
The book is a revealing document of a relationship so intimate as to be sacred: that of the writer and the page. It’s a reminder that note-taking is an act of noticing, of being present and showing up to the blank paper, again and again, and discovering what may arise there. Below is a brief illustrated history, inspired by “The Notebook,” of some of the luminaries who did exactly that.
Bruce Chatwin
A well-known fact: Chatwin was a celebrated nomadic writer; a not-so-well-known fact: It was his homage to his own notebook in his best seller “The Songlines” that helped drive the craze for the elegant pleather Moleskines so ubiquitous today.
Agatha Christie
School exercise books were Christie’s go-tos for plotting her crime novels — she wrote 66 of them — plus more than 150 short stories. She brainstormed ideas, populated scenes and fleshed out plotlines while talking to herself on the page. “Where can you push a body off a train,” she might write. Or, “Yes — better if dentist is dead.”
Leonardo da Vinci
It is estimated that Leonardo, arguably the world’s most famous note taker, may have “filled his notebooks at the rate of about a thousand pages a year,” Allen writes. A look at any of his sketchbooks reveals extensive drawings of the human body, diagrams for flying machines and giant crossbows, and studies of more esoteric subjects, like rivers and ponds.
Herman Melville
Though Melville did not keep a daily diary, he did scrupulously record his maritime travels in his notebooks. In them he would transcribe observations in romantic, voluble detail that would later come to define some of his signature works, including “Moby-Dick.”
Mark Twain
Twain picked up note-taking as a young apprentice to a steamboat pilot, a habit that he carried into his adult years. A page in one of his journals shows how he played with character names: “Siphillis Briggs” did not make the cut, but “Typhoid Billings” did.
Ernest Hemingway
The years Hemingway spent as a struggling expat and journalist in Paris during the 1920s are well documented in his beloved memoir “A Moveable Feast,” a book made possible only after he rediscovered the notebooks — in an old Louis Vuitton trunk forgotten for years in the basement of the Ritz — in which he recorded his then impoverished Parisian life.
Henry James
James’s notebooks were a gathering place for names of his characters, as well as bits of gossip. One note reads: “The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children. The children are bad, full of evil to a sinister degree” — a musing that would later inspire his horror-tinged novella “The Turn of the Screw.”
Virginia Woolf
As an occasional book reviewer, Woolf jotted down the titles of books she read in her journals. She even composed early drafts of her novels in them, including her most experimental work, “The Waves,” which she wrote by hand in seven small hardback notebooks.
Patricia Highsmith
From her days as a Barnard College student, Highsmith was a diarist and journal keeper so prolific (and entertainingly scabrous) that by the end of her life she had written more than 8,000 pages, later culled to just over 1,000 for publication in 2021.
James Joyce
The Irish novelist was a lifelong note taker who jotted down seemingly every thought and observation that crossed his mind. His notebooks “gained blocks of vivid color,” Allen writes, “as he used red, blue and green crayons to highlight successive passes through ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake.’”
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