The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Something about the act of writing by hand, and the production of a physical object, makes the older technology more effective than the new.

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.

Is it significant that we ‘keep’ a diary, as we keep an animal, a promise or a secret?

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.

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,

zibaldone

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.

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.

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.

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