Notebooks have been used both to capture fleeting and inchoate information at the start of intellectual projects and to make extracts from already sanctioned bodies of knowledge. The former role may explain the special power notebooks have exercised over our imaginations: they promise something not contained in books and other records, perhaps something lost or suppressed, or an insight into the creative process. Hence biographers and historians of art, music, and science have scrutinized the diaries and working papers of individuals such as Leonardo da Vinci, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Charles Darwin. The second function is equally important: notes taken from published material have been recombined with notes from various sources—testimony, observation, experiment, reflection—to generate new knowledge.
Note taking has a longer history than the notebook. From the eighth or seventh century BCE, Babylonian scribes made nightly observations of the sky in monthly reports now called “astronomical diaries.” The earliest surviving example dates from 652 BCE. Evidence of what might also be regarded as note taking is found on Egyptian ostraka—fragments of pottery (usually limestone). One of these dated to circa 1250 BCE, held in the British Museum, is a register of workmen’s attendances over a 280-day period. In the heart of Roman London, wooden writing tablets (ca. 140 mm wide × 110 mm high) dated to the first century of the Common Era were found in the excavations of a temple to Mithras (built about 240 CE). A recess was carved into the faces of these tablets and filled with a thin layer of blackened beeswax; a needle-pointed stylus was used to scratch a short message (often about provisions and financial transactions) on the waxed surface. Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE), the author of Natural History (in thirty-seven books), collected extracts from his reading in commentarii (notebooks). Pliny the Younger reported that his uncle bequeathed to him “160 notebooks of selected passages.” It is likely that these extracts were copied on to *papyrus rolls rather than bound in *codex form; the latter was a practice not regularly preferred for another two centuries.
It was not until the mid-1500s that the notebook took the form of a small bound “paperbook” comprising pages of blank paper. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), this word was first used in about 1548, slightly before “notebook” (or “note-booke”) in 1568. Since then there have been two main kinds of notebook—the *commonplace book and the journal (or diary). In principle, commonplace books stored information under categories and topics, whereas journals of various kinds were predicated on daily entries. The words journal (OED, ca. 1540s), day-book (1571), and diary (1581) betray this focus, as do diario and Tagebuch.
Explicit discussion about the format of commonplace notebooks was evident from the time of the European *Renaissance. Thanks to the legacy of the Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian, humanist authors such as Erasmus of Rotterdam promoted the habit of making notes under tituli (titles) or headings, adapting the Latin notion of loci communes (common places). By the late 1500s, this practice was established in grammar schools, universities, and private scholarship as a way of storing *copia (abundant material) for the purposes of conversation, oratory, and literary composition. The terms book of Common Places and commonplace book (1578) referred to a notebook in which excerpts from classical Latin authors such as Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and Seneca the Younger (and also contemporaries such as Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon) were kept under topical headings, such as friendship, honor, and constancy. In his De ratione studii (1512), Erasmus urged that students “have at the ready some commonplace book of systems and topics, so that wherever something noteworthy occurs he may write it down in the appropriate column.” This method of keeping like with like was believed to assist memory in two ways: first, to stimulate recollection (a process of searching, distinct from immediate recall) of both the information summarized and other related details and ideas, which themselves provoke trains of thought; and second, to serve as external records of information that dispense with the need for memorization via regular rehearsal of content. The benefit, therefore, of a carefully kept notebook was that it could function as a *secondary memory (memoria secundaria), or what Jonathan Swift in his “Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” (1721) called a “supplemental memory.” Many manuals from the early seventeenth century on extolled the virtues of various methods of taking notes—some recommended immediate storage of excerpts under headings, others a register in the order in which one read; the transfer of these latter notes to a commonplace book was compared with the procedure of merchants who entered daily transactions in a “waste book” before recording them systematically in a journal and ledger. Practices were as varied as the men and women who compiled the notebooks.
Conversely, the terms journal, diary, and day-book referred to notebooks that registered day-by-day (diurnal) events, natural phenomena, and ideas. Moreover, whereas commonplace books were mainly for private use, journals served both personal and institutional functions. *Jesuits and Puritans inculcated the habit of keeping spiritual diaries in which individuals entered both sins and prayers. In a sermon of 1631 John Donne underlined one rationale: “God … sees their sins … and in his Ephemerides, his journals, he writes them downe.” Outside strictly religious practice, almanacs (usually small duodecimo booklets) were often stitched into diaries, some providing blank pages for annotation, as in A Blancke and Perpetuall Almanack (1566), which promised to act “as a memorial … for any … that will make & keepe notes of any actes, deedes, or things that passeth from time to time.” The OED gives 1581 as the earliest instance of “diary” as a notebook for recording “matters affecting the writer personally,” a use that matches a line in Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1605–6): “This is my diary, wherein I note my actions of the day.” On almost every day in the diary he kept between 1672 and 1680, the experimental philosopher Robert Hooke noted his diet, health, and medical complaints—for example, “slept well but had windy pains in stomach and belly next morn … voided much urine” (January 28, 1673). In 1712 Joseph Addison declared that daily note taking was crucial to personal development, recommending to readers of the Spectator (no. 317, March 4, 1712) “the keeping a Journal of their Lives for one Week.”
In institutional contexts, journals were incontestably the notebook of choice in the cases of parliamentary records, merchants’ account books, ships’ logbooks, travel reports (such as the Venetian relazioni [relations]), and weather registers. Bacon signaled this in 1605 when he said that “in enterprises memorable, as expeditions of Warre, Navigations, and the like, [it was usual] to keepe Dyaries of that which passeth continually.” Published travel advice from the late 1500s, issued under the rubric of ars apodemica (the art of travel), provided explicit directions on what to note. The usual presentation of this advice under topics—for example, climate, ports, trade, fortifications, the structure of the society—indicates the abiding influence of the commonplace method even though, by the early 1600s, the journal became the more usual notebook for travelers. Some of the great scientific voyagers of the nineteenth century—Nicolas Baudin, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Darwin—chose journals as their notebooks of first response.
From the *early modern period, note taking played an important role in the collection of empirical information. Individuals engaged in scientific inquiry gathered material from books, testimony, observation, experiment, and their own thoughts. By the mid-1600s, notebooks included lists of things-to-do, desiderata (things desired), and “queries” or “inquiries.” Increasingly, the information thus generated was entered in journal or diary form, even if later transferred to a commonplace book under a topic. Especially in the observational sciences, this method suited the need to record information (also “informations,” in seventeenth-century usage) quickly as discrete “particulars,” with an emphasis on storage and retrieval, rather than to impose a systematic or topical organization prematurely. With further analysis postponed, the imperative of rapid collection favored rough notes, often including time and place of events, observations, or experiments. To be effective, however, “Diaries of wind and weather” (as Robert Plot called them in 1677) demanded detail and discipline. The English physician and philosopher John Locke began to keep such a diary, or “Register,” from June 24, 1666. He reserved a large number of pages in the back of a folio-sized commonplace book and ruled up columns for date and hour, for readings from a thermometer, a barometer, and (by July 30) a hygrometer, for observations of wind direction and velocity, and for general remarks, such as “rain,” “fair,” “cloudy.” Locke displayed rare commitment, sometimes adding entries up to three or more times a day. Aware of the demands entailed by constant observation, the astronomer and architect Christopher Wren envisaged a self-recording device that would replace human note taking by making “a Thermometer to be its own Register.” It was recognized, however, that personal notes could not contribute to a collaborative project unless they followed agreed conventions. Especially during the eighteenth century, scientific and medical societies in Europe attempted to standardize the manner in which empirical information was collected by issuing questionnaires and by giving instructions for ruling up notebooks. This stress on *protocol eventually governed all procedures in scientific laboratories, as the chemist Michael Faraday prescribed in 1827:
A blank writing paper book should be upon the table, with pen and ink, to enter immediately the notes of experiments.… The Laboratory notebook, intended to receive the account of the results of experiments, should always be at hand, as should also pen and ink.… The practice of delaying to note until the end of a train of experiments or to the conclusion of the day, is a bad one, as it becomes difficult to accurately remember the succession of events.
The commonplace and journal formats do not exhaust the range of note taking evident from the 1600s. There were “loose” notes on slips and sheets of paper stitched together, as in the zibaldoni of Italian merchants from circa 1400. In his Bibliotheca universalis (Universal library) (1545–48), the Swiss humanist Conrad Gessner recommended a version of this technique as a way of indexing books and composing new ones. The Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi kept twelve thousand cose diverse (various things, including specimens, ideas, and observations) on slips stored in sacks. There were also numbered lists of queries or experiments, some in sets of one hundred items (“centuries”), as seen in the writings of Bacon and Robert Boyle. Loose notes did not necessarily break with all previous conventions: they could preserve chronological arrangement or carry topical headings; with numbering or coding, they could be linked to bound notebooks. Moreover, despite being loose, they retained the ability to trigger recollection, as Bacon recognized when he said in 1620 that “a host of circumstantial details or tags help the memory, as writing in discontinuous sections.” Another advantage was that such notes could be physically moved and re-sorted, allowing reclassification of data and new combinations of ideas. This potential, however, depended on adequate storage and retrieval. In his De arte excerpendi (On the art of excerpting) (1689), a review of note-taking advice, Vincent Placcius promoted the invention of the Oxford graduate and rector Thomas Harrison, as outlined in a manuscript of 1640. Harrison’s “Arca studiorum” (Ark of studies) was a cabinet that stored loose slips of paper on hooks fixed to thin brass plates bearing labels arranged in alphabetical order. In the examples Harrison gave, the headings on the labels were conventional ones (such as Love, God, Faith, Virtue) but he also mentioned assigning numerals to single slips, thereby implying that these alone, not topics or categories, could be effective markers. Some of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s loose notes still bear the holes created by pinning them into a cabinet similar to the one designed by Harrison.
Paper slips, and then index cards, encouraged the notion of a note as a record of a discrete piece of information. In the mid-1600s, the German mathematician and philosopher Joachim Jungius used loose notes without a cabinet but stressed that each slip should contain only one *fact or idea, a principle forcefully stated in 1926 by the English historian Beatrice Webb. The use of slips and cards to register and store units of information was central to the work of the Belgian lawyer and bibliographer Paul Otlet. With Henry La Fontaine, he created the “Répertoire Bibliographique Universel” (Universal bibliographical directory), aiming to document information for worldwide access. Otlet sought not just to capture the publishing details of every book, but “to detach what the book amalgamates, to reduce all that is complex to its elements and to devote a page to each.” At its foundation in 1895 the “Répertoire” contained some four hundred thousand entries on single pieces of paper and index cards; by 1914 there were eleven million. Searches of these entries relied on an elaborate version of Melvil Dewey’s *universal decimal classification. In 1945, the American engineer Vannevar Bush put the emphasis on personal selection rather than universal repositories of information. His *“memex” (a contraction of either “memory extended” or “memory index”) was a photoelectric machine designed to link documents (on microfilm) chosen by the owner, thereby superseding both index cards and library classification. Its “essential feature,” according to Bush, was “the process of tying two items together”; multiple documents could be “joined together to form a trail” (before *“hypertext”) that preserved the mental associations made by the user. Bush emphasized the capacity to revisit these trails, but the consequent repetition—of what William James called “habit-worn paths of association”—lacked the suppleness of loose notes in combination with notebooks.
From the 1970s, when new information technologies promised to displace the paper notebook, the word itself (or its variants) remained irresistible—as witnessed in the Tandy Corporation laptop computer the “Notebook” of 1983, the Xerox “NoteTaker” of 1978, and the Samsung “Galaxy Note 8” of 2017. These, and subsequent electronic devices, were marketed as personal machines that facilitated note taking, in part by offering greater speed of entry and retrieval. However, these benefits were questioned in an experimental study of 2014 that compared groups of individuals who took longhand notes at lectures with those who used a keyboard. The former group made shorter, less verbatim, and more considered notes and subsequently showed better recall of concepts—thereby possibly confirming early modern advice that such notes prompt recollection and thought. It may be that it is not the speed, but the interactive potential of *digital note taking that delivers the most significant advance: individuals can share notes in real time, thus fostering collaboration. We may not yet appreciate how the tasks of selecting, entering, storing, classifying, recollecting, reviewing, and retrieving information—supported over centuries by notebooks—have been affected by reliance on digital devices.
Richard Yeo
See also accounting; albums; art of memory; cards; computers; excerpting/commonplacing; files; indexing; journals; lists; memos; merchants; observing; secretaries; sermons; storage and search