The Notebook

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.

biblioasis Windsor, Ontario

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.

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.

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.

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin,

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;

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

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.