The Notebook

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

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.

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 – ha

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.

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 pl

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 enviro

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 gr

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’).

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.