The Notebook

Accounts were always bound into ledgers for a similar reason: loose-leaf entries could easily be fabricated, but a ledger with numbered pages became tamper-proof.

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They called their playful genre Oulipo, an acronym derived from the French for ‘workshop of potential literature’.

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.

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

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.

Although the Chinese didn’t immediately think of it as a writing material (preferring split bamboo for everyday use, and silk for high-status texts) paper found a multitude of applications across the Chinese empire while the codex spread across the Roman Mediterranean and Near East.

To conjure the devil, play a C and an F# together, or listen to the intro to Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’.

The Romans solved one of the medium’s problems, finding a way to protect the writing on a wax tablet, making it suitable for legal documents or contracts. They drilled holes through its frame, tied it shut with a cord, and applied wax seals – up to seven, depending on the seriousness of the document.