The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper: A New Statesman and Spectator Book of the Year

Use it enough, and a notebook will change your brain.

the concept of affordance: that aspect of an object which makes the object useful to a human interacting with it.

Mark Forster, devised a ‘SuperFocus’ system,

For over a decade now, Purves has spent thirty to forty hours a week working on the notebooks of ships that stopped sailing long ago.

In the seventh century, Saint John Climacus reported visiting a monastery near Gaza where every brother carried a small wax tablet on his belt. If one found himself committing (or considering) a sin, he would note it on the tablet, and at the end of the day confess it to the abbot, and the tablet would be wiped clean, literally and metaphorically.

the best way to observe something closely is to draw

large fowles very like gannets, flying heavy, flapping their wings like unto a Crow or Raven’.

Mangofallukas,

Having collected such snippets in their table-books, users would later neatly write up the most valuable into the common-place books that they kept at home.