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

Wandering around the Tuscan countryside with a merchant’s ledger and an ink bottle, young Cimabue invented the sketchbook.

outstripped that of every other city in Europe. One study of the period by the scholar Small wonder that Florence made a congenial home for the scholars, who would turn

No-one knows exactly when the gloriously sonorous noun zibaldone appeared, or what it originally meant. The earliest record of the word, in the mid-fourteenth century, refers to it as Florentine slang, without further definition, and we can only infer from context that it means something like ‘mess’ or ‘jumble

You could sell a full zibaldone, or hand it down to your heirs, and in many examples one can see where the father stopped writing and the son took over.

The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook.

David Hockney would stress, with his characteristic directness, the importance of this process of reception and transmission: In one gallery they actually had a notice which said, ‘No Sketching.’ How obnoxious! I said, ‘How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?’ Hockney’s telling point is that it is not enough merely

Diptych tablets

‘See this?’ he said. ‘We make them ourselves, own-brand. The same size, the same number of pages. We use the same paper, the same boards, we make them at the same plants in China. They’re every bit as good as a Moleskine, and we ask half as much for them.’ He paused for effect. ‘And Moleskine still outsells us. And you’re asking me to take shelf sp

By using water power, rather than pounding by hand as the Islamic paper-makers did, the Fabrianese were able to up the rate of production while driving prices down.