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.

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

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.

Mangofallukas,

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.

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

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

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

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.