As a notebook keeper, I sometimes catch myself flipping through old pages and wondering: How did this all start? Who first thought of putting thoughts on paper? How did people use notebooks back then, before gel pens and dotted pages? And what’s the journey of paper and notebooks in this world? If you’ve ever had thoughts like that, you’ll probably enjoy The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen as much as I did.
We actually have the author’s friend Simon to thank for this one. He encouraged Allen to write down all his questions, and that turned into a lovely, meandering exploration of the notebook, not just as an object, but also as a witness to human thought.
Allen takes us through time, from ancient papyrus to medieval ledger books, all the way to travel journals, diaries, patient logs, war-time notebooks, and even the bullet journal craze. It’s part history, part essay collection, and part quiet reflection on why humans write things down at all.
One moment that really stayed with me was a quote from Joan Didion’s On Keeping a Notebook:
“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether… children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
That line just hit. It’s exactly the feeling I could never quite put into words myself.
If you’ve ever carried around a notebook just because it felt right, or if you’ve filled pages without knowing exactly why, this book might make you appreciate the simple act of writing even more.
Summary
How Accounting Was Born from Ink, Paper, and a 700-Year-Old Ledger
Accounting may live in software today, such as Excel, QuickBooks, or Stripe, but its language is still soaked in old-school paper metaphors. We talk about balance sheets, journals, ledgers, all rooted in a time when numbers were written by hand and columns were drawn with rulers.
To understand how this paper-based way of thinking stuck around, we have to travel back 700 years to a small market town in southern France. It’s here that one remarkable document, the Farolfi ledger, changed everything.
At first glance, it’s just a scrappy old notebook. But it’s actually one of the most important documents in financial history. Because it’s the earliest known example of modern accounting in action. Unlike older systems that only tracked coins and stockpiles, this ledger shows something new: double-entry bookkeeping, profit and loss calculations, and the abstract ideas that now form the backbone of finance around the world. It was the moment accounting turned from simple record-keeping into a full-blown system for understanding how money flows.
Florence, How a Small City Outsmarted the Giants of Europe
Florence wasn’t an obvious candidate for greatness. It was tiny, landlocked, and lacking in natural resources. Its farmland was poor, it had no strong navy or military, and its craftspeople, such as wool dyers and weavers, were skilled but not uniquely so. Compared to coastal rivals like Genoa and Venice, Florence looked like an underdog.
And yet, it thrived.
Instead of being held back by its disadvantages, Florence used them as fuel for innovation. With no friendly neighbors to trade with nearby, Florentines built far-reaching trade and financial networks that stretched across Europe. Their city didn’t pose a military threat to the great powers of the day which meant Florentine citizens could travel, trade, and do business more freely.
Even their political structure was unusual. Rather than being ruled by a powerful family or monarch, Florence had a more open and civic-minded system that gave weight to guild membership and public participation. This allowed skilled merchants and artisans to shape the city’s future.
But the real secret is banking.
Florentine merchants became experts in moving money across vast distances, especially on behalf of the Catholic Church. This gave them access to enormous pools of capital. That capital could then be invested in trade, or lent out at profitable interest rates. They weren’t just selling wool. They were also professionalizing finance.
And behind their financial success was a quiet technological edge: paper.
While other European cities were still using expensive, reusable parchment, Florentine bankers had started using paper notebooks. Unlike parchment, where ink could be scraped off and rewritten (hello, fraud!), paper locked in ink permanently. It was cheaper, more secure, and perfect for honest bookkeeping. This gave Florentine merchants a trustworthy, scalable system for managing transactions, something others simply couldn’t match.
Their ledgers weren’t just records. They were power.
How Notebooks Became the Heart of Florentine Life
Florentine merchants quickly realized the power of the notebook in business, but soon, it became just as important at home. What began as a tool for trade turned into something deeply personal, even cultural.
The first shift came with the ricordanze which means household account books. These were used to track everyday finances: what was bought, sold, earned, or owed. Families across Florence kept these records, some passing them down through generations. Today, historians treasure these ledgers. They don’t always reveal emotions or personality, but they offer an incredibly detailed picture of daily life in Renaissance Florence, more than we have for any other city of that time.
Take the wealthy Strozzi family, for instance. Their notebooks show a sharp business strategy: they lent money to struggling farmers. If someone couldn’t repay the loan, the Strozzi would take their land. Over time, their wealth and landholdings grew. But these records weren’t just tools of power. In other households, they offered protection: by recording transactions clearly and legally, notebooks helped the less wealthy defend themselves in court. In this way, they became instruments of fairness and social mobility.
Then there were the zibaldoni.
Nobody’s quite sure when this lovely word first appeared, but by the 15th century it had become part of everyday notebook culture. Giovanni Rucellai, a wealthy merchant and art lover, described his zibaldone as “a salad of many herbs,” a perfect metaphor for what these books were: eclectic collections of things people loved. A favorite poem. A helpful recipe. A wise saying. A funny anecdote. Religious prayers. Rude jokes. Anything went.
People wrote their zibaldoni for themselves and also shared them with friends. If they saw something they liked in someone else’s notebook, they might copy it into your own. It was social, creative, and personal all at once.
This kind of note-keeping changed both reading and writing. Readers weren’t just consuming books, they were also curating their own collections. And writers, like Boccaccio (a friend of Petrarch), used their notebooks to gather ideas, quotes, and influences for future work.
Was Florence alone in this habit? Not entirely. People across Europe kept their own little anthologies. But Florentines embraced the possibilities more fully and more quickly than anyone else. They made literature part of everyday life. Books weren’t locked away in libraries. They were copied, shared, and read at home.
In fact, book ownership in Florence was off the charts. A study of nearly 6,000 Renaissance-era Florentines found that they owned over 107,000 books altogether, an average of 18 per person. That might sound modest today, but at the time, it was a cultural explosion.
How a London Bookbinder Accidentally Made Diary-Keeping a Worldwide Habit
In the early 1800s, London was buzzing with business. Merchants darted through the city, always chasing the next high tide and the next deal. Right in the heart of this action, a bookbinder named John Letts saw a problem and came up with a clever solution.
In 1811, Letts introduced a new kind of product: the dated diary.
It was 104 pages long and divided each working week across a two-page spread, Monday to Wednesday on one side, Thursday to Saturday on the other. Each day was labeled with a date. Letts imagined it as a forward-looking tool, something to help busy merchants plan out their weeks, like a more structured version of the annual almanacs they already used.
Turned out, people started using the diaries not just to plan, but also to remember. Instead of only filling in appointments and deadlines, they jotted down what had actually happened. Their meetings, their moods, their reflections. These little datebooks, originally designed for scheduling, became personal journals. With Letts’ simple invention, diary-keeping quietly became a daily habit, and for the first time in history, it went mainstream.
Much like the Florentines had embraced the zibaldone, or how Germans had their Stammbuch (a kind of friendship book), the English found their own favorite notebook form: the daily diary.
But why in England?
It was a perfect storm of social and cultural forces. Rising literacy rates, growing class mobility, and the ever-present need to prove one’s place in society all played a role. Paperwork was exploding everywhere, like ledgers, journals, commonplace books, but diaries hadn’t taken off like this before, not even in Renaissance Florence or Venice.
Interestingly, people often start keeping diaries during moments of personal or political upheaval. In England, the 1640s brought religious conflict and civil war, which encouraged more self-reflection. But even that wasn’t as brutal as the Thirty Years’ War that had torn through Germany a century earlier, yet that war didn’t trigger a diary boom.
In England, something was different. It wasn’t just trauma. It was the rise of an organized, paperwork-heavy, forward-thinking society. And John Letts gave that society the perfect little book to capture its hopes, its habits, and its history.
Writers and Their Notebooks: Capturing Sparks, Shaping Stories
In her book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, author Patricia Highsmith shared a simple but powerful truth: “It is surprising how often one sentence, jotted in a notebook, leads immediately to a second sentence.”
Writers have long known this magic. A notebook is a storage space for thoughts and where inspiration gathers momentum. It’s where a passing idea can snowball into a scene, a character, or even an entire book.
Though every writer has their own style, most use notebooks in one (or more) of three ways:
- To capture the fleeting stuff Nearly all writers use notebooks to quickly record whatever grabs their attention: a snatch of conversation, a line of poetry, a sudden idea, a visual detail. These are the raw materials that may someday kindle something bigger.
- To draft and redraft Some authors go beyond quick notes and use their notebooks as a space to sketch out full drafts or revise work in progress. It’s less common than you’d think, but for those who do, the notebook becomes a kind of quiet studio: messy, fluid, but deeply creative.
- To think through the writing process itself This might be the most fascinating use of all. Some writers treat their notebook like a conversation partner, using the blank page to reflect on their work as they write it. They question, evaluate, refine. It’s a private dialogue that helps them understand what they’re doing and how to do it better.
A notebook becomes both a tool and a mirror. If words are your craft, then the notebook is where you work and where you grow.
Why Journaling Helps Us Feel Better (and Think More Clearly)
There’s a reason journaling is one of the most recommended habits for emotional well-being: it helps us make sense of what’s going on in our heads.
Psychologist Elizabeth Broadbent puts it simply: “Your writing goes from emotional to more cognitive.” When we slow down to name and describe what we’re feeling, we start to understand those emotions better. And when we organize our experiences into a story, even a messy, personal one on the page, we’re more likely to learn from them and move forward. It’s often easier to do this in writing than it is through casual conversation.
Journaling also helps take the power out of painful memories. When people write honestly about past trauma, they place it within the bigger picture of their lives. That memory is no longer buried in the background, quietly influencing everything. Instead, it becomes part of the story, not the whole story.
Another expert, psychologist James Pennebaker, explains that journaling also frees up our mental space by lightening the load on our working memory: the brain’s short-term, moment-to-moment processing system. When we’re stressed or emotionally overwhelmed, even without realizing it, that stress eats into our ability to focus and function.
Writing about what’s bothering us, especially things we haven’t fully processed, helps us untangle it. It gives shape to chaos. Pennebaker notes that expressive writing lets us organize the thoughts and experiences that otherwise just spin in our minds. That way, we’re no longer carrying around the same emotional baggage in the background.
The page becomes a surface for words and a space for clarity, healing, and relief.
Author: Roland Allen
Publication date: 2 November 2023
Number of pages: 416 pages
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