Angelus News | September 6, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 18

DESIRE LINES
HEATHER KING
All hail the humble notebook
A blank Moleskine notebook. | SHUTTERSTOCK
Increasingly we live in a digital
world: e-cards, Google calendars,
the Contacts phone app.
“The Notebook” (Profile Books, $31),
by Roland Allen, subtitled “A History
of Thinking on Paper,” celebrates
the age-old practice of writing things
down — numbers, images, thoughts,
dreams — and charts the evolution
of this handy, humble little item that
many of us consider indispensable but
to which I, for one, had never given
much thought.
Allen begins by recounting the
surprisingly absorbing history of the
Moleskine, forever romantically associated
with Hemingway, Matisse, and the
nomadic English travel writer Bruce
(“The Songlines”) Chatwin.
Maria Sebregondi, the creator of the
modern classic Moleskine, suggests that
the notebook’s minimal form — black
clothbound covers, thread binding,
elastic closure, an internal bellowed
pocket for maps, dried flowers, insect
specimens — makes it the perfect creative
tool: a “simple object” generating
a “sense of extraordinary possibility
born of small things.”
The notebook’s “practical effectiveness”
has been noted by many. Far
more interesting, to my mind, is Allen’s
conviction that the very incarnate, kinesthetic
act of writing something down
has a kind of larger, (he doesn’t use the
word, but I will) spiritual value.
“The laptop, the BlackBerry, the
iPhone, and the iPad all seemed to
offer greater functionality than their
paper antecedent,” he writes, “but a
stubborn constituency of users refused
to move over into the digital sphere,
and numerous peer-reviewed studies
soon showed that their obduracy made
sense. Something about the act of
writing by hand, and the production of
a physical object, makes the older technology
more effective than the new.
Sebregondi had, unwittingly, prompted
serious inquiry into the workings of the
human brain.”
From the contemporary Moleskine,
Allen goes back to the beginning:
cuneiform on clay tablets, long scrolls
of papyrus. Then things jumped ahead:
a small hinged writing tablet of wood
and ivory, palm-sized when folded, that
was found in the Ulu Burum shipwreck
off Turkey’s southern coast. Recesses
were cut into the two leaves, filled
with wax (that could be smoothed over
and used again), and written on with
a stylus. The ship went down in 1305
B.C. and archaeologists estimate that
similar tablets constituted Europe’s
“notebooks” for 2,000 years.
The Romans adapted the Ulu
Burun-style tablets, made them more
capacious, and called them pugillares
(hand-helds) or tabellae (table).
Then they started using parchment,
adapted from the Greeks and again,
30 • ANGELUS • September 6, 2024