The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

In Medieval Italy, the blank ledger revolutionised International trade and enabled the intellectual and artistic advance of the Resaissance. At sea, the invention of the logbook expanded horizons. Artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, writer from Chaucer to Henry James: all created work forged in their notebooks.

In this wide-ranging story, Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of medieval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine. On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world.