I love notebooks.
I love the ritual of pulling out my Leuchtturm Bullet Journal and pretending—for a few minutes each day—that I’m a nineteenth-century poet in a French cage, writing up my deep and progound thoughts. Most of the time, it’s my work list and reminders for my kids’ homework. But still.
I like that I can carry a physical artifact of my thoughts. That I can plan my day in a truly analog fashion. That I can step away from screens and write things down, slowly, by hand.
In a world where it’s normal to carry around a supercomputer in your pocket, a notebook starts to feel like an extravagance. A tiny luxury. Which is strange when you think about it. The iPhone is a thousand dollars. But it’s the twelve-dollar notebook that feels indulgent.
That’s why I was so excited to stumble across The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen.
The book starts with the Moleskine. You know those notebooks—the ones with the rounded corners and the elastic band that always snaps back too fast. If you’ve ever bought one, you might have read the history tucked into the back pocket: this is the same notebook used by Bruce Chatwin, Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse. You too could be part of this history of great writing.
But as it turns out, these original notebooks were just simple, utilitarian tools—mass-produced by a small French stationer, sold in corner shops, and bought by artists and travelers not because they were legendary, but because they were cheap, durable, and fit in a pocket. There was no brand, no backstory, no cult of creativity surrounding them.
Moleskine was reinvented in the 1990s by a literary translator named Maria Sebregondi, who saw the seed of a product for the “Contemporary Nomad.” It was a marketing masterstroke: aspirational minimalism, wrapped in soft-touch black. A humble notebook, reimagined as a lifestyle brand.
But here’s the thing: for most of history, notebooks weren’t luxury items. They weren’t artisanal accessories or “analog productivity systems.” They were modern technology—tools that solved real problems. And they were often messy, collaborative, and delightfully inconsistent.
Here are three of my favorite ways notebooks were used before they were cool.
1. The Zibaldone: A Salad of the Mind
Florence, 1300s–1400s
Before the printing press, books were rare and expensive. So when you came across a quote you liked, you didn’t highlight it or bookmark it—you copied it out by hand into a notebook.
The Italians called these catch-all notebooks zibaldoni. The word comes from a slang term meaning a mess, or a jumble—literally “a salad of many herbs.” A zibaldone might contain a prayer, a dream interpretation, a recipe for curing gout, a bawdy joke, and a passage from Cicero—all on the same page.
They were usually kept by men, but shared freely within families. Some were beautifully illustrated; others were scribbled in the margins of business ledgers. These notebooks became communal archives of whatever the owner found useful, memorable, or meaningful.
And then there was Leonardo.
Leonardo da Vinci kept notebooks obsessively. He filled them with everything: anatomical studies, engineering sketches, snippets of Latin, recipes, jokes, philosophical musings, and lists of things to learn—like “describe the tongue of the woodpecker” or “go see the measurement of Milan.” He wrote in mirror script—right to left—perhaps for privacy, but more likely to keep the ink from smudging under his left hand.
His notebooks weren’t tidy journals of polished thoughts. They were working documents—messy, overlapping, alive. Mechanical wings shared the page with grocery lists. Observations turned into inventions; sketches sparked theories. It’s hard to tell where the thinking stops and the dreaming begins.
Leonardo’s notebooks are some of the most valuable in the world. The most famous of them, the Codex Leicester, was purchased by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million—still the most expensive notebook ever sold. Spanning 72 pages, the Codex captures Leonardo’s wide-ranging curiosity, with notes and sketches on everything from the movement of water and the luminosity of the moon to fossils, erosion, and the nature of light.
2. The Commonplace Book: Organizing the Jumble
Renaissance Europe, 1500s–1700s
As notebooks became more widely available, so did the urge to organize them.
Inspired by thinkers like Erasmus and John Locke, readers began keeping commonplace books: notebooks that sorted information by theme or topic—what scholars called loci communes, or “common places.” You’d create headings for concepts like “bravery,” “envy,” “leadership,” or “friendship,” and then collect quotes, stories, and observations under each one.
It was a kind of manual database—an early search engine for the learned mind. You weren’t just collecting for the sake of it; you were preparing to speak, to write, to argue persuasively. The goal wasn’t just to remember things, but to use them.
Publishers soon got in on the trend. By the 1700s, you could buy pre-formatted commonplace books, like the ones sold by British printer John Bell. These elaborate volumes often came with brief instructions up front and lots of blank pages afterward. They cost more than a volume of Shakespeare.
In a way, commonplace books were the original knowledge management tools. Long before Roam or Notion or Evernote, they gave people a way to capture ideas, organize them, and put them to use. A 17th-century brain dump—with a filing system.
3. The Friendship Book: Social Media, But Softer
Northern Europe, 1600s–1800s
Then came the Stammbuch, or album amicorum—the friendship book.
Originally used by university students in Germany, these tiny notebooks were passed around and signed by friends, professors, and mentors. The entries usually included a motto, a short message, and a signature—sometimes accompanied by poems, sketches, or family crests.
It was a kind of analog LinkedIn. Your network lived between leather covers.
Martin Luther once used a friendship book to help a friend avoid a death sentence. Anne Frank’s first diary was a repurposed one. And like today’s social platforms, the format invited a certain kind of performance. Students competed to create the most elaborate or meaningful entries. Over time, these little books became emotional time capsules—fragments of identity, connection, and shared ideals.
It’s tempting to say we’ve outgrown this format. But in truth, we’ve just moved it online. Facebook began as a digital album amicorum. The memes, the quotes, the curated lists of friends—we’ve been doing this for centuries. We just used to do it in ink.
A Final Thought
Today we have tools that can transcribe speech, summarize books, suggest email replies, and remind us when to stand up and stretch. Our calendars buzz, our phones nudge, and our AI assistants whisper just-in-time advice. And yet, there’s something stubbornly human about a notebook. No battery. No cloud sync. Just a pen, a page, and whatever’s rattling around in your head.
Before we had apps and algorithms, we had notebooks. They were our memory, our planning system, our creative lab. For centuries, people have turned to notebooks to make sense of the world—copying prayers and poems into zibaldoni, organizing knowledge into carefully indexed commonplace books, or preserving friendships and mottos in pocket-sized albums. From Renaissance merchants to Enlightenment thinkers to traveling students, these humble pages helped people collect, connect, and create. The tools have changed, but the impulse remains the same.
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