A History of Thinking on Paper

The Moleskine is an exact reproduction of the legendary notebook of Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse. Anonymous custodian of an extraordinary tradition, the Moleskine is a distillation of function and an accumulator of emotions that releases its charge over time. From the original notebook a family of essential and trusted pocket books was born. Hard cover covered in moleskine, elastic closure, thread binding. Internal bellowed pocket in cardboard and canvas. Removable leaflet with the history of Moleskine. Format 9 x 14 cm.

Sebregondi’s recurring theme was that the Moleskine was ‘first of all, an enabler for creativity’.

Constraints proving creative.

Writing a diary made me happier; keeping things-to-do lists made me more reliable (which in turn made those around me happier), and I learned never to go to a doctor's appointment, or a meeting of any kind, without taking notes of what I heard. But there appeared to be creative benefits too. Every artist I met seemed to have a sketchbook to hand, as did graphic designers, and even web designers, whose product was entirely digital. Authors all kept notebooks, as did journalists, critics and other creative types - and the more assiduously they used those notebooks, the better their work seemed to be. The same applied to my colleagues' work: playful lists, diagrams and sketches regularly disgorged surprisingly good ideas.

You remember long-gone moments well, if you keep a diary.

When notebooks appear on the scene, interesting things happen.

We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls 'a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts'. You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.

Zibaldone was the Florentines notebooks where they would copy poems and notes and drawings.

Without double entry, businessmen would not sleep easily at night?, he writes. "Their minds would keep them awake with worry'

Leonardo knew that the best way to look at something analytically is to draw it.

There never was a book so bad that it was not good in some passage or another.

But common-placing is never an end in itself. It's always about producing something afterwards, or preparing you for public life.

Common-placing's advocates pointed to the intellectual benefits which made it more than just a way to trame a more convincing oration. Firstly, any reader tasked with making a selection from a given text would read it with greater concentration. The selection of a passage to excerpt required the exercise of judgement, a benefit summarised by Justus Lipsius, another Dutch scholar, in the Latin tag Non colligo, sed seligo I don't collect, I select). Selecting the appropriate common place (or locus, under a headword) for a given excerpt demanded still deeper engagement with its ideas, and once an excerpt was in place, juxtaposition with what had already been written tended to generate further shades of meaning. The physical labour of copying by hand also fixed the quotation more firmly in the mind. As yet another scholarly excerpter, the Jesuit Jeremias Drexel, put it, Notae propriae, notae optimae: 'your own notes are the best notes'. Finally, the well-arranged common-place functioned as a kind ot externalised memory, which, as historian Ann Blair notes, liberated the reader from the task of memorising the selected passages. This in turn 'freed up mental capacity for... reasoning and reflection' and was particularly useful in an age when the rate of arrival of new books far outstripped anyone's ability to master their contents.

Forty years later Jonathan Swift wrote, in his Advice to a Young Poet, that 'a commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without', for 'poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories.

Copying, he says, 'can calm and steady your state, not to mention improve it, for while the transcribing may appear to be a form of close and exclusive concentration, it has an equally important element of peaceable meditative mindlessness as well, like playing with a paper clip'.

It is a strange thing, that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen, but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land-travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered, than observation. Let diaries, therefore, be brought in use.

After noting King David's immoderate lusts, the modesty of virgins and the excellence of piety, Smith winds up with a line copied inaccurately from the Book of Proverbs: The lips of strong women' should be avoided, for they will consume a man 'flesh and body, and make him mourn at the end'.

We should hesitate before poking fun at the way the nineteen-year-old Newton beats himself up, and the incongruous assortment of, to us, harmless activities that he considers sinful. Using the same listing technique with which he steered his scientific inquiries, he sets out a charge sheet that allows for no acceptance at all. The list makes a particularly thorough example of what psychologists today call 'negative self-talk?, which has been associated with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This self-destructive self-image tallies with Newton's inability to maintain relationships, his angry responses to criticism, and the grudges which he carried for decades. Unable to forgive himself for anything, he found it impossible to forgive anyone else.

He meant nothing derogatory in this: for bookkeepers, and therefore all writers of the period, a 'waste book' was the place you made your first notes, on the fly. Later you would extract what you needed and copy it into the formal ledger.

As Francis Bacon observed fifty years after Gessner's death: Natural and Experimental History is so various and scattered that it confounds and disturbs the understanding; unless it be limited and placed in the right order; therefore we must form some tables and ranks of instances in such a manner and order, that the understanding may work upon them.?

This minimal approach ensured that every one of the fifteen field notebooks has a wide variety of entries: whatever caught Darwin's eye went in, so formal geological observations sit among notes of his routes, his expenditure, the people he met, and so on. Darwin named each notebook after the place where he first used it, so reading the paper labels he affixed to them tells you the broad strokes of HMS Beagle's itinerary: Cape de Verds, Rio, Buenos Ayres, Falkland, Bahía Blanca, Santa Fé, Banda Oriental, Port Desire, Valparaiso, Santiago, Galapagos, Coquimbo, Copiapò, Despoblado, Sydney. All but two of the notebooks opened upwards, like a reporter's notebook, and Darwin wrote rapidly across their small pages - none were larger than 17 cm by 13 cm - with frequent underlinings, dashes and abbreviations. "They are the worst, says the historian John van Wyhe, who has worked with Darwin's papers for decades and knows them better than anyone. Not written at a desk, often in pencil, short lines, staccato notes, terrible handwriting, very faint, with arcane geological content? And yet, the notes worked.

As the voyage progressed, Darwin became more aware of the value of his field notes and he started writing at greater length. 'Let the collector's motto be "Trust nothing to the memory", he would later write, 'for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting:

Ship's captain and gentleman scientist would sit writing together in the quarters that FitzRoy had agreed to share with Darwin to encourage him to join the expedition. This dedicated paperwork left little energy for letter-writing, so early in the voyage he sent his sister Caroline the first of his field notebooks instead, writing in a cover note: I have taken a fit of disgust with it & want to get it out of my sight. Any of you that like may read it.—a great deal is absolutely childish: Remember however this, that it is written solely to make me remember this voyage, & that it is not a record of facts but of my thoughts.

Once it was out of his hands, his opinion changed: in a following letter he warned his family not to let it go astray, as I would as soon loose [sic] a piece of my memory as it.?' He need not have worried: his family shared the notebook judiciously, and as the Beagle continued on its way, its contents garnered growing interest.

Darwin didn't stint on the notebooks he chose to use in the field. 'Leather-bound, high quality, some of the best papers I have ever felt,' notes van Wyhe, something of a stationery connoisseur himself.

Darwin started one of these Type 5' notebooks in May 1836, somewhere off the Cape of Good Hope, marking another significant change in his notebook-keeping. Now known as the 'Red Notebook', for the colour of its leather covers, this was the first that he devoted solely to theoretical speculation. Every field notebook contains questions - speculations as to the origin of a particular rock formation, most commonly - but in the 'Red Notebook, Darwin moved away from observation completely, and gave his theoretical speculations free rein, debating geological ideas with himself and contemporaries like Humboldt, Lyell and Von Buch, with one eye on later publication. 'Does Andes in Chili. separate geographical ranges of plants?], he wonders: then reminds himself to Urge the entire absence of any rock situated beneath low water in the Southern ocean not being buoyed with Kelp'. 'Geology of whole world will turn out simple', he writes, somewhat optimistically.

In July 1837, in the midst of this activity, he started another notebook, which, like the 'Red Notebook', would be dedicated to reflection, speculation and interrogation of his own ideas. Notebook 'B', as he labelled it, is now often - not quite accurately - cited as the place where Darwin first hit upon his theory of evolution by natural selection. It owes this fame to his 'tree of life' dragram, which shows multiple species diverging from a common ancestor, some falling extinct as others survive.

Having already filled the pages of the 'Red Notebook' with theory and hypothesis, Darwin was well accustomed to thinking problems through on the page. He confidently dedicated different notebooks to different intellectual functions: his field notebooks worked as immediate aide-memoires; in his journals, he constructed the narrative of his life's events and his emotional responses; and in the "Red Notebook' and the lettered notebooks - sometimes known collectively as the 'transmutation notebooks' - he gave his imagination free rein, posing questions to himself and recording his train of thought without inhibition (or syntax). These questions ranged from the seemingly recondite, Why 2 [species] of ostrich in South America?", to the existential. 'Why is life short?' he asked, Each species changes - does it progress?' The reader can almost hear Darwin talking to himself: "The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead, he proposed, then replied: 'No only makes it excessively complicated'. By privately externalising his ideas he was able to question them, manipulate them and hone the arguments that would turn a raw hypothesis into a well-substantiated, coherently argued theory. Darwin more than once explained the method in print, recommending that researchers 'ought to remember Bacon's aphorism, that Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man'.

While Darwin's notebook-keeping was streamlined and efficient compared to Francis Bacon's twenty-eight-book system, the two men shared an important process: make copious rough notes in a waste book or field notebook, then transfer them carefully to more organised documents, analysing them and thinking questions through on the way. 'So by 1839, when Darwin finished his Notebook E,' van Whe says, 'much of the basic framework of the theory of evolution by natural selection had been sketched out.' The notebooks also give the lie to the common belief that Darwin worked on his revolutionary theory in secret. It's absolutely false, van Wyhe says. 'He takes the notebooks out in front of people, he notes their opinion, he talks about his theory to everybody, he won't shut up about it."

The transmutation notebooks are some of the most famous in the history of science, and there can't be a clearer example of the notebook's intellectual potential than Darwin's story. Scratching quick, incoherent notes onto their tiny pages, he had used his field notebooks to prompt observation, interrogation and judgement of what he saw. Back on board the Beagle, Darwin turned these raw materials - just one hundred thousand telegraphic words - into nearly two thousand pages of systematic scientific notes, and an evocatively detailed diary. Then, in the 'Red Notebook' and its successors, he processed the arguments and ideas which would, in the six books he published in the decade after his voyage, make him one of the era's most respected scientists - and then, in On the Origin of Species, change the way we think of life. All germinating from a pile of field notebooks that fit comfortably into a shoebox.

Utilitarian in the extreme, the Letts 1812 'datebook' contained little detail. At 104 pages, it assigned each working week a two-page spread, Monday to Wednesday on the left, Thursday to Saturday on the right, dated the days, and that was it. Letts might have worried that his customers wouldn't see the value in such minimal content. If so, he needn't have: the concept was a roaring success, and each year he republished the daily diary, adding successive refinements and variations so that within a decade he offered an extensive range of products. His datebook, Letts realised, offered a natural home for the kind of practical information that annual almanacs had long collected, and so - as well as Sundays, which the first edition had omitted, as no pious man would do business on the Lord's day - he started to include practical data. Tide tables, which determined ships' arrival and departure times, proved a particular draw.

Letts intended his invention to help his customers plan their futures: his diaries were prospective datebooks. But they had an unexpected consequence: his customers rapidly realised that they worked just as well as retrospective journals, in which they could record the events of the recent past, and Letts diaries helped to turn diary-keeping into a mainstream occupation for the first time in human history. To which, we may ask: what kept you? Why did it take ordinary people so long to write about the events of their own lives, and their reactions to them?

Unsurprisingly, the mostly illiterate inhabitants of the post-Roman world didn't keep diaries either, though some flirted with the idea. 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. Monks elsewhere wrote contemporary chronicles of events, and they would be followed by secular historians. The epic journal of the Venetian Marin Sanudo, for instance, runs to forty thousand pages, and covers the years 1496 to 1536, but it was intended as a public record. Sanudo was paid by the city to write it, and he repeatedly referred to it as the first draft of the history that he would complete once he found the time, which he never did. A few years later in London, one Henry Machyn would start keeping the record that is now known as his diary. It isn't: Machyn himself doesn't feature in it at all and devotes most of its pages to accounts of notable funerals, from which we can deduce (he never tells us) that he was an upmarket undertaker. Such chronicles tell us a good deal about contemporary society, but nothing of their writer's interior

Even during the great flowering of literacy of Florence's golden age, when busy writers took advantage of the arrival of paper to create all manner of new genres - and frequently wrote of their private lives and emotions in letters - no-one kept the kind of personal, or confessional, diary that we know today. Some, like the apothecary Luca Landucci, wrote vivid chronicles of the city's affairs, many more, like Gregorio Dati (whom we met in Chapter Four), recorded domestic milestones like births, deaths and marriages, and nearly everyone kept a close track of income and outgoings, but only very rarely did a Florentine record their emotions, or the events of a normal day, on the page. Today we are astonished, writes Philippe Lejeune, the leading historian of the diary, 'but there it is: the idea never occurred to them.

Just as Florentines had fallen for the zibaldone and Wittenbergers for the Stammbuch, so the English adopted the daily diary. Why? A combination of factors reacted one on another: social and ideological tension, high levels of literacy, growing social mobility and status anxiety all played a part. The burgeoning of paperwork in general must have been a component: as we have seen, ledgers, common-place books and travel journals all proliferated during this period. But diary-keeping had not followed when notebooks arrived in Florence or Venice. People often start diaries in times of upheaval, such as the religious conflict and civil war that shook England in the 1640s. But these were minor skirmishes compared to the bloodbaths of the Thirty Years' War, which had devastated Germany a century earlier and not prompted a surge in diary-keeping. Public references by such prominent writers as Donne, Jonson and Bacon perhaps normalised the idea of the diary, before its popularity ensured its persistence and growth. The examples of alba amicorum, zibaldoni, Stammbücher and today's bullet journals show that sometimes we just start writing in notebooks because it's something the neighbours do.

In October 1788 a Dutch woman, Magdalena van Schinne, opened her journal with an address to the notebook itself: O my paper, henceforth you shall be the only one to hear my ideas, my feelings, my cares and joys. Here, I will be able to pour out my soul entirely; with others, even with my best friends, I want to learn how to hide things, or at least I no longer want to tell them about myself. You alone will be my confidant. When my heavy heart longs to unburden itself, you will not cruelly reject it. You will not misinterpret what I confide in you; when my pen is borne along by happiness, you will not have a morbid talent for snuffing it out in an instant. I will have you by my side always, to turn to when in need. This eloquent description of the emotional benefits of diary-keeping goes some way to explaining why the habit spread so widely and endured so well. A hundred and fifty years later, the opening lines of another Dutch diary echoed the sentiment precisely: I bope l will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support. Thus wrote Anne Frank, on 14 June 1942.

So when John Letts started producing diaries in 1812, two markets existed for them: businessmen, who wanted to efficiently plan their futures, and diary-keepers, often women, who appreciated the framework they offered for creating the narrative of the recent past.

When I cast a rapid glance over all that I have done and suffered over the last 54 years I feel that I have been a very ill-used man, both by Fate (or Providence) and by people in office. Out of the hundreds I have laid under obligation, scarcely one ever shewed any gratitude. But I cannot dwell on such minor miseries.

He had already dwelled on them for four million words. Madden's final entry does, however, highlight a feature of the diary which many enjoy: the ability to revisit your past, encounter your former self, and perhaps even enter into conversation with them.

It was now widely accepted that recording your life brought benefits to your emotional state just as planning your future made you more efficient. 'Keep a diary, and someday it'll keep you,' advised Mae West in the 1937 movie Every Day's a Holiday, which she both wrote and starred in, but the line wasn't new even then, having been coined by Margaret Astor fifteen years before.

Among its leading advocates was Arthur Ponsonby, a Labour MP who published several anthologies of diaries and encouraged everyone to preserve the detail that Jonson had lampooned: 'the trivial pleasures and petty miseries of daily life - the rainy day, the blunt razor, the new suit, the domestic quarrel, the bad night, the twinge of toothache, the fall from a horse'

By now the habit had become completely international. When war, long expected, finally broke out in 1939, many Europeans reacted by putting pen to paper and recording what they saw as the world they knew was upended. Many of those diarists were Jewish. At every stage of Nazi persecution, its victims picked up their pens, often intending that their contemporaneous record would bear witness in years to come, when the madness was over. Victor Klemperer, a Dresden professor already in his fifties when Hitler came to power, was something of a cineaste, and had kept a diary of his film-going for over ten years. But in 1932 his diary changed, as the full force of the Nazi state was brought to bear on Germany's Jewish citizens, of whom Klemperer was one. For thirteen years he documented this escalating oppression in detail, only surviving in precarious limbo because his wife was classified as an 'Aryan; with her, he spent the war years in an overcrowded "Jew's House', suffering forced labour, and watching Dresden's Jewish population dwindle by deportation. Klemperer recorded it all in exercise books, making a close study of the Nazis' twisted language, and writing of its injustices for posterity. 'As far as it lies in my power,' he wrote in September 1942, 'the Jew's House at 15b Caspar David Friedrich Strasse and its many victims will be famous.? As Gestapo persecutions intensified, discovery would have meant death, so his wife smuggled his pages to an "Aryan' friend who preserved them. Klemperer survived, and his diaries, published in three volumes in the 1960s, became a key source for students of the Nazi period.

In 1944, a boy imprisoned in the kódź ghetto started his own diary. Like Klemperer, he had to hide it, and wrote in the blank endpapers and margins of a French novel - presumably because it would attract no accidental interest. For three months between May and August, as the Nazi occupiers prepared to liquidate the crammed ghetto, its inhabitants clung to the hope that the Red Army would reach them in time. In English, Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish, the anonymous, orphaned teenager wrote of this yearning, as well as the daily struggles to survive and keep up his younger sister's spirits, and his angry bafflement at the German prosecution of the war and genocidal murder. There are different rumours current, good ones and also bad ones,' he wrote in English in July 1944. It is now impossible for me to write down a few decent lines because of the utter destruction of my nervous system. Two days later, he wrote a furious comparison of the German occupiers with the fleas that tormented him at night. The entries end in August just as the ghetto's inhabitants were being shipped out, and we must assume that its young writer died, as most did, soon afterwards. After the war, when a surviving neighbour returned to his building, the diary was found and archived - although it took six decades for its polyglot writer, Abram aski, to be positively identified. Many such diaries did not endure. One photo from the period shows a pile of notebooks sitting by a stove, waiting to be burned for desperately needed heat.

Even those who had lost all hope wrote diaries in testimony. In Auschwitz, the Sonderkommando unit of Jewish prisoners was tasked with shepherding new arrivals into the gas chambers, sorting victims' possessions, stripping their bodies and loading them into the crematoria. Witnesses to the most unspeakable crimes, and surrounded by industrialised murder, these men expected that they would not be allowed to live to testify, so some risked immediate death by writing accounts of their experience in salvaged notebooks or on scraps of paper, then burying them in tins in the crematorium yards. Zalmen Gradowski cached a notebook which explains their motivation: "Take interest in this document; it contains important material for historians, he wrote, We, the Sonderkommandos, have wanted for a long time to put an end to our terrible labor, forced upon us on pain of death. We wanted to do a great deed.' He closed his notebook with the address of an uncle in New York.

The diary impulse didn't vanish in 1945 but seems not to have found such a wide expression since. The long European peace gave most adults less cause to write a journal and, accurately or not, diaries became associated primarily with the solipsistic turmoil of the modern teenager (take a bow, Adrian Mole. Perhaps the arrival of television, giving people a different way to fill their evenings, had something to do with it; the arrival of digital culture, and the demise of the handwritten letter, definitely did. Published diaries tended either to be gossipy show-business affairs or self-serving politician's tomes.

So the first police notebooks did not facilitate investigation but subjugation; they embodied the force's control over its officers. But given that the constable had to carry his notebook everywhere, a secondary function inevitably arose, characterised by Williams as, Things I saw, which were important? If he did happen upon a crime, or its aftermath, or something out of the ordinary, a constable was expected to note down the details; then, on return to the station, he would transfer the details to the Occurrence Book, a larger ledger which served as the main record of events.

American police departments also found the paper logbook to be ummable to dishonest record-keeping. Notebooks there remained the officer's own property, and were usually kept haphazardly in their lockers or at home, making them even less trustworthy as eridence. "Memo books were a big source for deception and cover-up, the New York Police Department whistleblower Frank Serpico told me. He frequently saw fellow officers leaving spaces in their notebook records that they could later return to, adding observations which would persuade a judge to issue a warrant. In this context we should be grateful that the traditional paper notebook is being removed from service. British police officers now tap notes into digital devices, interviews and interrogations are recorded, and body-cams preserve interactions with the public. In New York, memo books were replaced by an iPhone app in 2020, to the relief of management and the suspicion of the unions, who grumbled about oversight and workplace surveillance. So the story of the police notebook nears its close: two hundred years of enuine usefulness to set against a shadow history of deception and corruption. The notebook, which had been trusted by medieval merchants as a reliably tamper-proof guarantee of truth, had been showti to be anything but.

It is surprising how often one sentence, jotted in a notebook, leads immediately to a second sentence. A plot can develop as you write notes. Close the notebook and think about it for a few days — and then presto! you're ready to write a short story.

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.

There's also a private, introspective, purpose to her note-taking: Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point,' she writes, calling her notebooking 'something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker... your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.'

Pulling back, we can see that, despite the wide variety of ways that writers used their notebooks, they broadly fall into three modes. Firstly, nearly all authors habitually use notebooks for immediate observation: capturing words, lines, scenes, ideas, transient moments, for later use. secondly, some - bur far trom all - use them for drafting and redrafting. Austen, Mary Shelley and Woolf all did so; James Joyce's notebooks gained blocks of vivid colour, as he used red, blue and green crayons to highlight successive passes through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The distinction between these two modes recalls - yet again - the two-stage process of the Italian bookkeepers, who had used their memoriale to record transactions in the moment, then copied them over to the double-entry giornale or quaderne for analysis and reconciliation. Artists, essayists, scientists had all adopted similar practices: Agatha Christie's striking-through of ideas that had been employed in a book echoes the bookkeeping practice of striking through matching credits and debits. But writers like James, Highsmith and Christie also used notebooks in a third way, to write about their own writing even as they wrote. With the ever-present blank pages as sounding boards, they could enter into dialogue with their own work, come to considered judgement about it, rehne it, and improve the end product. It your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium - and your mirror.

'When people write about upsetting experiences it has a positive health effect upon them.'

Expressive writing should be free from constraint, and it's up to the writer to decide what topics count as emotionally traumatic: researchers have found that the more specific their instructions are, or the more they constrain the topics that participants can write about, the less effective the exercise is. Any structure in the writing needs to come from the participant, not the researcher. That said, if participants, in writing, identify benefits to their traumatic experiences, or formulate their own coping strategies, they re more likely to enjoy greater benefits. Using language of insight ('now I realise that....') or cause ('one consequence was that...) in your writing is a sign that you've processed your emotions so they will stress you less in future. On the other hand, writing that just recounts the facts of a trauma, without an acknowledgement of its emotional effects, won't be effective.

If you experience fresh trauma, when should you start to write about it? The research suggests that you shouldn't rush to put pen to paper: one to two months after the event is probably best, but no sooner. And there's no difference between writing completed in one day, or over several days or weeks. And what is to be gained? The benefits don't only take the form of reduced calls on your doctor and lower consumption of painkillers: your blood pressure may come down, and emotional disclosure writing has been connected to a reduction in the recurrence of heart attacks, as well as better antibody response to vaccination and to Epstein Barr virus. One New Zealand study found that wounds heal faster, discovering biological markers for tissue recovery which correlated positively to emotional disclosure writing. Those are all objective measures, but participants' self-reported wellness also improves, and there are broader benefits, too. Students' grades go up; workers take fewer sick days; and one study found a lower risk of alcoholism developing if you wrote after losing your job.

As we verbally process trauma, we have to name and label our emotions: and this practice, in turn, is known to improve life satisfaction. It's known as the A-to-D emotion theory, in which 'analogue' emotions (non-verbal, woolly, hard to organise, imprecise) are turned into 'digital' (verbal, cognitive, easy-to-organise) chunks. 'Your writing goes from more emotional to more cognitive, Elizabeth Broadbent, who had led the New Zealand study, puts it. The more care we take to identify differences between our negative emotions, the more likely we are to understand them, and act effectively in the future. The same applies if we organise our experiences, and our emotional reactions to them, into a coherent story - easier to do on the page than orally. 'When people write expressively about past trauma, they're placing it in the context of the rest of their lives and they're reducing the impact that it has: it's no longer ting at the back of your mind, having a subconscious effect, continues Broadbent. 'You're brought it to the surface, you've dealt with it, you've made sense of it, now you can move on? Pennebaker also stresses the importance of working memory, the sort of short-term remembering we do when multiplying two numbers in our head, taking notes in a lecture, or getting the right round of drinks at the bar. People who are under stress, who are worried about stuff - that's taking up their working memory, he tells me. "They're not paying attention to what they're doing, where they are going, so they're more likely to have injuries, or do poorly on tests, and so forth.' Any kind of memory that still causes you everyday stress, even at a level that you can't consciously perceive, eats into that working memory. Several studies have shown that expressive writing counters that interference by organising the events or experiences that we are obsessed with. What this would mean is? Pennebaker concludes, 'if I have more working memory, I should do better on exams: and people do. If I have better working memory, I should interact more with my friends, and listen to you when you're telling me about your problems, and be more present. In a sense, my mind is clearer, I should sleep better - and people do.'

It seemed right to ask the professionals if they use the technique themselves. 'I do do expressive writing, now and then, maybe once or twice a year,' says Pennebaker. Having written or co-written fifteen books, a language-analysis software package, and 328 scholarly articles and chapters, he seems to have bounced back from the disappointment of failing to make it in jazz clarinet. Broadbent tells me that she's employed the technique too. Neither, though, are regular diary-keepers. If my life is going well, why in the hell would I ever want to write?' asks Pennebaker, rhetorically. I view writing as a way to work through miserable things. If I'm happy I don't have to work that out.' He admits to one exception: Writing is really beneficial when things are unknown, they're complicated? So when you find yourself in a war zone, or a divorce, or you lose your job - then, keeping an everyday diary will have benefits. The same applies 'when you're suffering from hormone poisoning, he continues, referring to our teenage years.

Something as simple as a task-list frees us from the effort of holding our to-dos in mind, and supposedly make us not only more efficient but happier.

These books and many like them were reviewed by Oliver Burkeman, who wrote about happiness and efficiency for the Observer newspaper, and tested so many such self-help systems that he was able to distil three general principles for successful listing. Firstly, you should always keep two lists: a master list, where everything goes (and which will never be empty) along with a daily list of your immediate priorities. Secondly, you should make your daily list a 'will-do', not a 'to-do', stocked only with the items that you're absolutely confident you can complete. Finally, once you've started the day's work, you should keep control of your agenda by only adding new tasks to the master list, not the daily list. If you manage your life according to these principles, Burkeman suggests, you'll quickly develop a better view of your professional and domestic tasks, prioritise effectively, and feel in control. The only problem he found was that a list-making system this sophisticated becomes impossibly onerous to maintain.

Burkeman also reviewed journal-keeping practices, discovering that keeping a food diary resulted in his eating a healthier diet, and that a Bob Graham-style time log revealed the alarmingly large chunk of each day that he idly frittered away. He noted that this kind of self-logging was a species of mindfulness, and that it brought benefits: 'merely observing your behaviour makes for better behaviour, he wrote. But, again, these habits are hard to maintain consistently. The most effective notebook habit, in Burkeman's judgement - or at least, the one which he stuck with while all others dropped away - is Morning Pages. The simplest of routines, popularised by the Hollywood screenwriter turned creativity-guru Julia Cameron, this consists of sitting down with a notebook at the beginning of each day and writing till you have three pages - then stopping. You can write a 'what-just-happened' diary entry, or you can go entirely fictional: what matters is taking what's on your mind and dumping it down on the page so that your stream of consciousness can run on, unencumbered. Cameron has written a book about this process in which she reels off the benefits: self-knowledge, confidence, creativity, optimism and so on. Its adherents have, she claims, published novels, written plays, recorded albums, adopted children, dropped toxic friends, moved to the mountains - all as a result of writing their Morning Pages. She even suggests the method may help you 'get laid".

"When you're drawing a nose, for Christ's sake don't draw a nose. Just draw what you see. And after half an hour, you step away, and there will be a nose." If you try and draw a nose you'll fall flat on your face.'

Other neurological researchers have shown that paper notebooks make particularly effective learning tools, with an edge over their digital counterparts. Multiple studies have found that students who take lecture notes on laptops don't learn as well as those who write with pen and paper. This is partly due to the distracting temptations offered by the internet, and partly because typing encourages verbatim note-taking, rather than paraphrasing, summarising and concept mapping, which are much more effective ways at encoding new information in the memory.

In 2021, a Japanese study compared how effectively we take (non-academic) notes on paper, a phone, or a tablet. Pen and paper proved the most efficient by far: not only did subjects complete the note-taking task more quickly, they later had much better recall of the details. This study also used MRI scanning to discover that the hippocampi, precunei, visual cortices, and language-related frontal regions of the brain were all much more active in the notebook users.

The physical labour seems to play a part, as we encode memories better when muscular effort is involved. So do the tactile, sensory qualities of the paper itself, and the fact that a note on a page has a fixed location, while a note on a screen scrolls away or vanishes altogether. Together, these factors result in 'deeper and more solid' cognitive processes, and the study unambiguously concludes that brain activations related to memory, visual imagery, and language during the retrieval of specific information, as well as the deeper encoding of that information, were stronger in participants using a paper notebook than in those using electronic devices. It seems that, despite the billions poured into product development by the likes of Apple, Google and Evernote, the best cognitive tool we have was invented hundreds of years ago.

Use it enough, and a notebook will change your brain.

That won't surprise anyone who keeps a diary or journal. Each word we add increases its value: the tattier it gets, the more battered, the more precious it becomes. And this value goes far beyond what seems rational, for in truth I rarely refer to my old diaries or notebooks, and I suspect that few of us are 'on nodding terms with the people we used to be, as Joan Didion put it. I would, however, be mortified if anyone else, however sympathetic, delved into those boxes, and exposed the diaries in public like Sir Politic Would-Be's in Jonson's Volpone.

Now imagine how it must have felt to grow up in that world, and then to see pen and paper in use for the first time, making baffling ideas simple, defying memory's inherent slipperiness, and allowing for complicated sums, lifelike drawings, gripping verse, lengthy memoirs, and surprising harmonies. You could say that the arrival of the notebook gave us a way to extend our minds, or you might go further, and say that it blew them completely.

I see the story of Europe's adventure with the notebook as one of enlargements - intellectual, economic, creative, emotional - as curious minds expanded to interact with, and fill, the blank pages that notebooks presented. Maria Sebregondi asserts that the Moleskine's material simplicity - compared to its digital competitors - is a constraint which prompts creativity. But to the early adopters, those blank pages represented unconstrained horizons. They had no finer cognitive technology. It challenges us to create, to explore, to record, to analyse, to think. It lets us draw, compose, organise and remember - even to care for the sick. With it, we can come to know ourselves better, appreciate the good, put the bad in perspective, and live fuller lives.

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