And I think hopefully by the end of the show, we're going to find out it's not so humble. Because if you look at any advancement in art, technology, economics, there's typically a notebook involved. I'm curious, what got you to take this deep dive into the history of the notebook?

Well, I guess there are two questions. Where did my interest come from in notebooks? And then what made me take the deep dive? The interest came from keeping a diary myself, essentially, which I did for years. I started in my mid-20sies and quite quickly it became a really important part of my life and it still is. And keeping a diary, I started just to notice other people's notebooks and in my work, I'm a sales guy, I'm not especially creative, but in the publishing companies where I worked, the really creative people always had sketchbooks and notebooks which they would use to design things or write books or generally be enviably creative. So I would sort of notice them and always sneak a peek at them if I could. How did the book come about? I guess one day it just occurred to me that this absolutely universal, omnipresent, really simple object had in fact been invented at some point, like anything else. And so I thought, well, where was it invented? And it was really hard to find out, by which I mean, Google didn't help. So that was what set me looking. And it sent me off on this sort of wild journey, which turned into a book pretty quickly. And you have the results in front of you. Yeah. And what I love about this book, it really captured,

I think, the love and the mystique that I think people have around notebooks. I know for me, there's something about buying a new notebook. You open it up and you feel good. What do you think is going on there? Why do you think people are so drawn to notebooks and keeping a notebook and buying new notebooks, even though they already have unfinished notebooks at home? What's going on there, you think?

I think partly there's a promise, there's potential, isn't there? It's like any vaguely improving thing. It tells you that you can be a better version of yourself, I think. You can be a bit more creative, you can be better organized, you can write that novel, or you can start keeping a journal, or you can get really on top of your workload. I think that promise is in the blank pages. I think, but also you find it inviting. A lot of people actually, particularly who aren't long-term notebookers, do find it a little bit intimidating almost, the blank page. And they get a bit frightened of it. Yeah.

I've known people like that. They'll buy a really nice journal and they won't write in it. It's like, well, I just want to make sure what I write in it is good. Yeah,

it's got to be perfect. And that's not the right attitude at all. Yeah.

So let's talk about the history of the notebook. What did humans use to keep track of notes before paper notebooks existed? There were three main things.

And we're talking about Europe here. It's largely a European story that I tell in the book, although I'm not arrogant enough to think that that's the entire world. But they use parchment, which is very tough. It's very expensive. It's very tricky to write on. It's very hard to use parchment if you're not sitting at a desk. And in effect, you're actually painting onto the page when you write on parchment. So it's not the most practical medium. For

those who aren't familiar, what is parchment? I'm sure people have heard like, oh, this is parchment. But like, what is parchment made out of?

Parchment is basically a kind of leather. It is animal hide, which has been stretched very thin. So it's been tensioned while it's been, I guess, cured. But it is leather and it's made out of the same stuff as your boots And it does, therefore, last forever. It's incredibly tough. It's very robust, but it's very thick pages. So if you have a parchment book with 100 pages, it's like a brick. But it's a very tough material. And as I say, if you can sit down on your desk, it's a great material. Then you have papyrus, which came out of Egypt, which the ancient Egyptians famously used, but also the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans used a lot of papyrus. And it's much easier to use for sort of quick and dirty writing. And it was very cheap, but it falls apart over time. It's very, very hard to keep papyrus together, which is why it basically only survives in Egyptian tombs, which are sort of the driest, stillest places in the entire world. So the Romans had a lot of literature on papyrus, but it's all gone. And then the third thing, which is in a way the most interesting, were these little wax tablets, which people all over the Mediterranean used and the Middle East used for thousands of years. And these were very much the notebooks of their day. You'd have a little pair of wooden frames, if you like, which opened like those little picture frames with a hinge in the middle. And you'd have wax on the insides, which you could scrape into with a stylus. And so you could fill up these pages with scratched writing. And then when you filled the page or didn't need it again, you could just wipe it clean. Now, obviously, that's really, really useful if you want to just make a shopping list or keep a quick list of something that's going on. But it's not so practical if you've got something like a contract, which you want to preserve forever and never change. So all of these mediums had their advantages

and disadvantages. I thought that was interesting, the handheld wax tablets. There's actually mosaics of a woman, and it looks like she's using almost like a Palm Pilot. It was really bizarre to see. It's like, wow, this is like thousands of years old, but it looks like she's got a little PDA in her hand. Yeah. And they were absolutely used everywhere for maybe

2,000 years or probably more. They were really, really good little bit of technology. And then they vanished with paper, basically, because paper was so much more practical. Yeah.

And during this time, what did people keep track of? I mean, today we use a notebook for all sorts of things. What were people keeping track of on their handheld tablets or parchment or papyrus? Well,

one of the interesting things which I found out during the book is really that people's lives back then were as complicated almost as ours are now, or rather that they were certainly as varied. So people had shopping lists. They had anything to do with their businesses. If they were buying and selling or making, they inevitably had to take notes about their customers or the money that they borrowed or lent, etc. And so any kind of business, it was very important. But also people were writing down prayers and poems, any kind of what we would call literature. But obviously, they didn't have printed books in those days. So if you wanted to have poems or any kind of writing in your house, you had to have it basically in a notebook or something like that. Okay,

so these three mediums, parchment, papyrus, tablets, they allowed you to get stuff down and keep it there. They all had their downsides. Parchment, too heavy, too expensive. Papyrus didn't last very long. The wax handheld tablets, you know, good for shopping list and very ethereal type things that you could just erase at the end of the day. But you talk about there was a big change that happened in the 1200s in Italy, that basically revolutionized the notebook and created almost the notebook that we have today. So what was going on in Italy in the 1200s that led to the development of the paper

notebook? It was a really important moment in history, I think. And it was a real technological leap forward. So they got hold of paper from the Spanish and the Spanish got hold of paper from the Arabs or the Islamic occupiers of what is now Valencia. And for hundreds of years, they'd been making paper there as part of the Islamic caliphates. And they got really, really good at it. And then when the king of Catalonia, who was a guy called James II, he wanted it. Basically, he went out and conquered them and he got hold of the paper and the papermakers kept hold of them, treated them very well and started exporting paper everywhere. Now the Italians, what they did was they realized that it could transform their business. Because suddenly they had this medium, which they could do business on, which was permanent, and therefore secure. So if you had a business ledger, and you wrote something down in it, you knew it could not be forged. Yeah, why is that? What is it about paper? You

talk about in the book that parchment, that was one of the key differences between parchment and paper. Paper was permanent. What was it about paper that made it permanent? If

you write on paper with ink, the ink goes into the middle of the paper and it sticks there and you can't get rid of it without destroying the page. If you write on a parchment sheet with ink, it just sits on top a bit like paint and it's very easy to scrape it off and replace it with something else, which people who used parchment did all the time because it was so expensive. So if they'd finished with a book and they wanted to reuse the parchment, they just scraped off the writing and it was as good as new. But merchants suddenly had this secure way of recording transactions, debts, deals, and of course that enabled them to have much more interesting, complicated businesses because they could suddenly trust their information technology. And this allowed the development of paper and paper books.

This led to the development of, what's that accounting? Double book accounting? Double entry bookkeeping. Double entry bookkeeping. I mean, maybe people have heard this, but for those who aren't familiar, what

is double entry bookkeeping and why is it such a big deal? Right. Among your listeners, you're going to have, I hope, plenty of accountants, plenty of people who've got double entry bookkeeping degrees or qualifications, people who have trained in any kind of money management. And I just want to salute them because they're the real heroes of the story. Double entry bookkeeping is tricky, but it's a very, very useful way of managing money. And it enables you to create a profit and loss picture out of quite a complicated array of deals. So when you talk about a company's balance sheet today, you're talking in terms of double entry bookkeeping, balancing credits and debits. When you talk about the profit and loss account, which every company does to this day, this was invented in Italy around the year 1300. When you talk about an annual statement or an annual statement of a company's accounts, that was invented in Italy. They invented limited liability partnerships. They invented futures markets. They had very sophisticated insurance and modern banking. And they invented the company. So if you've ever worked for a company, you can thank these Italians back in the year 1300. They invented all of these things in probably around Florence. And

it was all done in paper notebooks. And

that was their technology, yeah. And because there was so much cash flying around, Florence became one of the richest places in the world, despite the fact that it's a small city with very few natural resources of its own. They were so good at money management that their bankers basically ran European business for 100 years or more, and their merchants and manufacturers were among Europe's leading tradesmen. So basically because they were incredibly good at managing money. And people from all over Europe would look at them enviously and say, oh, they're doing it the Italian way. But they couldn't quite understand it because looked at from the outside, double entry bookkeeping is quite opaque, a little bit difficult to get your head around. So it took quite a long time for other people to do it. But then the Northern Italians learned how, the Germans learned how, then the Dutch and the French, and eventually even the British learned how to do double entry bookkeeping. And that is where the whole European economic model, capitalism really comes from. And

something that happened at the same time is you had these Italian accountants basically with their notebooks, their ledgers. And there were the artists around the same time looking around like, oh, these guys have got this cool thing that's they got this medium. Yeah, they got this medium where they can just look at things. It's lightweight. It creates a permanent record. Maybe we could use that for art. So how did Florentine artists co-opt paper accounting books and then turn them into sketchbooks? I

think it really was that simple. Imagine if you are an artist in a time before paper, then you can paint on the walls, you can paint on parchment or canvas, which are both inconvenient and expensive. You could carve wood or stone, but you couldn't casually go out and just sketch something and today's artists whether or not they're a hobbyist or a pro good or bad can take it absolutely for granted you can pick up a pencil just go out and sketch whatever you want or draw a picture of a person or of a rabbit or of a tree but this is actually again a sort of surprising development which people weren't always able to do so i think there was like a generation of artists in florence basically who saw their contemporaries using these notebooks which were quite cheap by this point for quite you know interesting business things and they just picked it up and started drawing in it and they realized or they discovered that if you draw a lot you get good at drawing. And suddenly they were better artists than they would have been without these notebooks and turned into really great artists, a generation, I think, of great artists. Yeah.

That's when you see the development of perspective, like there was an artist you highlight and you can actually see how you develop this perspective where things, because before that time, when people drew things, people have always seen those sort of like Byzantine type paintings where they'll just basically stack people on top of each other and yeah maybe they might the the person that's supposed to be far away looks smaller kind of but then it's still not in perspective well the notebook the sketching allowed these guys to figure out oh if we do it this, we can actually provide some visual depth to our art. Yeah.

And they could try and try and try again, which is really important. You know, if they produced a drawing, which wasn't very good, all they had to do was turn the page and try again. And that was never really available to previous generations of artists. But this movement from business technology to creative technology we've seen in our own time, because we've seen computers go from IBM to the Apple Mac. And then you have Pixar and you have these amazing digital artworks, which no one could have conceived of 50 years ago. And it's a very similar story. It's information technology being co-opted by creative people and used in crazy new ways. And the other thing that the notebook allowed

artists to do was not only they just draw a whole bunch, but because it was lightweight, they could share things with other artists. So it allowed artistic ideas to spread faster than before. If you wanted to see a painting, you had to go visit a church or go look at this mosaic wall. Now the notebook, you could just hand someone your sketchbook and go, hey,'m doing this thing with a perspective or two-point perspective you should check this out and then it just started spreading faster and faster exactly

exactly and there was definitely training going on in artist studios which worked exactly like that where they would have you know some really good drawings of feet in the studio notebook studio sketchbook and then you would just practice drawing feet using those and you would get good at feet, and then you'd move on to the next piece of anatomy.