A Notebook Accounting

We watched today’s keynote for the Wild Wonder Conference on nature journaling that is currently taking place. The keynote presentation was given by Roland Allen who recently wrote the book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, and was billed as an incomplete history of nature notebooks. Allen traces the history of notebooks in Europe back to the introduction of paper manufacturing in Xàtiva in Islamic Spain. This technology gave people cheap and durable surfaces upon which to write, and in Florence the paper was bound into notebooks for common use. Accountants were some of the first ones to take advantage of the technology, inventing double-entry bookkeeping via ledgers. Paper was also a much more satisfying material to draw on than parchment, and this led to the first realistic nature illustrations by individuals such as Conrad Gessner.

Allen is a great advocate of the notebook as a cognitive tool, and he shared some of the different notebooks he keeps. Both Pica and I keep many notebooks as well, and here is a perhaps incomplete list of the ones I have:

1. My bullet journal. A list of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks and events, together with notes on various projects. This is a Moleskine gridded notebook.
2. My daily journal, entitled “A Journal of The Unraveling”. I complete one page a day in this, and always end the page with a quick sketch of a cat.
3. My daily sketchbook, currently in vertical format with the subjects being plant bits.
4. A work notebook, which I mostly used for taking notes on conference calls.
5. A nature journal. Unlike most of the attendees at the conference, I rarely make entries in it.
6. A notebook of astronomy observations.
7. A notebook for my Catalan studies. I don’t seem to have a notebook for Spanish, and instead use a card file to record interesting words.
8. A notebook of Hebrew vocabulary from the Duolingo course which I got through in spring of 2022.
9. A notebook of astronomy observations.
10. Two notebooks from the days when I was actively doing radio. First, a logbook of my ham radio contacts on HF.
11. Second, a notebook of interesting shortwave radio loggings.
12. And a miscellany of other sketchbooks.