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Roland Allen is the author of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. The book is about the development of the notebook (i.e. a book you write in yourself) in European history, and it covers everything from the development of paper as a cheaper thing to write on than vellum, to wax tablets, to Italian accounting practices, to Leonardo da Vinci's famous notebooks, to Darwin, to the modern Moleskine and where it actually comes from.
In our conversation we talk about the means, motive and opportunity that enabled Roland to write The Notebook, and the challenges of covering such an enormous topic: what had to be left out; and the power of holding a grudge. There’s also great advice for anyone writing any sort of book about how to incorporate cause and effect into your storytelling. Readers need reasons and consequences to stay engaged.
We talk about Roland’s favourite genre of notebook, the zibaldone, which existed in medieval Florence as a way for people to write down all the bits of literature they liked, local songs, recipes, events – anything notable was written down in a hodgepodge paper version of a mixtape. To connect this to fencing, it is similar to one of our oldest treatises, Manuscript 3227a, also known as the Döbringer manuscript. This is basically a zibaldone, with a section in it on fighting with a longsword. But it also has sections in it on other things like fireworks and recipes.
There’s lots else to talk about, including our preferred brands of notebook, and our favourite paper.
Find out more about The Notebook on Roland’s website: https://roland-allen.com/
Transcript
Guy Windsor
I'm here today with Roland Allen, who is the author of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. He also works for Thames and Hudson's Skittle Dog imprint, in charge of operations, sales and marketing. The book, that's The Notebook, is about the development of the notebook (i.e. a book you write in yourself) in European history, and it covers everything from the development of paper as a cheaper thing to write on than vellum, to wax tablets, to Italian accounting practices to Leonardo da Vinci's famous notebooks to Darwin to the modern Moleskine and where it actually comes from. So without further ado, Roly, welcome to the show.
Roland Allen
Thanks very much for having me, Guy.
Guy Windsor
It's nice to meet you because I picked up your book in Helsinki, when I was there in November last year, just sort of on a whim. I’d never heard of it, and I thought that looks like my kind of thing. And oh, my God, I don't normally contact authors who have nothing to do with swords and say, do come on my podcast. So, yes, awesome book. Now, just to get everybody oriented, whereabouts in the world are you?
Roland Allen
I'm in Brighton in the south of England.
Guy Windsor
Well, that's lovely, nice part of the world.
Roland Allen
It is today. Yes, it's gorgeous.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. And clearly you're a publishing professional. So how did you get into publishing?
Roland Allen
How did I get into publishing? I guess this is a question I've been thinking about quite a lot recently because of another thing that I'm writing. But essentially, I always loved reading and did an English degree, and then it just seemed like the path of least resistance, which is a decision, or lack of decision, which I've sort of slightly regretted over the years when making financial decisions, but generally, by and large, culturally and for my happiness, it's been a good decision. I've very much enjoyed working with books. But I will say I work in illustrated books, which is full colour things, things like cookbooks or gardening books or gifts. Which is a very, very different world to most of the books that you actually read, and indeed, The Notebook. So doing The Notebook was very much a step into a different territory for me.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so what's different about producing books with pictures?
Roland Allen
Well, that's an interesting question. Essentially, it boils down to with a photographic book, you're printing it in four colours, so the print is automatically complicated and expensive, and you need things like repro and graphic design and high-quality paper and full colour printing on expensive presses.
Guy Windsor
Just to give you some context. I mean, I've produced books that are black and white, and I've produced facsimiles of medieval treatises in full colour and whatnot. So I'm familiar with the basic idea, but since 2012 or so, I've produced all of my books myself, because I make a lot more money that way. But I'm not familiar with how it works in the wider publishing industry, because commercial publishers, you have to basically put a bunch of money into a book that may or may not sell. Is that correct?
Roland Allen
Yes, and the risk is in different places. So if it's a book, for the sake of argument, like a big cookbook with 50 Italian recipes or 100 Italian recipes, or whatever, most of your investment goes into the physical product, either in the form of graphic design or the actual printing of the book or storing it or shipping it, and that's what you're trying to minimize or manage that risk. Whereas, if you're printing a text only book, a novel, for instance, your investment isn't in the physical book. Your investment is in all the work which goes into the manuscript, hopefully, so things like editing and the author in particular, and also to a certain extent, the marketing. So a book like that goes through many, many editorial stages, but it's very, very cheap to print, and it's normally printed on very bad materials.
Guy Windsor
Can I just say that I absolutely love The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, but the paperback I got in a book shop in Helsinki is shit.
Roland Allen
yeah. I do completely get that.
Guy Windsor
Is there a fancy, high end full colour printed on good stock version of the book?
Roland Allen
There isn't a full colour version around, that would be suicidally expensive.
Guy Windsor
I would buy it.
Roland Allen
That's very nice of you to say. The hardback edition profile actually did a really, really nice job, and they did put some money into the paper and etc. for that. It's quite hard with paperbacks, just because in the. UK, there are basically two paperback printers. They have a limited selection of paper stocks, and people very often just default to what they default to. And yeah, I agree, it doesn't feel as nice. If you can find the hardback on eBay, that's an extremely nice production. Also the Canadian edition, which is what they sell in the States. If you're listening to this in the States, the Canadian edition from Biblioasis is produced to a really high standard. It's a paperback, but it's a totally different paperback. Okay, so that's a possible solution as well. Biblioasis have really put some love into it. So yeah, I'm not in love with the paperback, but the function of the paperback is to is to be cheap and cheerful.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and it does that just fine. I just think, because you've got quite a lot of illustrations in the book, including pictures of Leonel da Vinci's notebook and pictures of, like, Boccaccio, for example, handwritten stuff. I mean, lots and lots of really interesting illustrations that I would like much bigger and printed on better papers, so I can see them better, but yeah, okay, so I shall find the hardback, no problem. So is the hardback not available in actual bookshops anymore?
Roland Allen
No, it's sold out from the publishers.
Guy Windsor
That's nice.
Roland Allen
Yeah, very nice. Yes. Everyone's been playing a blinder. I'm very happy with it, excellent.
Guy Windsor
So they're not going to be producing another hardback edition.
Roland Allen
No, I shouldn't think so. Not unless, you never know, something happens. Do you remember when Tiger Woods got arrested for crashing his car? And there was a book, it was called something like 50 Lessons in Physics or something, a very generic, boring book, which was in the background of the photos. It was in the footwell when he crashed his car. And for some reason there was, well, because of that, there was a massive spike in sales in this completely ordinary book about physics. As I recall, it was about physics. You know, it was a real five days wonder and in the bestseller charts just because it was the book that was in the car when Tiger crashed. So, unless something momentous like that happens…
Guy Windsor
Ah, well, really, you're appearing on my podcast. I mean, that's got to be better than being in a car crash with Tiger Woods. Maybe not. Okay, so you got into publishing. You've been in publishing for a while, though, so why did it take so long to write your own book?
Roland Allen
Because I was quite good at it, because I'm quite good at it, and it therefore took me a long time to get made redundant. Books are like crime scenes. You need means, motive and opportunity. And so the motive for me first was that over both my professional career and my home domestic life, I'd become really interested in notebooks. So I started keeping a diary when I was in my mid 20s, and then kept it more and more, as in writing more and more each day, on average, through my 30s. So I was very interested in diaries. And at work, I was working for an illustrated publisher, as I say, so I was constantly meeting artists, photographers, authors, all kinds of designers, all kinds of creative people, and seeing them use their notebooks creatively became fascinating for me. So I was very interested in the creative side of notebooks, and then, as I say, I had that sort of lurking in the background, and it was something I was interested in. And I always wanted to publish a book about notebooks when I was a publisher, but the right project never came up. The right author never came knocking on the door. So when I was made redundant, which happened, I think, a year before lockdown, a year before COVID, suddenly I had the opportunity to sit there and actually do some research. And so that was the means, if you like, because I had my redundancy money and/or the opportunity. But the other part of the motive was very much the sense of resentment I felt that having been laid off, and a big part of losing my job and then failing to get a job quickly, was being told repeatedly that I didn't know about long form historical nonfiction so going off and writing a long form historical nonfiction book.
Guy Windsor
So why would you need to know anything about long form historical nonfiction to publish Italian cookbooks?
Roland Allen
You don't, but that was the kind of job that I was applying for.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so, and they saw a gap in your CV, okay.
Roland Allen
Very much being told, no, you don't know anything about that. And I thought that they might be wrong.
Guy Windsor
Were they wrong?
Roland Allen
Well, I don't want to blow my own trumpet, Guy. I'm here to do so, but it’s been translated into eight languages. You know, the reviews from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal were so nice, I might have written them myself, you know, that sort of thing.
Guy Windsor
They were definitely wrong then.
Roland Allen
Well, that's my take. That's what I tell myself. But the point is, I was motivated by grudge. And you'll know this, you're into single combat. So grudge is a very, very powerful thing, and that very much got me through the first painful period of working out how this book was actually going to work, because you've read it, there's a technical problem in as much as you're talking about an inanimate object, and inanimate objects don't make great protagonists for books. So you have to find a way, firstly, to bring the notebook to life. And obviously I tried to do that by talking about the lives of people who used it and then showing how notebooks changed their lives. So that’s one technical problem, you can’t actually write a whole book from the point of view of a notebook. The other one is that everything happens all at once. So when you're looking at a place like Florence in the 1300s they are using notebooks for literature in really exciting and I think, consequential ways, and for art as well, but also for architecture and also for business and bookkeeping. And that's, in a way, the most significant of all, because that sort of goes on to define capitalism and the modern economy. But all of this is happening at once, and it's really hard, technically, to pull it apart so it's coherent. And that process actually took me months and months to work out. And, you know, I think sometimes when I'm looking back at the book, you can sort of see the muddy patches in the book where I wish I'd sort of gone back and taken it apart again. But, you know, ran out of time.
Guy Windsor
I didn't get stuck in any quagmires myself. But this is something, when I was reading it, I was like, okay, you've got Roman wax tablets, and you've got everything between there and the modern moleskin, right? Yeah. And you have this explosion of notebooks being used for sketching and accounts and design and diary and commonplace booking, all that, basically everything you can use notebook for is happening. And it's like, I keep trying to write a book about swordsmanship, in which I cover basically everything, where, you know, this is how swords have been used in all of these periods, and you have these kinds of swords or those kinds of swords, and they're all using these. And it's just like, there's too many styles and too many places and too many types of sword. But then you actually managed to tackle a broader subject, because swords are only really used for two things, there's fighting and there's display, whereas notebooks are used for lots and lots and lots of things. So your book is on an even bigger topic than swords and there are far more notebooks lying around over the centuries than there are sources for how swordsmanship was done. So your collection of data is at least an order of magnitude larger, and yet, somehow you managed to do it. So because I want to produce this book about swords, which has the same problem, I want to know the nitty gritty technical detail of how you took that morass of stuff and ordered it into an actual working book.
Roland Allen
It was a painful process, but and one of the most painful parts of it, as you'd guess, really is working out what to leave out. There was a lot on the cutting room floor with this book, I would say, easily, the same amount of book again, was chopped by me, mainly, but also by the editors. So I ended up focusing on the firsts, the first time something happened, not necessarily, because the first is when there's the most impact, but that's when it's new. And new is a very interesting idea for readers. So I guess from your point of view, you're looking at the first time you can, you can look at a particular technique or a particular kind of sword or blade or material or armor or whatever. The other thing is to focus on human stories. So if you can't find the first then find the first person with a name who did something whose story you can tell or guess at. And also, the other thing is to focus on is consequences. Because people are obsessed. Readers are obsessed, I cannot tell you how much, by cause and effect. This occurred to me, I don't have a strong interest in snooker or pool but when it comes on the television, suddenly it becomes riveting, and it is because your game of sneaker is your absolute cause and effect in purest form. There's no mediation at all. The ball gets hit, other balls ricochet off it. That's it. It’s so transparent. And then there are obviously nuances and subtleties to how you do that, but watching balls bounce off each other is intrinsically fascinating.
Guy Windsor
So basically, snooker is a more sophisticated Newton's cradle. And how many executive desks have Newton's cradles on them? Because when you get bored, you pull the ball back and it goes, tick tack tick tack and it’s the same damn thing.
Roland Allen
Yes, exactly. And people are obsessed by cause and effect. So find a human story, which is to do with the first time something happened or something was made, and look for the consequences. And when you're telling a story as well, look at the beats of your story. This is not my original thought, but it's a very useful one, look at the beats of your story. And if it goes, this happened and that happened and that happened and that happened, then think again. If it is this happened, but this so that, but then so they, if it's but and so, or but and therefore, then you're in a good place, because it's all about consequences and struggle and things making a right, if it's “and” then you're in a list. And no one wants to read well, actually, I like reading lists, they are a literary device, but they are not good for telling stories. And what you want to avoid is things which happen out of the blue, which don't have consequences, or which weren't triggered by something else. Triggering is a great concept. This very simple advice about the ‘and and and’ being bad, and but, and so, or therefore being good. I learned from the creators of South Park, and they're very good, because they produce South Park at extremely high speed and I don’t know how many times they've done it now. They're extremely good at doing stories, which work, which carry across the humour and the point at pace. So you’ve got to take your hats off to them. And it is true. In fact, if you can watch things which are boring, and think, well, why is this boring? And you think, oh, well, it's because things keep happening and there's no cause to them, you know? Yeah, she crosses the road and she gets hit by a van and that's a plot point. Okay, that's that happens. But maybe she's crossing the road and a bee flies into the cab of the van, and the guy is trying to swat the bee, and he's frantically losing control, and then he runs her over, and that's what triggers everything. It's the bee. But what made the bee fly in there? Oh, was someone knocking its hive and etc, etc. Then you've got an interesting story. I would also say, and I'm sure that you've had this realisation, you've got to look at familiar things with a fresh eye and think, well, hang on, wait, wait, wait, wait, where did that come from? Which was the original thought with The Notebook. I was thinking, oh, this thing must have been invented somewhere, which seems to have been a question which no one else really asked, or at least no one else had asked in print. And I'm sure it's the same with you, you know, you'll be looking at different kinds of swords, and thinking, oh, hold on, why did people put a curve into their sword and make a scimitar? Why did they have short ones or long ones, or two handed ones, or ones with guards, or ones which were made like this, or bendy ones, etc? You'll know the answers to this, but there's always going to be a reason why something was invented. And I think you got to look at simple things and think, Oh, that was invented. I was listening to a podcast recently, which made the point that castles were an invention. And of course, you grew up in the UK. You grew up in England. They're just always there, you know, you take it for granted that castles are around the place. And then you think, oh, castles had to be invented, and they were a technology which did a particular thing. And that tells you a heck of a lot suddenly about the society which created castles. They weren't a natural part of the landscape. And then you understand why they're there. And of course, it's a much more interesting story than you know, brave Sir Richard built a castle.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, why did he do that? He had a reason. Yeah, for sure. Basically, they are aircraft carriers for horses. So basically a castle is a like stronghold where you can have a lot of soldiers and high end gear, and they can therefore control the countryside around them and retreat back to.
Roland Allen
Why are you doing that? Oh, because it's not your countryside to start with. Exactly.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah. Or it is your countryside, and other people want to take it for some reason.
Roland Allen
So, and it's really interesting, the transition from England, for instance, Anglo Saxon England having been fortified towns, to Norman England being full of castles. And you think, oh, that's actually on one level that's really sinister.
Guy Windsor
Very. Yes, okay, so you looked at all this morass of material that you had, and you're looking for firsts, your human stories, consequences, cause and effect. And I love that ‘this, but so’ rather than ‘and, and and’, that's really helpful, and also looking at familiar things with a fresh eye, like, you know, people see swords all over the place. So why does pretty much every coat of arms have swords on them?
Roland Allen
Another question I would ask, why do why do people carry ceremonial swords around, but not ceremonial clubs? I mean, in some scenarios they do, in the Houses of Parliament, of course, you've got the ceremonial mace, haven't you? But you know why swords, not halberds or spears or bows? The big questions which you would know the answer off top of your head, but you know, there will be an interesting story for the general reader there, I'm sure.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah. And I'm sort of holding myself back to not tell it right now, because it would take up the next three hours of this podcast, and it's supposed to be all about notebooks. Okay, so one thing you seem very good at doing is actually finding the firsts, the these original pieces. I'm thinking of, like that fish book in was it the Netherlands?
Roland Allen
God, that absolute bonkers. Lovely, lovely, lovely thing.
Guy Windsor
And so how did you, how did you find all of this material?
Roland Allen
Lots and lots of trawling through library catalogs and websites. So most of the writing is done during lockdown, which initially seemed because when I sort of got the book deal, and I'd made all sorts of plans for travel. I wanted to go to Florence, and I wanted to go to the Hague, and I wanted to go to here, there, everywhere,
Guy Windsor
And what better excuse?
Roland Allen
What better excuse, and able to put it against tax and everything like that. Yeah, then lockdown happened, and I just had no choice. I had to sit at my desk writing this book, because travel was impossible. But not only travel was impossible, like all these institutions basically were closed. So that actually turned into probably a good thing, because the thing about travel is it's very time consuming and quite inefficient, whereas once you get the hang of online library catalogs, and in particular, JSTOR, which is the humanities research portal, which has a lot of academic writing in the humanities on it available for free, once I've got my head around JSTOR, in particular, things started to fall into place quite quickly. So the book took three years, probably, to write. Had I been traveling around and looking at all these things in person, I'd still be writing.
Guy Windsor
It would have taken 10.
Roland Allen
It is quite interesting. They're not perfect by and large, but my goodness, the British Library catalogs actually kind of work, the American ones kind of work, the French ones, notoriously, really don't. So I didn't realize this until much later on, after the book was finished. But the main digital manuscripts catalogue, digitized manuscript login in the French system is called Gallica and it's got a terrible, terrible search function, which I now know all academics know. So they share hacks with each other, and they say, oh no, you go to this sub menu, and you go to this sub menu, and knowing the number of the manuscript will not help, because the number of the manuscript will not return it in a search.
Guy Windsor
Wow, that is bad.
Roland Allen
And there was me searching for things like the, effectively, the diaries of Louis the 14th, which I know are in there, and which I have all of the call numbers for, and everything, they wouldn't pop up. They're in there. But anyway, so that that is one reason, actually, why there is less about France than perhaps they could be. I will say also, the Italian collections have excellent catalogs, but very few of them are digitized. The German ones have lots of digitized stuff. The British Library has really surprising digitized stuff. The British Library, for instance, just utterly for no reason at all that I can tell the State of Qatar paid to digitize every single manuscript in or book in the British Library which mentions Qatar or the Gulf at all, because that means that every effectively, because of where the ships pulled in on their way to India, everything to do with British India is digitized, and it was digitized courtesy of the State of Qatar. An amazing resource, for instance, and one of the log books in there was because of that. So that led to another decision I made when I was writing the book, which was for people like you who got really into it and wanted to see more, I focused very much on manuscripts which were digitized, which I could direct people to and say, if you liked this, if you found this one interesting, away you go. Here it is. You can look at the whole thing, because most of them, like a good notebook, you can I could write a book about most of the time, I found. And the chapters as they are now, are a really tiny, tiny version of what you could say about all of these notebooks. So, you know, I hope that I've sent some people off down some fun rabbit holes.
Guy Windsor
Ah, yes, there's a reason that my current two book projects are about, I don't know 30,000 words behind where they ought to be. Thank you Roly.
Roland Allen
Sorry about that.
Guy Windsor
No, no at all. Yeah. Okay, so, so basically, your, your key to finding the sources is internet Kung Fu,
Roland Allen
And also, the other thing is always looking under the stone. Always, always, always look under the stone. So if you see someone mentioned in passing in someone else's story, look them up. If you find the name of someone's father or someone's grandfather, someone's mother, someone's village. Look it up, because a. that will give you probably a connection to something else, which is useful for that story, but otherwise it'll give you the colour. And there's nothing like finding out that, this other book I'm writing at the moment, for instance, I'm focusing on the books that a particular guy wrote, but then completely accidentally, I've found that he was involved in all kinds of sort of slightly blood feudy things, and was nearly executed and only got off because of obscure political reasons, et cetera. And that just makes the story so much more interesting, brings him to life. It's got nothing to do with the main topic of the book, but obviously being charged with murder makes you a more interesting person.
Guy Windsor
So who are we talking about?
Roland Allen
Funny enough, it's happened twice. One of them is an obscure Italian called Perottus. Well, he's called Perottus. He only wrote in Latin, so he's called Perottus. So I think there's some ambiguity as to whether his name was Perotto or Perotti, so an obscure Italian from the Renaissance is one. And the other one I've just discovered, actually, and I studied English and did quite well. And I had never known that Ben Johnson killed someone in a duel. Narrowly escaped a murder charge and but also was apparently an utter piece of work, I mean, widely reviled. I had no idea.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, he was branded on the thumb with T for Tyburn because he got off from the murder charge. He pleaded benefit of clergy because he could read and write. Which is insane.
Roland Allen
Cheeky in the 1600s isn’t it?
Guy Windsor
Cheeky, but he managed to do it, I think mostly because King James liked his plays, and I think probably a little deal was struck there.
Roland Allen
Yeah, so that's it, and that's interesting, because that I studied quite a lot of Ben Johnson. Never knew that. Really, didn't ever know that, and would have really helped at the time. Essentially, looking under the stones, looking at the things which are tangential to what you're actually writing about, just in case they throw something up. And time and time and again, it threw up something which, or another example, for instance, is looking up Leonardo's childhood. Now, I was writing about Leonardo's notebooks, yeah, and all of the notebooks which we have, which survive, were written when he was, I think, 30 years old and more. So don't have any of the notebooks of his youth, which is actually a big hole, which people don't really mention them. People say we've lost a lot, but they don't say there was a real at some point he lost them all, or they all got lost, which I find quite interesting, but also so I look back at his youth and discover that he did his apprenticeship in the studio of Verrocchio. Now this is very well known, and people are constantly comparing Verrocchio’s paintings to Leonardo's, so that they can say, oh, Leonardo was much better painter, okay. Look under the stone. What else was going on in Verrocchio’s workshop, and you find that he was copying zibaldoni commercially. So that's interesting, because that's a direct connection between the Florentine zibaldoni and Leonardo's training, his youth. He was surrounded by notebooks as a teenager in being produced almost on an industrial scale. Of course, he went off and had made notebooks for himself. You know, it's perfectly logical, and that explains where his notebooks actually came from, which is a big question otherwise.
Guy Windsor
Okay, we are going to come back to that. But I do need to know, what is the connection between Perottus and Ben Johnson?
Roland Allen
Oh, well, Perottus was an attempted murder, which didn't come off. Johnson's, he killed someone in a duel, as you say. So that's, that's the connection. I was looking at their books, but defined that they were both homicidal. Let's put it like that. It's fun.
Guy Windsor
Yes, absolutely. And it's funny how people have very different views of what counts as, like looking for trouble. Because if I remember rightly, it was, I think Cellini, the silversmith who was exiled because he got into a fight in a pub and killed somebody, and it was clearly not murder, because he went to the pub wearing a mail shirt with a sword and a dagger. So he clearly wasn't looking for trouble because he wasn't really armed. Yeah, and I have a friend in America who lives in a open carry state, and he always carries a revolver. And I asked him, well, why are you carrying a revolver? You've got six shots. Why don't you have a Glock or something? And he was like, well, the thing is, I'm carrying a revolver, and so I'm clearly not looking for trouble. So if I do end up shooting someone, I can say to the cops clearly I didn't go expecting a gunfight, or I’d have brought a bigger gun, and that apparently flies over there. Try telling that to the Metropolitan Police here, and they will not be impressed.
Roland Allen
Or a jury, yes. Another person I'm researching at the moment was a Jesuit priest, not a monk, a priest, who went to China in the late Ming period, around 1600, and one of his main surprise observations about China was the men don't carry swords. What is this place, right? And of course, they didn't need to because they had law and order, which was very much missing in Italy at the time.
Guy Windsor
Well, there was law and there was order. It was just different. And what was considered reasonable behavior was different. I mean, murder was still murder, and it's not like everyone could just randomly go around killing each other. Gentlemen in duels could get away with murder because they're gentlemen having duels. And that's sort of understood. Even European monarchs have been trying to mitigate the problems of dueling up until it sort of died away in the 19th century. Like the last duel fought in Scotland was done with pistols. There's a whole book about it, and the judge who let the chap go, because, well, it was basically a duel. And that's kind of yes, technically murder. But you know, we can't, we can't hang a chap for shooting someone who was clearly shooting back. No, it's premeditated murder, where the other person gets a chance to shoot back. That same judge had sent a young girl aged about eight to Australia for 10 years or something for shoplifting. So, yeah, there were laws and they were applied. They were just applied, should we say inconsistently?
Roland Allen
Yeah.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so zibaldoni, right. I am, one of the things that really surprised me when I read the book was, how the hell did I not know the word zibaldone, because it's just the best word for the best thing. So yeah, tell us what zibaldone is.
Roland Allen
I think this turned into my favorite genre of notebook, and I was really lucky here. Zibaldoni exist in huge numbers in the libraries in Florence, because medieval Florentines were assiduous zibaldoni keepers, and they are your personal anthology. So you got to think, we're talking about a time before print. And therefore, if you wanted to enjoy literature, you had to have it hand written down at home. And if you wanted that, basically, you had to write it yourself, because paying a scribe to write something for you is very expensive, and, you know, it's just not ideal. So people kept their own anthologies of the literature that they liked, and they were really mixed things. They had prayers in them. They had Aesop's Fables. They had bits of Ovid. They had folk tales, they had local songs, they had recipes, they had particularly cures for different ailments. They had the events of the town. If they were particularly notable, they would write something down. You could think of it as a kind of mixtape. Basically, is anything which I wouldn't want to forget, which will be fun or useful in future, I'll just write it down. Keep it in my zibaldone. Everyone in Florence had one of these notebooks. It seems we know from the wills that typically, the average will in Florence includes two to three books. And in those days, they weren't printed books, they were handwritten books. So we're talking, in effect, about people’s zibaldoni, and they were so fun, people would fill them with drawings. And because they're entirely personal, there's no kind of filter on what they put into them, and then they would share them. And this is, I think, how a big part of how Dante, for instance, built up a big audience, was that people could take their favorite bits of Dante, of the Divine Comedy, and write it down and have a copy at home when at a time when to pay a scribe to do it and get a copy made for you, would have been ridiculously expensive. So it's a very, very democratizing thing that zibaldone. And zibaldone is a Tuscan word which apparently means salad or mint salad to them, and that perfectly captures it. It's a hodgepodge book, yeah. So it's very easy to fall in love with zibaldoni, and I was really lucky in as much as they're very poorly digitized in Florence, people know nothing about them. And also, it's one of those words where half of the time when you read the word zibaldone being used, it's in the wrong context, and it's misdefined, so it's very misleading. And I was very lucky that the person who's done more research on zibaldoni than anyone else shared her thesis with me, which was all nearly everything you read in the book about zibaldoni comes from that thesis. And I do credit it.
Guy Windsor
It’s lovely when, when people, when people do that? And honestly, in my experience, academics generally, they know that their PhD is going to be read by maybe 12 people. And so anyone who says, Can I please have a copy of your PhD? It sounds really fascinating. I'd love to read it. I usually like, oh, my God, you actually want to read this thing? I spent eight years of my life working on? Yes, please!
Roland Allen
And then when you come across one which is readable, then that's a massive bonus. And when you come across one which you know sort of actually tells you everything you need to know, it's fantastic that this is, I mean, this isn't a disadvantage at all, but be careful disagreeing with something in that PhD thing. Then you’re opening cans of worms, which happened to me with one of the economists who I asked questions about the bookkeeping of Florence and the economy of Florence, and he robustly disagreed with my suggestions, but that's part of life, isn't it? But, yeah, Lisa Cabarica, her name is, and so she is, I think, producing a book about zibaldoni at the moment, which will be great.
Guy Windsor
Fabulous. Wow. I will buy it immediately when it comes out. Because this reminds me, like one of the oldest fencing treatises that we have. It's known as Manuscript 3227a, also known as the Döbringer manuscript, which is a sort of slightly dodgy way of referring to it. It is basically a zibaldone. It has a section in it on fighting with a longsword. But it also has sections in it on other things like fireworks and recipes. And it has just tons different bits and pieces. Because, you know, some people think, oh, this, this sword thing I came across, is really cool. I better stick it in my zibaldone.
Roland Allen
And that's wonderful. I wish I'd come across that. Where's it from?
Guy Windsor
Well, it's German. It's written in German. And let me see where the manuscript is.
Roland Allen
What was the date of it?
Guy Windsor
1389, 1388, somewhere around there.
Roland Allen
See, that's really interesting, because that's when, very nicely time for when they're starting to make paper in Germany, or paper is starting to get its way into Germany in decent quantities.
Guy Windsor
I don't know whether it's on paper or vellum. Let me just check for you, because we can always edit out lengthy pauses. It's known as the Nuremberg Hausbuch. So it's a house book, yep, fencing and grappling.
Roland Allen
I'm going to make a stake modest wage now that it's on paper, okay, purely because of the date and the fact that it's called Hausbuch, people did not keep house books on vellum unless they were really quite well off.
Guy Windsor
According to Wiktenauer, which is basically a friend of mine called Michael Chidester, runs this unbelievably excellent website called wiktenauer.com which has basically all of the sources up until about the early 1600s that we have on anything related to martial arts. All of those sources, digitized, annotised, stuck up online, in many cases, translations. A couple of my translations are up there too. So basically, it's this fabulous collaborative resource for historical martial artists, which includes dozens and dozens and dozens of scans of manuscripts, and it says here on Wiktenauer that it is on paper and parchment.
Roland Allen
Well, then we're both right, the parchment may well be part of the binding. What they often did was put parchment covers around paper books, because parchment is that much more robust.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Well, I will email you the link to it on Wiktenauer, and that can set you off down your own little rabbit hole. I think it's only fair that I get to send you off down rabbit holes too. That's justice.
Roland Allen
But it's really interesting to actually, to get a non Italian notebook like that, like a zibaloni type random notebook at that period that's really early, full stop, regardless of whether or not it's about swords so that, I mean, that's a really interesting document. For instance, if you're comparing with English, I'm going to stick my neck out and say we have about four notebooks from the entire 15th century, which fall into that category, and they're all merchants notebooks from London. It's really very, very few. So 1380 and outside Italy is remarkably early.
Guy Windsor
Okay, now, I will not swear to the dating, but by all means, you dive down this thing, and I'll be fascinated to hear what you think about it. And you know, feel free to write an article on it from your perspective and send it to me and I'll publish it everywhere. And all of my sword fighty people will be extremely pleased with me, which will be good. Because anything I could do to get people with solid academic skills, pointing them towards the sources we care about. It's a good, good thing. So one of the, I guess we'd call it a zibaldone, like Barnabas Smith's commonplace book. I mean commonplace book is the is the standard English term for this isn't it?
Roland Allen
Yeah, you've got to be a bit careful, because there's the thing about a zibaldone, it's like a salad, it's tossed, and it's random, if you like, yeah. Whereas a commonplace book actually is very well organized, because it's should be, in theory, organized under head words, and it turns into, over time, your own little encyclopedia, thematically arranged. So typically, it would be a theology student who would keep a commonplace book. Typically the head words would be things like ‘jealousy’ or ‘God’ or ‘love’ or ‘justice’, you know, big topics like that. And you would root through all of your serious reading, and you would pull out useful quotations and excerpts on those subjects. And so a commonplace book is, firstly, very organized, very educational. Secondly, it's no fun, whereas a zibaldone is fun, and you can tell this. The thing about Barnabas Smith's is that he doesn't get very far with it. He definitely peters out. But anyway, I interrupted.
Guy Windsor
No, no, I was just bringing up Barnabas Smith, because, again, it was one of those startles in your book where you start talking about this rather, rather tedious cleric and then who did he end up stepfather to?
Roland Allen
He was a very poor, very neglectful, very unloved stepfather to Isaac Newton, who went on to as an adult form, so far as I can tell, precisely no warm human relationships at all, and was clearly like an emotional basket case. And all sorts of things were to blame. He clearly had a bit of a wreck of a childhood, poor guy. And Barnabas Smith, his stepfather, who was an Anglican priest in Lincolnshire, definitely played his part in that miserable childhood. Yeah, and I'm glad that worked as a little reveal. That was a little trick I saw there was an opportunity there to sort of have a little reveal. And yes, we put it in. Because no one's heard of Barnabas Smith.
Guy Windsor
And his commonplace book survives.
Roland Allen
Yeah. And this is really interesting, because, and this is cause and effect for you. So Isaac Newton's at Cambridge, the plague comes around, so he gets sent home. So he's shut up in a farmhouse in remote Lincolnshire, away from intellectual company and in the house where he'd had a very unhappy childhood, or parts of a very unhappy childhood, but he turns that on its head, and turns this period of isolation into something useful, because he finds a big empty notebook, or nearly empty notebook, with huge pages on which he can really let himself go. So he designs telescopes, and he comes up with differential calculus, and he does all kinds of crazy intellectual Newtonian stuff alone, basically in this cottage in Lincolnshire, in this big, half empty notebook, which had previously been his loathed stepfather's commonplace book. But as I say, it was a very, very big book, and the stepfather didn't have much patience for commonplacing. So large amounts of this book were blank white sheets of paper, which young Isaac Newton, who had very little money as well. This would have been a big, expensive bit of stationery. He would really appreciate it, being able to use it, and he probably enjoyed, in this sort of territorial way, nicking his stepfather's book and putting it to his own ends. I think that's a human thing.
Guy Windsor
A lesser mind might have nicked his stepfather's car and driven it through a hedge. Yeah, so he nicks his notebook. And as you say, it's a big, expensive book.
Roland Allen
This is well documented, it's on the Cambridge website. You can see every page of it beautifully. Also, they've got videos of it. It's actually now in two parts. You need two hands to lift it. It's an absolute brute of a book. It must have been made as some kind of heavy business ledger originally, because there's no way that any normal person would use it as a notebook, even if they were, you know, deep in studies. So it was a completely unsuitable choice for a commonplace book in the first place. But yes, huge, and it is now the seat of Newton's discoveries regarding gravity and calculus and optics and things like that. So it's a really precious thing.
Guy Windsor
You have to wonder what Newton would have done in that period if he hadn't had enormous bits of paper to write on. How much of that stuff would have just come and gone in his brain and never been recorded?
Roland Allen
Or never been pursued. Yeah, and if he'd been at Cambridge, for instance, he would have had his studies. Would he have come up with that stuff? He wasn't isolated, he wasn't on his own. He wasn't forced into sort of deep reflection. Who knows. And another really interesting thing about that notebook is that 30 years later, when there is argument over who came up with the calculus in effect, he goes back and rewrites his notes to make it look like he was ahead of the game. Like I say he really was a piece of work.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, he was. He was a petty piece of shit who was knighted for basically, torturing and murdering, executing forgers. That's what he was knighted for. He was knighted for his relentless pursuit of forgers, which, to be fair, they were a problem for the stability of British currency. But still, I mean, he had the sort of personality where he would vindictively make sure that they got properly tortured and then executed.
Roland Allen
The right man for the job at the time.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so what kind of notebooks do you actually use?
Roland Allen
I am very so writing the book about the guy. I'm sorry this is going to have to have to be the last question.
Guy Windsor
Oh, sorry, are you short of time?
Roland Allen
No, no. I mean, I'll answer this in full, but I've got like, five or 10 minutes tops, if that's all right.
Guy Windsor
Okay, all right, yeah, sure.
Roland Allen
Okay, so what notebooks do I use? I'll answer that two ways, firstly, in terms of what I do with them, and then secondly, the actual notebooks themselves, the brands, etc. So writing the book about the notebook was amazing from the point of view of showing me how notebooks could be used, because I didn't know any of this stuff when I started. I didn't know what a commonplace book was. Certainly didn't know what a zibaldone was. Didn't understand how common it is for people to go through stages. So you put your rough notes down in one notebook, just as they occur into your head, and then you process them into a second notebook where they're organized and where your thoughts can develop. And this is a very common thing through all kinds of notebooking over time. I had no idea that this happened, and it also showed me time and again how effective notebooks are at what they can do, you know, and in terms of organising our thoughts. So I started off writing The Notebook, ironically, not being very good at keeping notebooks. By the end of it, I knew a lot about it, but I still wasn't keeping great notebooks. I will admit the book I'm currently working on, which is another book about paper culture, if you like, the notebooking I'm doing for that is a different order. I mean, it's absolutely, I'm really pleased with it. I have a notebook for every chapter. I have book which is apropos the discussion we had earlier about how to make something interesting out of this mess of information. I have a notebook which is called plans, beats and schemes, and all it is is me organizing facts into little arrangements which might make a narrative, which might be an interesting story, and that's all it is. It's not any of the research at all. It's just me going, oh, if I go this, so this, so this, so this, does that make a story? Okay? Scratch it out next time. Try again. And there's an entire notebook which is nothing but that. Then there's another one which is well, for each chapter, for each chapter I'm writing, I've got a little method now, which is, I start out by putting a map of the place. This is an incredible tool, because when you map someone's life story, and you say, okay, grew up in this village here, moved here for university, went there, went there, went there. And you track those journeys, and you think, okay, so they saw this, or they had to go through this place, you know? And I don't know Italy particularly well. If someone says to me, Oh, they were born in Genoa, and then they studied in Florence, and then they moved to Bologna, I need to look at it on a map to work out what that means. And that always throws up something really good. And particularly, again, if you're talking about two or three characters, where did their paths intersect, that's really interesting, and why? And then you look at the town where their paths intersected. And then. You realize, ah, there was a school there, or there was a library, or whatever it was that was there. So that's key. Timelines are really important as well. So for a given chapter, I will have a particular timeline, but I've also got a notebook which is basically nothing but like a mega timeline of everything from the year 1400 to now, which I'm filling up steadily, which is quite good. So just for the book I'm writing at the moment, I'm going to estimate that I'm probably writing in about five, six notebooks at once. I think that's fair. Then I've got two or three book ideas which aren't yet, you know, plans or contracted, but where I'm just storing ideas and storing things, sticking pictures in, making notes of things that I come across online, articles and stuff like that, to come back to in a year's time or 10 years’ time. And I've got two or three of those on the go. I want to say three, three on the go. And then I've got my own daily diary, and then I've got my work notebook. Then I've got a commonplace notebook, which I started. It's actually in an address book, just purely to see how annoyingly difficult keeping a commonplace is. It's got a tiny number of entries in it. Keeping a commonplace book is a real bore. That's really interesting information to me. Do you remember address books, the size and shape they used to be? Very good for slipping in your pocket. I pack notebooks like that, and when I'm doing a talk, when I'm doing an appearance, I make my notes into one of those so they're very small. And again, all of my notes for all of my public appearances talking about these things are in one place. So I've got a little stack of those now. I've got a sketchbook for when I do get around to doing any drawing, and I am sure that I'm missing one.
Guy Windsor
Are you fussy about sort of paper and binding. I mean, I'm so fussy about it I bind my own.
Roland Allen
That’s good. And I applaud that I am fussy about them. I started like everyone. I started off basically writing my serious diary in the Moleskine.
Guy Windsor
They're terrible.
Roland Allen
Well, it's interesting. They went badly downhill. And, you know, there are websites which do nothing except compare different versions of Moleskine for every year. But there definitely was a sort of drop in quality. The Moleskine company has changed hands so many times. I think every time they probably move that they place their printing in different places. Anyway. Went from them to Leuchtturm. Leuchtturm is, I think, a superior product. But then I discovered Japanese paper, and that was that. There's a one particular brand called Tomoe River, which is wonderfully smooth and fine. But in fact, I have discovered that there is just a lot of Japanese paper which is wonderfully smooth and fine. So now I use for my main notebook, for my main journal, if you like, I use a Stálogy 368 page notebook, which is on thin paper. And therefore it doesn't feel like 368 pages, but it's a page for every day of the year. And then that's A5 size, which is nice and portable. They're nice for writing a diary. And then I use B5 now for making notes, for my writing, which is a exactly 50% larger page area. And that's sort of school exercise book size, or Japanese exercise book size. And I use Japanese notebooks of different brands for that, and lovely, smooth paper, narrow lines, and I fill those pages.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the Fabriano Ecoqua
Roland Allen
I’ve heard of that one. I'd love to go to Fabriano and see the paper mills there.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I mean, and they've been producing paper there since, I mean, well, Michelangelo got his paper there, and they were old when he was buying from them.
Roland Allen
Well, they seem to have, no one knows for sure. They seem to have invented the mechanized paper mill, based on a fulling mill, which is so when, when you're fulling your pounding wool, and it occurred to them to stick flax in there instead. And instead of pounding wool, they made paper pulp, so that they had an impact on history.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Okay, now you said you are short of time, so would you like to wrap it up now?
Roland Allen
Give us one quick one.
Guy Windsor
It's actually more of a request. Now you said there's about as much of the book that didn't make it into the book, as did so you have a bunch of extra material, yeah. Do you have any plans to make any of that like public in any reasonable way?
Roland Allen
No, because there is a reason why it's on the cutting room floor. Because there is too much, and by and large the book is basically a director's cut as it is. It's fairly long, and it's got nearly everything in it that I wanted. I see the point of your question. Rather than revisit stuff which are junked, mainly for good reasons, the three areas which I really wanted to pursue and just couldn't for reasons of time and space. And a couple of reviewers, have noted gaps, but most people missed it. The things which I really wish I'd covered were astronomers’ notebooks, because I’m absolutely positive that they would have been some good stuff there. I really wanted to cover architects’ notebooks. Did very briefly with Ghiberti’s notebooks. He helped build the Duomo in Florence, but only very, very much in passing. And I would love to have covered journalists’ notebooks, and particularly in the 19th century, where you have characters like, what was his name, Russell, who reported on the Crimean War and the American Civil War and so forth. And his notebooks are pretty amazing. So yeah, journalists, architects and astronomers, I did not get in, and I wish I had, but, you know, I needed to publish it at some point.
Guy Windsor
You can always do a second edition with these bonus chapters.
Roland Allen
Yeah, that would be terrific. A 10th anniversary thing.
Guy Windsor
Don't wait that long. Maybe produce a notebook to The Notebook where you have these three extra chapters and space for people to write their own notes in. I mean, the possibilities are endless, and I certainly would buy it.
Roland Allen
You're very, very kind.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so we have covered quite a lot in a relatively short time. Is there anything that we that you'd like to bring up that you haven't had a chance to?
Roland Allen
No, I'm just really grateful for the for the invitation. So thank you very much. It's been really fun. I will look out for your swordsmanship titles. Definitely have a look at that interesting sounding German treaties, because that sounds really, really interesting and relevant to notebooks.
Guy Windsor
I will email you a link. No problem at all. Excellent. So well. Thank you so much for joining me today, Roly, it has been lovely to meet you.
Roland Allen
That's a real pleasure, guy. Thank you so much.
