“The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not ‘exact reproductions of the old’) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound those seventy-five words proved themselves one of the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities – usefulness and emotion – to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. Sebregondi and Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. ‘Made in China’, on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.”

“It became commonplace to contrast the old technology with the new. The original Moleskine had launched at the same time as the Palm Pilot, the first hand-held digital organizer, and had from day one faced competition from increasingly powerful devices. The laptop, the BlackBerry, the iPhone and the iPad all seemed to offer far greater functionality than their paper antecedent, but a stubborn constituency of users refused to move over into the digital sphere, and numerous peer-reviewed studies soon showed that their obduracy made sense. Something about the act of writing by hand, and the production of a physical object, makes the older technology more effective than the new. Sebregondi had, unwittingly, prompted serious inquiry into the workings of the human brain.”

Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century Roman Bible made of calf and sheepskin parchment

Cai Lun, a Han dynasty eunuch, invented paper with pulp vegetable fibers

“Over the middle centuries of the first millennium, as the Roman empire waned and the Chinese empire grew, their respective innovations approached each other along the silk roads. The codex moved east, as paper moved west, until finally, around the year 800, they met in the middle at the Abbasid Caliphate’s capital, Baghdad, which was rapidly becoming the world’s largest and richest city.”

Paper flourished among intellectuals during the Islam golden age, but didn’t spread into Europe; most literate population (clergy) committed to parchment and suspicious of paper’s infidel or recycled origins

Florentine merchant Giovanni Farolfi set up shop in Provence in 1299, and his bookkeeper Amatino Manucci pioneered use of double-entry bookkeeping through ledgers and notebooks to track accounting, credit and debit, equity and profit, monetary conversion into French livres

Proximity to large-scale paper manufacturers and merchants another advantage to Florence commercial dominance

Historian Jacob Soll: “Without double-entry accounting, neither modern capitalism nor the modern state could exist.”

Silicon Valley another example of “intersection of conceptual innovation, advanced, manufacture, information technology, profitable exports, and plentiful cash”

Florence between 1300-1500 become common to keep ricordanze (home account book), libri di ricordi (memoirs), and libri di famiglia (family books)

What we know as a diary pioneered by Gregorio Dati in 1400s, incorporating emotional life with transactional or genealogical

Zibaldone a Florentine slang for early version of commonplace book that peaked in popularity during 1400s  

“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.”

“Keen notebook-keeping was not unknown in London, but the practice never caught on as it had in Italy. One can point to many reasons why: lower literacy rates; less innovative commerce; a more stratified society; more expensive paper; and, away from the court, quieter intellectual networks.”

“In systematising the arrangement of information, Erasmus’s common-place – just as merchants’ ledgers had revolutionised finance – turned the notebook into information technology, a piece of hardware in which data could be stored, categorised and retrieved as necessary.”

Ars excerpendi: the art of excerpting

Angus Vine: “Common-placing is never an end in itself. It’s always about producing something afterwards, or preparing you for public life.”

Common-placing intellectual benefits: reading with greater concentration towards excerpting, placing under appropriate headword, juxtaposing with previous excerpts, externalized memory

Commonplace books became fixtures of European classrooms by 16th century, including for young Shakespeare

Darwin on his notetaking: researchers “ought to remember Bacon’s aphorism, that Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

Diaries of real-time accounts of people’s lives didn’t become common until early 17th century England

Lined pages arrived in 1770 but remained rare until mid 1800s