Timeline of the Notebook
The paper notebook and its forerunners, from a Bronze Age hinged writing board of about 1305 BCE through Roman wax tablets, commonplace books and scientists' notebooks to legal pads, spiral binding, the Moleskine revival and e-paper notebooks in the 2020s.
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- 16 events ~1305 BCE – 2017
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- by claude-opus-5-5
~1305 BCE: Uluburun wreck preserves a hinged writing board
A merchant ship that sank off southern Turkey around 1305 BCE carried a diptych of two boxwood leaves, hollowed to hold wax and joined by ivory hinges. Though its wax is lost, it is the earliest surviving example of the folding wax writing board, a reusable surface for notes and drafts used across the Mediterranean for more than 2,000 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluburun_shipwreck~95: Quintilian advises drafting on wax tablets
Romans called handheld sets of wax tablets pugillares and used parchment notebooks, membranae, as an alternative. In his "Institutio Oratoria", the teacher of rhetoric Quintilian recommended wax for drafting because ink and pen slowed the hand, allowed parchment for those with weak eyesight, and urged writers to leave blank space for corrections. Bound tablets and parchment notebooks are often cited as forerunners of the codex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutio_Oratoria~600: Springmount Bog tablets record Irish Psalms
Six wooden wax tablets found in a bog in County Antrim in 1914 carry Psalms 30 to 32 in the Latin Vulgate text. Dated to around 600, or by some scholars to the late 7th or early 8th century, they are the earliest surviving writing in Latin script from Ireland and show the wax notebook in everyday monastic use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springmount_Bog_Tablets~1002: Sei Shōnagon fills a notebook at the Heian court
Sei Shōnagon, a lady-in-waiting to Empress Teishi in Kyoto, wrote that the empress gave her a bundle of fine paper, a gift from the empress's brother, and that she filled it with lists, anecdotes and observations. Completed around 1002, "The Pillow Book" helped establish the zuihitsu, a Japanese genre of loosely ordered notes and essays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillow_Book14th century: Italian merchants keep their accounts on paper
As paper made in Italian mills became cheaper than parchment, merchants in cities such as Florence, Venice and Prato kept running records in bound paper books: journals, ledgers, memoranda and letter copies. The archive of the Prato merchant Francesco di Marco Datini, who died in 1410, preserves more than 500 account books and ledgers and some 150,000 letters and is a major source for the history of commerce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Datini1478 – 1519: Leonardo da Vinci records his work in notebooks
Leonardo da Vinci kept loose sheets and small notebooks of drawings and notes on anatomy, engineering, water and flight, mostly in right-to-left mirror script. Several thousand pages survive, scattered across collections; the Codex Leicester, a notebook on water and geology written mostly between about 1504 and 1510 by differing estimates, was bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester1512: Erasmus teaches students to keep commonplace books
In "De copia", a textbook on abundant style first published in Paris, Desiderius Erasmus advised students to copy striking passages from their reading into a notebook arranged under subject headings. Taught in grammar schools across Europe, the commonplace book became a standard tool of reading and writing for scholars, lawyers and writers into the 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copia:_Foundations_of_the_Abundant_Style1686: Locke publishes a method for indexing commonplace books
The philosopher John Locke described anonymously in a French journal, Jean Le Clerc's "Bibliothèque universelle", the system he had used for decades: a two-page index keyed to the first letter and first vowel of each heading, so entries could be found without dividing the notebook in advance. Translated into English in 1706, his method was widely copied, and printed blank commonplace books with Locke-style indexes were sold into the 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book1837: Darwin sketches a tree of descent in Notebook B
After returning from the voyage of HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin began a series of private notebooks on the transmutation of species. In Notebook B, opened in July, he drew a branching diagram of common descent headed "I think". The notebooks record the development of ideas that he published more than 20 years later in "On the Origin of Species".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception_of_Darwin%27s_theory~1888: Legal pad attributed to Thomas Holley
According to a widely repeated but poorly documented account, Thomas W. Holley of Holyoke, Massachusetts, began around 1888 to sell pads made by binding together substandard paper offcuts from mills. The ruled pad with a wide left margin became a fixture of American law offices; its usual yellow color and its association with legal-size sheets have no well-documented origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_pad1930s: Spiral-bound notebooks come into use
Wire coils threaded through punched holes let a notebook lie flat or fold back on itself. Metal-coil sketchbooks were made in Europe by the late 1920s, and the Spiral Binding Company, founded in New York in 1932, brought coil binding to American notebooks and catalogs. Accounts of who first patented the method differ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coil_binding1987: Chatwin mourns the "moleskine" in "The Songlines"
In his book "The Songlines", the travel writer Bruce Chatwin described the oilcloth-covered notebooks he bought from a Paris stationer, which he called "moleskines", and wrote that the small family firm in Tours that made them had closed. The passage gave the generic notebooks a literary association and the name a later brand adopted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songlines1997: Modo & Modo launches the Moleskine brand
The Milan publisher Modo & Modo revived the black, elastic-closed pocket notebook under the trademark Moleskine, citing Chatwin and marketing it as the notebook of artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, a heritage claim that refers to generic notebooks of that kind, since the brand did not exist in their lifetimes. Its success fed a wider revival of premium paper notebooks, and the company listed on the Milan stock exchange in 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moleskine2013: US patent law switches to first-inventor-to-file
Under the US first-to-invent system, signed and dated laboratory notebooks witnessed by colleagues were key evidence of who conceived an invention first. The Leahy–Smith America Invents Act, signed in September 2011, applied a first-inventor-to-file rule to applications filed from March 16, reducing the legal weight of notebook records, though laboratories still keep them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy%E2%80%93Smith_America_Invents_Act2013: Ryder Carroll publishes the Bullet Journal method
In August, Ryder Carroll, a New York designer, put online a system for using a plain notebook as a planner, to-do list and diary, built on short bulleted entries, a hand-made index and monthly migration of unfinished tasks. Spread through social media and his 2018 book "The Bullet Journal Method", it drew new users to paper notebooks and dot-grid paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_journal2017: E-paper tablets imitate the paper notebook
The Oslo company reMarkable, founded in 2013, began shipping a tablet with an electronic paper screen designed for handwriting and sketching rather than general computing. Amazon's Kindle Scribe followed in 2022, and such devices, along with reusable notebooks whose pages are scanned and wiped, offered a digital alternative to the paper notebook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReMarkable_(manufacturer)