'The only balm and the only refuge'

At the cusp of a new year, I bring out my arsenal of notebooks, pens and inks to review myself and look upon the future. During the purgatory of the pandemic when everything moved online, I latched onto the analogue pleasure of paper, growing obsessed with quality, size and binding. So, I was intrigued by The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, which traces the material and cultural history of the notebook as an object. A publisher and diarist himself, Allen has an intimacy with notebooks; he says writing a diary makes one happy and creative. He investigates the history of the notebook: when it was invented, what materials have been used over time, and how its uses have evolved. He even kept track of his research in various notebooks.

Allen takes us through the early life of writing — on clay, stone and wax tablets, wood, leather hides, and papyrus bound with parchment (‘the codex’). A cheaper material was created by court eunuch Cai Lun during the Han dynasty around 200 BCE, “with pulp vegetable fibres drained over a fine mesh”, travelling West with the growth of the Chinese empire and silk routes. On reaching Baghdad by 800 CE, paper helped preserve ideas in science, religion and mathematics in the Islamic world, the material for the ministrations of everyday life. The reluctant Christendom of Europe resisted this “infidel” material for centuries, and it was only when Islamic Spain was occupied that paper became “paperwork”, used for the rule of law and officialdom.

Among other explorations, Allen traces the evolution of the sketchbook. In pre-Renaissance Italy, a young artist Cimabue of rural nobility began to use paper to sketch the Tuscan countryside, observing texture, light and shadow. He brought these details into his work depicting religious saints and scenes in church frescoes and paintings. Paper, unlike papyrus, could be used with chalk or charcoal, bound and taken anywhere. By the time of Leonardo Da Vinci, the most famous ‘notebooker’ of all time who used his to record anatomy, structure, waves, colour and geometry, sketchbooks helped artists record their ideas and hone and develop their styles. Urban sketchers everywhere have embraced this in our modern age, and the sketchbook can be a staple of a well-observed life.

In reading accounts of different uses and users of notebooks — autograph books, climate and accounting logs, bullet journals, collections of prayers and recipes — I thought of some notebooks that gave us important works of literature. Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas emerged from scrapbooks of pamphlets, letters and ephemera. She wrote The Waves in seven notebooks, developing characters and narrative by hand. Many of William Blake’s poems, including “Tyger Tyger, burning bright/In the forests of the night” of Songs of Innocence and Experience were drafted in a commonplace book! Henry James always kept (and burnt) notebooks, and The Turn of the Screw emerged from the record of a ghostly anecdote. He said (and I agree) that a notebook is “the only balm and the only refuge, the real solution of the pressing question of life, are in this frequent, fruitful, intimate battle with the particular idea, with the subject, the possibility, the place”. 

In my own life, looking back on last year’s notebook helps me remember the patterns of yesterday’s questions, while a new one helps me look at the world and myself afresh. And I never go anywhere without at least one.

The author is a writer and editor based in Mysuru. She enjoys non-fiction about politics and society, and the punny brilliance of Anthea Bell.

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.