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Transcript
I always say to people, imagine you're in an Italian restaurant and.
Zibaldoni.
Exactly.
Okay. It's me, Zibaldoni. Hello and welcome to episode 217 of erasable. I'm Andy Welfle. I am on hosting duties today, and as always, I'm joined by your. Your friends and mine, Johnny and Tim. Hey, guys.
Hey.
Hey.
Hey, Johnny.
How's it going?
Han?
Yeah, I haven't had a good Baltimore accent in here for a while.
Yeah, I was getting a tattoo cover up this weekend.
I couldn't stop.
Just all those subconscious Baltimore accent stuff
just flows out, just comes out.
I don't have my phone on me.
So today's episode is a really special one. As we talked about last week, we started our next installment of the Erasable Book Club. And we discovered and started reading a book called the A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. And we've, you know, we've all read it. It is, it's really great. We have a lot of just, like, thoughts and questions about it. And who better to help us answer these questions and discuss these thoughts than the author himself? So we have with us as a guest all the way in the uk, author Roland Allen. Hey, Roland.
Hello. Hello, people. How are you?
Amazing. We're honored that you've joined us and that you've taken some time out of your day because I'm sure you're, you know, doing world tours, you know, discussing this book in Japan and the US and just all over the place. So, yeah, we're glad you're here.
I'm delighted to host this book.
Well, you know what? I haven't had anything from Japan yet.
Not yet.
I feel like.
I feel like with as much as Japanese folks love notebooks, like this would just immediately be a hit in Japan.
That's what you'd think. And I'm frankly, you know, as someone who really does deep dives on Japanese notebooks, I feel a bit disappointed. But, you know, they may come. They may come.
Yeah, I. Oh, man. So we need a whole section of this interview to talk about some of the kind of like, specifics of notebooks themselves. But we also have some. Some questions and discussion items just about the kind of the book in general. So if you out there in listener land have. Have not read this book or listened to last podcast. Roland wrote a book called the Notebook, A history of thinking on paper. And it is a really great deep dive into, I mean, everything from gosh, astronomy, like navigating your ship by the stars to accounting. I didn't think that I would go so far into accounting and including just. Yeah, just. Just everything in between. So the history of Moleskine was really interesting, kind of at the beginning, I knew a little bit of that story. But Rome, before we get into that, can we start by. I would love to hear a little bit more about you, your background, and kind of like, what led you to write this book.
Yeah, sure. Well, I'm British, and I guess I'm quite well traveled because I worked in. Have worked in publishing all my adult life, and for most of that period, I've been traveling around Europe selling books and also selling, up to a point, rather unsuccessfully, as I say in the book, trying to sell notebooks which weren't very well conceived and weren't very well made. But, you know, I did my best. Yeah. And I guess I came to notebooks when I was in my mid-20s, and I was given some of my grandfather's old diaries, and he had died when I was six, many years before, so I'd never really known him. And he'd had a really interesting life, too. And he was very well traveled, much even, you know, much more well traveled than I was. And he'd lived in Lithuania before the war and had an amazingly interesting life, which was detailed in these notes in these diaries. And just completely inspired by this, by the fact that someone I'd never knew was completely brought to life by these really minimal little paper documents, I started keeping my own diary. And then I started noticing how people use notebooks at work and obviously working in the publishers. I was a sales guy. Still am.
Yeah.
But I got to meet a lot of authors and designers in particular, and illustrators, other creative people, and seeing how they used their notebooks close up, I always found absolutely fascinating. I love looking at other people's sketchbooks, even if the sketching isn't that good, there's somehow sort of quality to them, which makes them fascinating. And then I actually became quite interested in other people's work, notebooks as well, because I realized that the people who I like working with the best, who were the most reliable, most efficient, most creative, were the ones who never let go of their notebook. I mean, really never let go of it.
Yeah.
And the people who were conversely, a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with and didn't really deliver as much as they could have, were the ones who tended not to ever have a notebook to hand and say, oh, I'll remember that. They never did remember that, you know. Yeah. So that was initially what got Me interested in notebooks. And then.
Would you like to name any names of the people who were the pain in the ass?
No, I'm not going to do that. I will add no identifying details, although I will say that the Venn diagram overlaps strongly with people who thought that iPads were great productivity tools, you know, period. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I.
You.
In the book a little bit, you talk about your. Your grandfather's notebook, and that really, really resonated with me. I. Early in the pandemic, my mom sent me some stuff that belonged to my great grandfather, and one of them was a little pocket. He was a. An engineer at General Electric right after World War I. And he had a little notebook that had a bunch of just like. Just little diary notes in it. And it was at that point, it was written almost 100 years ago. Wow. That day, like, it was. It was like October, like, 1921. And I was reading it in October, like, 2021. And what I. Yeah, and I still have it. It's right here on my desk. And it's just. It's so fascinating. And I never knew him, but, like, my middle name was his last name, and so I like. Yeah, definitely. It makes me just feel a connection to him, which is really interesting.
So.
Yeah, I love that chapter when you were talking about that. Yeah.
Well, it brings people to life, I think. You know, we put so much of ourselves into these diaries and notebooks that in a way, they're. They're slight sort of time capsules. They enable people to reboot us a little bit after we've gone.
Yeah, that's a great. It's a great way to frame it,
I know, with, like, notebooks that I. I keep. And we've talked about this on the show before. Johnny talked about his pact with his buddy to burn the notebooks. But, like, I. I look back through my notebooks, and it's almost like a sense of terror. I'm like, what would happen if, like, you can't. No, I didn't say it. It was Johnny. So you can talk about it. You know what.
But my friends have fireman, so I doubt he'll actually do it.
But, like, the. But, like, what you really get in these notebooks is, like. I mean, it's just a snapshot of the chaos of what, like, your brain looks like sometimes. You know, like. I mean, it's just like. I mean, when I look back through my old notebooks, it is just sort of. It's fascinating to follow my mood and follow the things that Seem to be like, just totally taking over my brain, that now I'm like, why was I so worried about that?
Why was that even important? Yeah, yeah.
Why? Why? I was pissed about that. Why was I so pissed about that? That turned out fine. But. So to the book. We did talk about it in our last episode, but can you talk a little bit about what it's about, kind of the premise, how you got to it, which you do talk about in the book, a little bit there at the beginning of kind of how you ended up writing it and then how you chose to structure the book. Because it's not.
Yeah.
You know, I think it's a really, really clever way that you. That you constructed it, I guess, organized it.
It went through a few phases because. How to put this. So I had years of being interested in notebooks and then the opportunity to do something with this interest came about when I was made redundant. So this was at the beginning of 19. So I had a little bit of time and a little bit of money and I thought that I'd find another job after three months, but I could, you know, give it some thought. And of course, working in publishing, my first reaction to anything is, why don't you just write a book about it? So. Which is sort of a bit flipped, but there's a germ of truth in it. So I gave it that. That few months there in 2019. But what I found. And I found so much stuff, like all of the Florence medieval stuff, the Zibaldoni's, the accounting, the importance of accountancy to world history. I had no idea. Like. And it just. And sketchbooks. And I remember the moment when I first realized that Giotto was at the same time as Dante was at the same time as the first accountancy notebooks in the same city. And I thought, well, what ties them together? You know, it's. It's the notebook which they're all using.
Yeah.
And that was like when the penny dropped in a big way. But this left me with a problem which I could not solve, which was this massive, huge sort of wave of material, how to organize it and how to turn it into a narrative. Because it was just. Everything happens all at once, you know.
Yeah.
And. And I sort of came up with this soup of a proposal. Everything was a total mess. Did get a book deal, which was not sort of hotly contested. It wasn't. There was no fight for it. It went to one publisher who didn't have to haggle. And then a massive stroke of. With a massive stroke of luck the editor who acquired the book left the publisher, which is normally terrible because you lose your mentor, you lose the person who owns your project. But in this case it worked out really well because the guy who stepped in and took over her list when she left is my editor, called Mark Ellingham. Shout out to Mark, who took a look at this mess. He must have thrown his hands up, but he knew that there was something there. Yeah. And he sent me off to the other end of the story. He said, well, you know, you're going to write about notebooks in the present day. Why don't you just find someone who's doing notebooks right now, interview them, write it up, see how it goes. So I went off and I wrote the chapter about patient diaries which people always mention. That's the one chapter, I think, which affects people more than any other. And it's about the nurse, the diaries that nurses keep for on behalf of intensive care patients. So it's very relevant in Covid times because we're now having Covid in the writing process. And I was really lucky. I got to speak to Michael Rosen, who's a huge name in the uk. He's like one of our national poets and he suffered from COVID very badly, but he was very happy to talk about it. And I put together this little chapter which told the story of the patient diary and mixed it up with his personal story. And it came together in about two days. It was amazing. Like all of the, all of the primary, secondary sources, the interview. And I just, you know, it really came together so easily. And I sent this off to Mark and he said, that's it, there you go. You're just going to do lots of little stories. I said, okay, so it's lots of little stories. So that's the structure of the book and that's, that's why it sort of. The chapters are very varied and nearly all of them, I think, read on their own as short stories.
Yeah.
And sometimes it works, I think, better than other times, you know, but that's the price you pay for any structure.
I was definitely expecting something that was more like, have you ever read any of Mark Karlansky's books, like his little micro histories? Yeah, I was expecting just sort of like something like that where just almost chronologically you go through it. And I really love this way. Just, it's more engaging. You can like pick it up and set it down a little bit easier. Like it's.
Yes. And I really wanted to write a Mark Kalanci style book, you know, When I was pitching its publishers at the beginning, he was a big influence. He's big comp. But his. That the subject was just so complicated, you know, so many strands all at once and I could not. I didn't have this sort of forensic skill to unpick it. So breaking it down into human stories, that turned out to be the moment when it all clicked. So there's nearly always a human story in there.
Yeah.
Awesome.
So before we get into, like, the details of your book, can you talk a little bit about some of the, like, historical notebooks you've got to handle in your research or even, you know, contemporary.
Handling is an interesting word because I previously mentioned Covid, and the bulk of the book was written either during the COVID years, either during lockdown or when everything was just really difficult. And quite early on, it became clear that I just wasn't going to get to go into research institutions as you'd want to, and. And as you say, handle this stuff, touch the pages. So I was very lucky in as much as I was writing in the 2000s when there's a huge amount of scanned stuff online. So if you want to see Leonardo's notebooks, they're all online, then the scans are amazing and you can see actually much more of them than you can in the flesh. And I'd never be able to touch Leonardo's notebooks anyway, so. Which is, you know, you've got to be realistic about my status at the point when I was writing this book. So nearly everything was based on. I say nearly everything, yeah, was based on scans online in collections, but which was annoying. And wherever possible, I would dig out the physical properties of something, like how much a book weighed, or I would try and speak to someone who handled them all the time. And I would say, well, what are they like? What's the paper like? How big. You know, you can always tell how big they are, but the. The pages are. But how heavy is it in your hand? I think it's really important. Does it feel rough or smooth? And that sort of detail was hard to get hold of, but yeah, and the advantage of that is the reader can look at nearly all of the notebooks I mentioned, can find them online and look at them themselves and get lost in themselves like I did.
That's very cool. Were there any that, you know, as you're doing your research or and just learning more and, you know, hearing reference to other, you know, notebooks might be out there that you really wanted to be able to, like, examine or it was Kind of like the white whale notebook that you really would have loved to been able to see whether it was digital or not, that you weren't able to track down. It still kind of haunts you because we've talked about this. So just like notebooks of famous people that like, you know, I've talked about Hank Williams and you know, Bob Dylan's notebooks are now on display, but of course you can't look through them, but like his little blood on the tracks notebook.
And also in Tulsa, and I'm not knocking Tulsa, but it's hard to get to.
Oh my goodness. Yeah, when they announced that, I was like, you have to be kidding me. I mean, yeah.
And I looked, I looked quite hard at for that, for that last chapter which covers the songwriters. Towards the end of the book, I really wanted to get to Tulsa and see them and just see them because you can, I don't know, it would have been fascinating.
But nobody just casually ends up in Tulsa.
No, exactly.
No, you don't pass through Tulsa on the way to anywhere that's not like a thousand miles away.
Yeah, no. And you know, I'm British, yet I have been to Kansas City. You know, I'm reasonably well traveled and even to me. Yeah. So yeah, I tell you what, the white whale, as you put it, I mean, the first thing is I want to touch all of them, I want to hold all of them, I want to smell them. That's a given. But the fascinating, the real white whale is Darwin's because they haven't been photographed ever. They're still in the family and they keep them under lock and key. This is not. Some of Darwin's notebooks are in Cambridge University Library and available for people to see and researchers to see. But the Beagle notebooks, which are the little tiny little pocket notebooks which he went ashore with on the Falkland Islands or the Galapagos or in Brazil and made the field notes which then became the written up notes which then became on the Origin of Species and the Theory of Evolution. Those little notebooks I don't think have ever been photographed. And so far as I know, they're sitting in his, his old house, down house in Kent. So I'd love to see them. However, they have been completely transcribed so you can read them entirely and you can tell how incoherent and scrappy and illegible they must be in the flesh. But yeah, those are the white whale. And also, I mean the impact of those notebooks is unparalleled. Nothing else like them.
The, the way that you just sort of described how he and the. The ship's captain were. Would just like, sit in that little room on the. The Beagle and just write in their notebooks and translate. That just. It sounds fascinating. Like, how has that not been made into a movie yet?
I know. An amazing story. I could not, you know, and obviously, once I'd started off and I've been told to look for stories.
Yeah.
You know that. The fact that Charles Darwin only went on the Beagle before because the captain demanded someone to keep him from getting so depressed he would kill himself.
Exactly.
Yeah. That's.
That's bananas. Just.
And then they were friends for life. I mean, they did. They did argue, but they were friends for life. And then. Well, I went. I won't spoil it, but it. The. The story has a natural conclusion. You know, it's a real thing.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a. That was a really fascinating chapter.
Did you get to look at Chatwin's books in the Bodleian?
No, I haven't yet. And that's an interesting one because that's. Those were. I guess if I loved Chatwind when I was young and when I was studying English, both before university and at university, I really loved his books. And. And he was such a big name in the 80s. And. And his books, they're great boy books, if you know. I mean, they're very adventurous and they're full of people swaggering around, doing really cool stuff. And. And he's a. He's a sort of posh, blonde English protagonist and therefore incredibly relatable to me. And I loved the song lines. And that. That chunk of the song lines where he goes off into the notebooks really struck me at the time. So this is back in like 1990 or something, and. Oh, yeah, I'd love to get crypto Chapman's notebooks. Yeah, definitely. I mean, he. His were great, but almost. I mean, he was also. He was not. He made stuff up, shall we say? And he's famous. He's famous for having made stuff up. You can actually trust the word he said.
He said creative non fiction.
Yeah, exactly.
Like today I slept behind a bush. Like, sure, okay, sure you did. Yeah, I knew that all was good.
Switching gears a little bit, I. One of the things I was. I was surprised to read about especially so quickly, was just kind of the depth to which you started talking about accounting practices, especially how it was invented in Florentine and. Or Florence. And I had never really thought about one of the. One of the assertions you make is that like this is, this is the start of sort of like modern capitalism. The, the double entry ledgers. And as like I've, I've just, I've just never thought about that.
This is, this is, it's the only part of the history of the notebook, as in the history I tell, which has really been covered extensively elsewhere, which I came to. And the story had already been told. Yeah, but it's been told by historians of accountancy.
Right.
It's never really had.
Yeah, not exactly flying off the shelves.
Yeah. So that, you know, when I, when all of the assertions about how important accountancy is to world history and also how important notebooks are to accountancy, they're not original thoughts of mine at all. That's quite accepted within the history of accountancy. And actually speaking to your listeners here, I'm just going to say if any of you have got bookkeeping qualifications or accountancy qualifications, massive respect to you, shout out to you, you are the real heroes here. Because it all starts. The whole notebook story does start with bookkeeping. Yeah, it does.
And, and you like, I think in later chapters you sort of talk about how like, oh, that led to corporations and franchises and sort of like people, you know, in other places in the world, like continuing like you know, corporate structures and interest and practices. And it comes back into like the main ledger. And the amount of time that people must have just spent looking over notebooks is just mind boggling.
Well, Geoffrey Chaucer, he was plugged into this. So Geoffrey Chaucer, he was a customs official by day and a poet by night. And in one of his poems he complains about exactly that. Spending all day pouring over ledges of Italian merchants in the port of London and bankers lending money to the English crown. Spends all day wrecking his eyes looking over these ledgers. And then he goes home at night and wrecks his eyes still further by writing poetry in identical ledgers. Yeah. By candlelight.
So they have some ancient version of blue light glasses back then for him to like easier on his. We're like too much screen time. He's like too much notebook time. This is too much.
Yeah.
I don't think they had glasses then, did they? Like maybe a magnifying glass? I actually don't know.
Well, do you know what? It's one of those things. So you get, you have this magic moment in Florence in 1300 where they invent double entry bookkeeping.
Yeah.
Sketching by perspective, cross hatching. You have Dante and other things going on there. Amazingly fertile time and that is the same time and place where they invent spectacles.
Wow.
It's in Pisa because they're destroying their
eyes from reading so much.
Yeah.
Yeah, Interesting.
That's fascinating.
Yeah. For another book, I looked quite long and hard at writing a history of the lens because that is an interesting story as well.
Yeah, that'd be super interesting. So at various points you talk about sketchbooks and like how like there's that transition from like there are these ledgers and then artists started like using them to, to sketch out and sort of change the way that art works. Wonder if you talk about like if there was a similar, like how, how you would sort of draw a parallel to what happened in the literary arts from as paper became more accessible and affordable and all that and how that changed it in the same ways that it did in the visual arts.
Well, paper's a great tool for refining your skills. So I think it's a slightly different process, but there's a lot in common with someone who just sits and writes all day and someone who sits and sketches all day. Both of them are going to get really good at what it is they want to get good at. And the, and the. Just the availability of paper notebooks. And the thing is that this is something you read quite often in the histories. Paper was really expensive. Yes. And no paper was really expensive compared to what it is today. But paper effectively is trivial in cost to us. You know, you can, I can go and buy 500 sheets of printer paper for 10 bucks or something. So you can get a lot of paper for little money. And it was more expensive back then. But you could probably get one large sheet of paper for the price you'd pay for a beer, which was the standard drink at the time. And then you could fold that piece of paper four times and make a 16 page notebook, cut the edges off and then it's suddenly a very, very cheap notebook. And I think people overestimate how expensive it was and they underestimate how accessible it was. I think if you could read and write, basically you could afford to have paper around. Yeah. So, yeah, so it made a massive difference. I think that the process is externalization. It's the idea of getting your thoughts, whether or not they're verbal or visual, down on the page in front of you and then you can manipulate them. And I don't know how people can think seriously if they can't externalize in some way. It must be really, really hard. So, yeah, that I think is the sort of the commonality between sketching and drafting a poem.
Yeah, that's really interesting how you mentioned externalizing it, because one of the other chapters that really resonated with me was the one about Jamie Pennebaker and expressive writing. And this is also something I just never knew about, which, no spoilers for listeners, but basically they. There were some studies. Hopefully I can sum this up accurately. People who have experienced traumatic events, who journal about it, who just write kind of free range about it, typically recover better or more smoothly or faster. And that was really interesting to me. This is not the time or the place, but a couple years ago I went through some. Some pretty hard things and I. I found myself really wanting to sort of express that somehow. And I realized myself, this is also this, this is what I like to call a grad student question. That's not so much a question as it is a comment. But I, I used to come. I used a combination of Day one, which is like a Mac journaling app. I really just wanted to like Brain Dump, because I can type faster than I can write. But then I was like, this isn't enough. And I started taking a lot of that and started distilling that into more natural, like, handwriting talking. And I think that really helped a lot and just kind of like the healing process from that.
So, yeah, and it would have done you. I'm sorry to hear you had hard times, but you did the right thing, definitely. And it would have. They don't know completely how it works, but they have a fair idea of the way that keeping secrets or keeping anything in isolation just in your own head and nowhere else seems to be incredibly bad and stressful. And that stress plays itself out in your body in really surprising ways. And one of the main effects of reducing the stress is to speed up healing. So you speed up mental healing. And that sort of seems to make intuitive sense to us that if we keep a diary, you get over bad things more quickly. What blows my mind utterly is how it heals it. It speeds up physical healing. So if you are going to have an operation, for instance, write down your emotional state beforehand. They say two weeks beforehand is about optimal. Give it a good, hard, you know, write down about the trauma, whatever it was, recent, old, anything that's buried, get it out of your system and you will recover more quickly from that operation. And that is a proven scientific fact. Just blows my mind. It's completely underreported.
Yeah.
To the extent that I, I went and tracked down the professor in New Zealand who came up with the. The key study on this and she moved on years ago. She was like, you interested in this one? I was like, yes. So, yeah, it's a. It's a. It's. Honestly, it blows my mind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was amazing. Like, it. Yeah, just a. Just a physical feeling of blockage. Right. Until. Until it happens.
So. Yeah.
Yeah. So, yeah, thank you for that chapter.
Awesome. So I hope everyone reads that one, because that's the one which can really do people some good. Yeah.
So you mentioned Bruce Chatwin, or. We mentioned Bruce Chatwin and how in the song lines, he sort of had this premonition that, you know, he was. He didn't have a lot of time left, so he just kind of dumped notebooks into the back of the.
The book.
And, I mean, aside from the fact that he made a lot of it up, the book's not that good without that. So I'm thinking of, like, Thoreau, like, how Thoreau thought his journal was his life's work. And I wonder what you think about the value of publishing famous people's journals, like, unedited.
I think obviously they vary from. From person to person. I think there's nearly always a value if they've done something of interest. I think the. If the finished product like Thoreau or Chat Wind is of interest. I think the notebooks themselves are going to reveal so much about the process that led there, or to reveal the actual truth. You know, in the case of something where they rewrote history, I think it's nearly always going to be valuable. But it's interesting. For me, this is a given. I guess, that you think that's a good idea, and I certainly do. And we agree. But I was talking to my aunt's wife about this, and I. And she was like, why are you interested in sketchbooks? Well, I think it's fascinating. You can see where the paintings come from. You know, you can follow Picasso's thoughts on the page, and then you can look at Guernica and see where it came from. She said, I don't want to see that. I just want to see the painting. And that really took me aback, and I thought, okay, some people do just want to see the painting, but I think that for the rest of us, there's a lot to be learned from seeing the process underneath. Yeah. And I think I strongly feel that you should never throw the notebook on the fire inside it.
Come on, Johnny.
You don't know how Johnny's notebooks would incriminate him if ever they get made public.
So, like, yeah, you know, send them off to that Italian museum of notebooks. No one will read them for 100 years. Everyone will be long gone. It's fine. But they'll still be around. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. So it's not surprising that Darwin, you know, kept these extensive journals. Actually, wait, hang on. I had a thought that I just came back to me. I was, like, pausing for a second, so I asked this. But, like, I was thinking about what you were saying with the, like, the process question. Like, seeing the process or seeing a writer's notebooks, like, because I'm like that. I mean, I've got books of, you know, Graham Green's notebooks and John Cheever's notebooks and all these things that I. And I just love flipping through this. And there's something, at least for me, that it was like. And then seeing the sketchbooks of these famous artists, it's like. It's almost encouraging because you. You see their process, and you see that they're like a human. Like, they're like that. They're not a superhero that just, like, pulled this thing out of nowhere, you know, like. Oh, they just did. Oh, no, actually, they put in, you know, the Gladwell terms. Like, they put in their 10,000 hours. They probably put in 50,000 hours, you know, before the thing that you're seeing. I don't know. That's just. That's something that I think, like, bubbles up in me when I'm looking at stuff like that, because it's just humanizes them and. Yeah.
You know the shopping list in the corner of the page.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
It's contrary to all the social media stuff, where, you know, everyone just presents their best selves, like, it's every day.
Yeah. Yes.
It's a nice relief. Like, oh, these people obsessed over weird stuff.
Like, I do sometimes.
Way weirder.
Yeah. So. Okay, so back to the question, though. So not surprising that Darwin kept a bunch of journals, but I had no idea that he was so systematic in how he used them in which journals he bought and liked to use. Which brings up two areas of questions. First, like, toward the official topic of our podcast is pencils. We talk a lot on the show about how pencil is forever. It's kind of a joke phrase we sort of. Sort of joke phrase we use while ink fades and eats away a paper, et cetera. And a lot of Darwin's notes are in pencil. Well, maybe his notebooks were, like, not among them. But I'm assuming you were lucky enough to, like, see other old notebooks, you know, in, you know, physical notebooks. While his weren't available. And how. How do you see that playing out as far as, like the type of writing instrument they're using, as far as it's, you know, crude pencil or. Versus a fountain pen or whatever. Like, what did you notice about the writing?
This. I didn't give enough. I'm going to say I didn't give enough thought to. When I was writing, I was much more focused on the. The notebook itself than the. What you people were writing in, however. So I guess you've got to tie this into the history of the pencil, which is slightly different and runs parallel to the history of the notebook. So you've got. Leonard, nearly all of the notebooks I looked at would have been written with a pen and ink. And most of that period, it would have been annoyingly impractical to write with pen and ink. So I think as soon as people who are out and about could write with a stylus or with a pencil. And I think that the Darwin notebooks you're referring to were some sort of patent thing where you had a metal stylus which reacted with something in the page and created a line rather than a graphite line being left by a pencil, which is a sort of fascinating area in its own right. We can digress on. But. So as soon as people want to go out and about, then they start using styluses and pencils. But when they're at a desk and when they've got sort of a chair and something to lean on, they tend to use ink. I must admit, I am. I'm. I write in pen.
Well, thank you for joining us today.
Is there an ejector seat in Zencast? I don't know. We talk about pens all the time.
Yeah, yeah, I didn't want to drop that in right at the top.
We actually have a super secret Patreon only podcast called Indelible, which is our pen podcast. So we do. We do sometimes talk about pen and paper. Yeah, I appreciate it.
There's a. There was a. On this, this topic, there was. When in that section where you talk about songwriters and you were talking about Bob Dylan's notebooks, these famous little blood on the tracks notebooks that he was carrying around his pocket. And you mentioned in there like, that he was really inconsistent in what he used, which makes it like really hard for people to figure out what came first or what came second. Am I remembering that correctly? Whereas, like, he was using like black pen and blue pen and pencil and this and he was kind of jumping and so it was like Kind of hard to track how his songs.
I think that makes it slightly easier to track because you can say, oh, this is the red pen.
Okay. Then I'm just. Okay.
I must admit, I'm so anal about the pens I use. It would be very hard. You couldn't do the same exercise with me because it's always.
Oh, yeah, okay.
It's always a UniBall micro ub1 ub150 in black. And it hasn't changed for years and years. So you couldn't do that kind of archaeology forensically on my writing.
Oh, yeah, we always.
Those are called.
You always know.
We're.
Oh, good.
Those are interesting. Those are called visions Uniball visions in the US and yeah, like, this is. This pen is like one of the ones that just like, got me interested in writing instruments. I loved it in green ink. I used those just through high school and college.
And.
Yeah, these are. Yeah, we can almost spin off podcast talking about ink. But yeah, I loved. Love those. Those Uniballs.
I was just gonna say we're like, definitely. We know we're. We're talking to one of our own.
Yeah.
Somebody who brings the numbers into the name of the pen.
Like, really? Yes.
Going there. It's like. It's just this Uniball thing. No, no, it's. It's not just a uniball.
It's the UB150.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah, absolutely. It could be a pen or a submarine or something.
Yeah, I guess. Slight, Slight tangent. One of the things that made me really interested in Green, Inc. Was I read Operation Cicero, which is this English spy novel, and the commandant of, like, this embassy always signed in green ink, and he was the only one allowed to use green ink. So if you saw green ink, you knew that it was. It was signed off by the commandant. So it was very like. It's like, oh, green ink. And the Uniball had this. This ink called Evergreen, which was this really gorgeous sort of deep green. And they later switched to something that was a little bit lighter and more blue, and it just wasn't as good. So I have. I have a few. Few episodes ago where I just was like, I'm gonna go in search of the perfect green ink that replicates that. I think I found it. But yeah, it was. It's. It's a fountain pen inks, so definitely can't use my. My Uniballs anymore.
Wait, which one is it?
It's Lierre Savage. The. Oh, the Giorban ink.
My favorite.
Yeah. Yeah. Anyhow, sorry, you're fine. Yeah, I guess this is the place. I would apologize if I was just telling Normies about this, but this is where I'm under that crap.
Yeah.
We're all sitting here like.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
So, speaking of Darwin, I appreciate it as a book binder, all of the really good details about how his books were made. And you mentioned Patricia Highsmith was really particular about her Columbia notebooks. And, you know, when Moleskine came out, they were like, oh, you know, Hemingway use this, and Picasso used this, which of course isn't true. And Blackwing, for a long time, they were sort of trading on the original Blackwing. That is unrelated. So I'm wondering, like, when stationary items become like, magical totems, like, like superstition. I'm trying to formulate this into a sensible question. Like, at what point is it not inspiration anymore? And now it's just, you know, some hipster magic that doesn't work.
Yeah, I, I, I. Well, I saw the, the word totem, I think, is really interesting because I got. When I was. This is a long time ago, before I'd started work on the book or started thinking about the book, I was in the habit of carrying my diary around with me everywhere, like a comfort blanket to situations where I would never use it. Yeah. Never refer to it in a work meeting. I'd have my personal diary there on the desk. And it's like, why? Why? You know, there's no reason for a thought. It was purely a comfort thing. And then it sort of became clear that it was quite becoming quite hard to let go of. Not that this is a problem per se, but it's just an odd thing. So, so. And that made me, you know, when you say totem makes me think of that, but I guess what you're referring to is more the kind of status symbol, the kind of project what you're trying to project with the notebook that you carry around.
Yeah.
Yeah. And even, like, I don't know, people that would think, you know, oh, I have two pencils and I'm in a cafe, so I'm gonna write some Hemingway now. And of course, you have to actually write, not just have them.
I mean, most given Moleskin's marketing. Right. Like the. They like, oh, this is the pen. This is the one that, like, Picasso used. And, you know, it sort of. The marketing made it kind of become a status symbol. And we see that a lot with Blackwing pencils too. Right. Like, this is the, this is the pencil that Stephen Sondheim and. And you Know, other famous people use. Right. Like it's very status symbol, like.
Yeah, yeah. Which is a brilliant. I mean, it's amazing, Mark.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's the virtue of being true. Yeah. I really wanted to speak to Maria Segrebondi, who's the Moleskin, the sort of the genius of Moleskine. Yeah. And I made numerous attempts to contact her for interview, or I contacted the PR people all over the place. Yeah. Various foundations and companies and got no reply back. And so the account I give of Moleskine in the book is completely accurate and I stand by it, but my interpretation of it is slightly cynical, just because I didn't get to speak to her and therefore I felt free to put my slightly cynical worldview into it. Yeah. Last week I bumped into someone who used to work for her and who now works in the same company as I do, and he said, oh, you know, you've written this book. I'll send it to Daniel, to Maria. I was like, oh, yeah, that would be great.
Let me print off a handmade version of it that I make a few quick changes to.
So, yeah, it's absolutely. It's. I've. I've gone back and had a look and I think, well, it's a bit cynical. It's not actively rude. There's a lot of respect in there as well, because you've got to respect someone who comes up with just a product and a marketing message like that. It was just peerless, I think. But also it was a product and a marketing message and I think, you know, you've got to be slightly cynical about capitalism at times and. And not let them get away with it entirely.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you didn't write anything like, well, they keep getting worse and more expensive, which you could. It's kind of a reality sometimes where you get something, you're like, well, that's a dud. I spent 30 bucks on it. But that's all right.
Yeah, that's true. And, well, you know, the sort of. The stationary websites and their obsessive. Oh, my God, you three guys all run stationary websites with obsessive product conversions, don't you?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, so that's it. So you know the field. Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah. Moleskin is definitely.
We're pretty. We're pretty well adjusted.
Yeah.
So you're safe here, Johnny.
Johnny buys a lot of moleskin.
What? Oh, not anymore.
Oh, really? Have you switched to wood term? Pretty much.
I mean, I make all my books.
Well, I'm sorry. Yeah, sorry.
You know what? I do use the official bullet journal because I just like them. I like the limited colors.
Yeah, yeah.
I haven't bought one in a long time.
Yeah.
One of the. I think my favorite chapters was when you're talking about kind of the Zibaldoni. Am I saying that right?
I. I always say to people, imagine you're in an Italian restaurant and.
Zebaldoni.
Exactly.
Okay. It's a me Zibaldoni.
I. And.
And people would have these kind of like big, I guess similar to a commonplace notebook where they would like, just write down some pieces of poetry they like or they would have their friends write in there. And when I was reading this, I made a little. I highlighted that and made a little note that just read Tumblr and like this is.
I wrote. I wrote something like that. Like the first feed, like the first like social feed or something like that in mind.
Yeah, yeah, it is. So. So you're looking for the comparison, I suppose.
Yeah, yeah.
Just.
Just how. Just how that kind of like gave. I mean it's social media, right? Like, it's very analog, but it just feels so much like social media, I think.
So in as much as these things were always shared, you wouldn't share them with strangers, but you would certainly share them with the neighbors and you'd serve them definitely with your family. So. So Zibaldoni were your random collection of things that were written down that you wanted to just keep hold of because they were fun normally. And this is the age before print, so most people wouldn't have had a book in the house. So if you wanted a book, if you wanted to have literature in your house, you had to write it down yourself. Most people, you know, and Sibaldoni's were people reaction to that, where they would write down. It could be an entire Aesop's Fable, for instance, it could be a chunk of Boccaccio or Dante or Petrarch. It could be bits of the Bible, it could be bits of the classics, whatever you wanted, you know, it's fun. You just kept it. And yeah, I think people did. There is that Tumblrish sense in as much as they were random and they weren't organized at all. They were just what people liked in the order that they liked them. And they were very mixed up and varied and they had recipes in there alongside prayers, alongside poems.
Yeah, I loved one thing you mentioned with that was just the process of kind of like copying and writing it down was very much a. A way to remember it.
And it just, just.
I was Thinking a lot about, like, you know, I. I think it's. Is it field notes where they say, like, I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now? Yeah, it's just. It's just that.
And. And the. And I don't know about you guys. When I was young, I used to write down song lyrics in. In a note, you know, and. And it was a really fun thing to do. And those are the. I know those songs now. I can tell you all of the words. Yeah, so. So it's similar to Tumblr in that respect, but I think it's a much deeper engagement. And you also. The other thing is you end up with a physical thing and my senses with any of these digital things. Evernote is the other comparison. If it's not in front of you, it sort of vanishes up into the cloud, and that's that. Whereas if you've written it down on a page in a notebook, it's always there. Even if you're writing on page 100, whatever is on page three is still there. So I think it's much more permanent than Evernote, etc. And I said this recently at a speaking engagement in Los Angeles, and I didn't realize that I was speaking to the VP of marketing or something from Evernote. Oh, so I offended someone there. But she was. She was senior, something of something. I can't remember the job title. I was Jeff Harris.
It's almost like you. You need to be a little scared of losing it, like, for it to actually be important. Like, you need. If that makes sense. Like, yeah, it needs to be all this digital stuff. Yeah, it needs to be precious, all the digital stuff. It's like, you can. I got 200 gigs in my Google Drive. I mean, I can just throw a bunch of crap in there and, well, whenever I'll forget.
It's just all data centers, then, like, you know, digital content will be like that, too.
Yeah. Well, who was it? Walter Isaacs. He wrote biographies of Leonardo and Steve Jobs and Elon Musk now. Yeah, he said it was much easier to find the paperwork in the case of Leonardo than it was in the case of Steve Jobs. He couldn't access Steve Jobs. This was. Couldn't access emails which were more than about eight years old.
Yeah.
So there were huge chunks of his life which he'd lived on email, which just weren't gone.
That's one thing I really enjoy about day one. That journaling app is you have the option if you Would like to basically print it and have it turn into a little paper bound journal because if there's stuff I want to pass on and I die, so much of my digital life just gets locked up and eventually it disappears as companies fade or whatever. But potentially, yeah, like a printed out version of that digital journal is potentially has lasting power.
So.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
Well, you knew this was coming. What are some of your favorite notebooks to use? What do you like to use? Your favorite things that didn't work for you, things that did like. And maybe even you know, in the book you talk about or at the beginning of the book you talk about like keeping multiple notebooks that you read, you know, writing this book in and doing your research in or whatever. But yeah, what are some of your favorites? What do you like?
This is why I'm here. But don't tell anyone.
Your secret. Safe with us.
So the notebooks I guess which inspired me right at the very beginning, my grandfather's old diaries and they don't actually have a brand in them but my suspicion is that they were probably made by.
Lets you talk about, let's. A little bit.
Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
And. But those diaries were just ubiquitous and because every company basically used to give them out to their customers at the end of the year as like Christmas giveaways. And so the ones he has were given to him by, had, were given to him by a shipping company or a transport company. And so it's full of their branding and information and their phone numbers for head office, etc. So, so these little leather bound things, they're tiny, lovely, lovely smooth fine Bible paper. You know, you could fit them into the smallest pocket and they have a sort of pencil loop down the spine. He must have had those little propelling pencils I think that came with them, but they long gone. Okay. So that's what got me into it. And then when I started keeping a diary for the very first time, it was actually a branded diary from a magazine, Timeouts, which I think timeout happened in the States, but it's gone now. And yeah, but this was, this was fun because I lived in London at the time and they have, they had like a little almanac section in the back and this is late 90s and the early 2000s. So it would have an address book, it would have the phone numbers of all the cinemas and the theaters. It would have, it would have the addresses of the shops and it would have a tube map and it would have a street map for central London. And so On. So these were incredibly practical things in theory, as well as being diaries, date, book type things. So I started writing a diary in that. Then I realized that I wasn't referring to the map or to the cinema phone numbers at all, but I was really digging the writing a diary part. And there wasn't very much space. So then I moved on to your basic Moleskine week to view. And I stuck with them for a fair few years. The. The problem with them, I don't know, I could go down the rabbit hole of their bindings.
Is that the one where on one side it's that you're weak and the other side it's empty paper, like.
Yes, yes. And I really like that. Yeah, yeah. As a layout, I really like that because you have the. Simultaneously you have the advantage of the structure.
Yeah.
And then you have also the space to draw something. And quite a lot of those. I've got drawings on the right hand side of the page and then my week on the left.
And I one time wrote a big, long time ago, a big post on. Do you remember. Oh, shoot. What's it called? 35 folders, 37 folders. It was Merlin Man's website, 43 folders. It was Merlin Man's website back in the day. And I wrote a big post about that very Moleskine layout. And it kind of like got. Got a little traction and was the first times I wrote on the Internet about stationary. Yeah, that's. That's such a good layout.
Yeah, yeah. And I really like that. And two things happened, I guess, because I used to keep all kinds of like postcards and ephemera and tickets and photos and crap in the little pocket in the back.
Yeah.
And the actual. The pocket always holds together. But what happens then is that it busts the spine because it forces the. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about.
Oh, 100%.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It kills the end papers. That's what it does. Yeah. So. So then I moved on to Leuchtturm, the A5 model, so a little bit wider to try and avoid that problem and to have a little bit more space to write in. But I kept that same layout and the week to view, which is very nice. And so for a bunch of years I had the Leuchturms and then I. So basically I got slightly bored of it and I wanted more space to write because. What. I don't know if you guys recognize this, but I find that over the years I've wanted to write more in my diaries. They've gone from being very short and pithy to being quite full. Like hundreds of words every day.
Yeah. I go through times like that for sure. Like I. Sometimes I'm just exhausted and I can't think anymore, but sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's. There's a steady progression. Like I want more space. So I looked quite hard at the Hobonichi tech shows.
Yeah, yeah. Or like the 70s writers.
To which writers?
What are they called?
The seven seas writer. The one that has like 400 pages of that Tomoe river paper.
Yes. Yeah. I don't. Yeah, they're really. And the paper's lovely.
Yeah.
But the problem is they've got too much crap on the page. And you just want date. I just want the date, really. I don't need like some marketing guys, quotation wisdom at the bottom and I don't need the hours of the day down the side, etc. So as an alternative to that, I went for the most similar thing, which is slightly minimal from Japan, which is the Stallagy notebook. And I really recommend these.
Wait, how do you spell that?
Stallogy. S, T, A, L, O, G, Y. Just buy one. You will not be disappointed. Yep. Okay. And they have a soft cover, but they have an incredibly tough binding. So the. The COVID has got cloth in it. So it feels. It's actually not that robust, but it feels like it is. And it's nice because it's cloth. And the binding, you can see it's lay flat, obviously. And you can see. I don't know what the technical term is, but the, the. The. The bits which go through the thread of the sections. So the little lumps, you can run your finger down the spine and it's like four or five lumps.
Johnny, what do you call that?
They'd probably be tapes.
Yeah, yeah.
So. And you can actually feel them and see them on the. On the side of the book block. And I love that. And they're on. Completely indestructible as far as I can tell. The paper is really nice Tomoe river type paper. Really fine. You can write on it, draw on it.
Yeah.
And it's really smooth. And so what I do. Because they don't do a dated version of this, what I do is I write the date on the top of each page and have a page to review. So writing a date on top of each page is a bit of a chore because I do it in advance. So I do a whole year's worth and takes a while, but.
Oh, interesting. So you're. You're kind of, like, pre. Piecing out, like, the number of pages that you're taking up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And what I wanted to do was. Do you remember the chapter about Bob Graham where he rotated the color of his notebooks because he knew he was always about to finish one, and it was a good way to know which one. So his. The order was of his waste. Blue, green, red, yellow, I think it was. And he just went. Rotated through these colors, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool to do that with my annual journals?
Yeah.
And I've done the first three years like that, and then I need to get green next. And, of course, this is the year that they don't manufacture green.
Oh, no.
I'm going. Yeah. So it.
That's exactly why sometimes when there's something I love, I just, like, just hoard them, because I'm just like, what happens if they stop making.
Yeah, it's so frustrating in the time. You know, I've got to be more Zen about this. So anyway, so next year I'm going black, and the Bob Graham plan is abandoned. So that's the main journal. How much longer have you got?
I got 20 more minutes.
So you have to sleep before we do, so.
Yeah.
So you could do the. There's the Natalie Goldberg method, which I think I've talked about on here. But she wrote this great book about writing. She's a poet writer. She wrote a book called Writing down the Bones, and she said she would always insist on, like, the. I'm not actually suggesting this, but at back to school season, she would go at the end of back to school season and buy all of these just ridiculous, novelty, like, notebooks that, like, cartoon characters and, like, athletes and things on them. And then so when she goes back through her stuff looking for things, she's like, I think I did it in the, you know, Smurf Nerf's notebook. Right. I did it in the Ninja Turtles or LeBron James or whatever it ends up being. Yeah, yeah.
I. I like to put as I go. I often like to just put stickers on my. My notebook covers. Like, I. I kept a. I don't know why I did this. It was a little morbid, but I. Living through the pandemic. Like, at the very early days, I had a notebook where, like, a journal where I was just, like, tracking the number of, like, cases reported and the number of deaths in both the US and internationally. And eventually the numbers got so big that I just gave it up because I just didn't want to See that? But fascinating. It was, it was such an interesting snapshot. And as I would get stickers or like, you know, something I like, I would start sticking them in the COVID So I'm like, okay, it's that blue Leuch term with the, the sticker from San Francisco, Sutro Tower. Right. Like, I like something like that. And it was, it was, I was, I was keeping track of like my. I don't know if you played Animal crossing during the pandemic like so many people did, but I was keeping track of my, my turn up prices as that was happening. It was such a little snapshot of time. But I definitely remember those, those notebooks by the stickers that I put on them often.
He's going to get a big Florentine ledger book to turn up prices.
Yeah, exactly.
There would have been someone in Florence keeping track of people dying of the Black Death.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You're part of a long tradition there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Funny enough, my mum, my mum was a teacher and they all used to get issued the same diary at the beginning of the year. All of the teachers in her office. And so she used to put a sticker on the front and say, so I know that this one's mine. Yeah, because they're all the same otherwise. But yeah, so I do. I occasionally put stickers on the front.
Yeah.
And then for writing. I'm writing another book at the moment, and for making my notes and for sort of doing drafts and things. I like a. Like I'd like a bigger page actually than a five. So I go with B5. And again, Stallogy, because I like that Japanese paper, but soft back. But B5.
I need to grab one of those. I. I don't think I've ever used a Stallogy notebook.
Oh, so good.
Yeah. Your tour wouldn't happen to bring you to San Francisco at all, would it?
I'd love to, yeah. At some point. Yeah.
If you do, let me know and I'll take you to Mido, which is just one of the. The best Japanese stationery stores in the
U.S. yeah, yeah, great. Yeah, I love all that. I love when I'm in New York, I always go to Kinokuniya. The basement down there is.
Yeah, that's a good one.
What?
Well, I shouldn't ask this question, but. Johnny, you go ahead.
Sure.
So you're sort of. You're answering a lot about your preferences, but you know, I spent all day making books and, you know, I don't know what people like. So I'm wondering like, if you could come up with your perfect notebook like in terms of size and binding and what it's covered with and what kind of paper and what sort of format paper. What would that look like? Oh, that's in a perfect world.
In a perfect world for. For a journal it would be a five. I like a five a lot. It's a handy size for it to take around. I would go for something like not a hardcover but something like flexible. Not paperback either. Something what would. In book publishing we'd call flexi where it's paper over paper almost and. Or something with equivalent thickness. It has to be lay flat binding. Has to have a really strong binding. I do quite like having the pocket in the back. You lose that actually with the Stallengies you don't have that. But I quite like having that. I'm not that bothered about ribbon markers and the.
What about the elastic bands?
I don't miss them. I used to find that by the end of the year they've always given up anyway. Yeah, yeah, this is the thing like by the end of a year because I take my diary everywhere. Like all of the bits attached to it would be completely crappy. Like the elastic would be like 14 year old knickers, you know, that's one thing I found.
Have you ever used the Baron Fig confidants?
No.
It's there. Gosh. It was a Kickstarter just like 10 years ago and it's a couple guys out of New York. We've had them on the show before and they make like a really nice A5 journal that's clothbound, which is something I really love. Just it's very tactile and if you get it wet it just instantly just like looks terrible for the rest of his life. But it's slightly, slightly shorter and slightly wider than an A5 which I really like. It's almost exactly the size of an iPad mini, which is interesting if you carry them around together.
Yeah.
And then also. Yeah, it's one of the things I learned like you was I. I don't miss the elastic strap because they don't put them on there. But they also. I realize I do miss the like the paper envelope in the back because I do have like little ephemera that I like to stick in there and carry around. So yeah, that was my kind of like that's my stalogy notebook is the Baron Fig confidants.
The other thing I did when I was made redundant and I started researching the notebook, I made myself a little leather cover. I always Wanted one. And it was the only time I ever had time which would go all the way over a notebook, which a notebook could actually sit in with the back cover under a slot and then had a zipper running around the edge. So it was like a small portfolio thing, but only a five in size. And then you could fit in a pen and a pencil. Yeah. And. And, you know, slots for other papery things as well. And I actually made this out of leather. It took bloody ages. And I used it for a bit and then. Then I just stopped. Yeah. Interesting.
When you do use a pencil, what is your pencil of choice?
I like a propelling pencil. I tragically recently lost a really nice repelling pencil which my wife gave me. And in my. I'm just looking in my pencil case. I've got the brand. What's the brand? I have got. I quite like Blackwing. You don't get Blackwing over here, but trade fairs in the States. I was once given just a handful of Black Wings by the Blackwing people, which I thought was quite a nice gesture.
Yeah, absolutely.
That was given us Tombow.
I love it. Yeah.
And it says on the side for general writing, which is sort of what I do. General writing.
Is that the 9008?
It's the 8900. 8900.
Okay. If you. If you find yourself in Oxford at
all, I feel seen.
If you find yourself in Oxford at all, there's a store called Scriptum, which has a bunch of Black Wings in it, which is really nice. So, yeah, you can. You can get a lot of the. Like, really nice. There's also Nero's Notes. Johnny. They sell. They sell Black Wings, right?
Oh, I don't know.
It's an online. It's a UK online store run by a guy named Stuart Lennon, who's really great. Well, he lives in Cyprus, but I think a store runs out of the uk.
I think the thing is, I don't use a pencil very often. It's going to take. I've got a box of the tombows.
Yeah.
It's going to take me a long time to get through a box of tombows and then my handful of complimentary black wings as well, so.
Well, don't you acquire pencils way faster than you use them? I sure do.
Afraid not.
Yeah, I understand.
I'm quite decent.
Sorry. They have Black Wings and they have Musgraves, which are way harder to get in Europe than Black Wings.
Yeah, Musgraves are great. We should send you a little care package of American pencils. Let's Connect about that afterwards. Yeah. Some of our favorites. Yeah. Roland, it's. It's. It's been amazing talking to you. This book is such an achievement. I just. I'm so glad to know it exists. I. I think I randomly. I was somebody. There's a guy named Clive Thompson who used to be the editor of Wired magazine, and I'm on his, like, emailing list, and he was talking about this book, and I was just like, oh, my gosh. So.
Oh, that's a good one. I heard that.
I. I saw this and just told Johnny and Tim that, like, oh, yeah, we. We need to read this.
So when he sent us the, like, the link to it to tell us about it, I was like, how. How old is this book? Because, I mean, if this book had, you know, like, I surely would have come across this. It's like, we would have talked about it. So. And then saw that it was, like, so new, and I got so excited, like, oh, my gosh.
Oh, can I. Can I give you guys immediately?
Yeah.
Can I give you guys a quick. Okay, so, you know the pencil. The Henry Petroski book? Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah. Have you ever come across thinking with a pencil by Henning Nelms?
No.
By Henning Nelms.
Okay, this. Got this. This is where I repay you guys for. Okay, so this is. This is back in the 50s or 60s when Barnes and Noble went through a phase of doing some proprietary publishing under their own imprint. I'm just having a look. I'm having a look for the date. And Henning Nelms was evidently some kind of weird genius. Where's the copyright line?
I love weird genes.
And I got this for pennies on ebay. Yeah, it's copyright 1957. 64. So it was republished in 1964 by Barnes Noble in a paperback edition, which is actually very handsome.
Yeah.
And it's everything you can do with a pencil. And you guys.
Wow.
Need to have it.
Yeah.
I'm not going to spoil it. You just. You guys just need to have it.
I. Yeah, I'm looking at this. No, that's. That's funny. It says I'm looking at it on Amazon and it says customers who viewed this also viewed the Notebook. A history of thinking on paper.
Oh, beautiful.
Three of us looking at it is what? Yeah, that. Maybe this is our next book club.
I will.
I'll.
I'll make sure we all get a copy of this, guys.
It. It really should be.
That's amazing.
I mean, and it's. It's like Biblical. It's like penning gnomes. God. It's about 400 pages and it's clear his life's work.
Wow, that's so cool.
That's super cool.
Thank you for that. That's really useful. Yeah.
Gosh.
Yeah.
Anything. Anything else we want to chat about or bring up before we. Before we button it up.
I. I feel like I've had a chance to express myself.
I think you. You are seen. You are among friends. This is a safe spot for sure.
We appreciate you accepting the invitation to be our permanent fourth host. So, yes, just you. This has been really fun.
Christmas special, anything like that?
Series two, you mentioned. You mentioned, you. You teased this and I would. I would be bereft in my journalistic duties if I didn't ask you if you have. You would care to talk about your next book or spoil it anyway. And if you don't, that's totally fine.
I can't.
Okay. Understand.
I'd love to, but I can't.
Yeah.
But I'm very much enjoying it and I think. I think, you know, in three years time or whenever it finally drops, I would love to come back here and bore you about it again.
I. Anything but bored over here. So.
Yes.
Roland, where can people find you on the Internet if they wanted to kind of follow you and your work and also find your book?
In as much as I am online, it's at RolandAllen.com www.roland-allen.com and that links off to various places and then there's notebookhistorian on Insta and that's where I'm busy.
That's so good. Yeah. How do you. How do you spell that rolled R that you had in there when you were talking?
Roland.
Hyphen.
Allen.
Allen.
Perfect.
You're born with it.
Well, thank you so much. It's been just a real pleasure. This book was a gift to the world. And yeah, if people listening have not already checked this out, go get yourself a copy of the Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper with our guest, Roland Allen.
Thank you. Thank you all very much. I've really enjoyed this chat.
Yeah, it was great talking to you.
This has been episode 217 of the erasable podcast. You can find the recording of this episode and some show notes at erasable US 217. You can find us on social media, Instagram,
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