The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

1305 BCE: wax tablets like this were Europe’s notebooks for two thousand years. We know that they used the tablet for writing, but we can’t know exactly what they wrote. Diptych tablets

The Romans, when they eventually succeeded the Bronze Age and Hellenic civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean, adopted small Ulu Burun-style tablets, which they called pugillares or ‘handhelds’. They made them more capacious, either by making the leaves larger (and calling the results tabellae) or adding more leaves: tablets with three (and therefore four, not two, faces to write on) became common, and one survivor from Pompeii has eight.

In the year 80 CE, someone in Rome created the first bound book of papyrus pages folded within a protective parchment cover. This innovative format – the codex

These included the quaderno bianco (‘white book’), which was the preceding year’s general ledger; the libro rosso (‘red book’), a record of Farolfi business in wheat, barley, oats, olive oil, wine, wool and yarn; the quaderno dei panni (‘cloth book’), covering trade in wool cloth; the libro dell’entrata e dell’escita or cash book; and two small quaderni delle spese, notebooks for the day-to-day expenses that Manucci and Baldovini accrued on their rounds, called the quaderno memoriale and the libro piloso.

Highlights

items recovered from the bottom of the Mediterranean. The Ulu Burun shipwreck is one of its glories, and its gallery dedicates a display case to a small wood-and-ivory item: a hinged writing tablet which, when folded shut, would sit nicely