This week’s notebook addict blogs about history at Patriots and Peoples.
He says:
A bit more than twenty years ago I started carrying a spiral notebook with me almost constantly. I usually wrote in it while reading—taking notes, jotting titles and authors of other texts that I planned to examine, proposing theses, writing initial drafts of key paragraphs, outlining course syllabi, composing poems, …
Alas, it seems he is a notebook addict no more:
The habit of always having a spiral notebook with me has ceased since computers have become ubiquitous. These days I’m more likely to carry a notebook manufactured by Gateway than one made by Mead.
But he hasn’t totally given up on notebooks, and still appreciates the qualities of paper:
As created text morphs from rough notes to polished prose, much is lost. Some of the loss is beneficial, but not all. My initial condemnation of some book or article may give way to cautious acceptance of another scholar’s perspective, or exuberance for a fresh approach may become the jaded recognition that notions discredited long ago might be resurrected once their refutations have been forgotten. My spiral notebooks preserve a record of these journeys. Those saved as files, even when new drafts have new names, are quickly lost. I’ll never again see the notes I saved just a few years ago on 5 ¼ inch floppies, for example.
There definitely is a different feel when you’re writing things in a notebook and just typing on a computer. When things go down on your notebook there’s a greater sense of accomplishment and permanence.