Isn’t that just the best headline ever? It kills me that this story didn’t include a photo of the actual notebooks! It is a story that is, literally, as old as the hills, yet its history can be traced in just eight small notebooks. The accounts ledgers of Victorian bookkeepers in the upper Dales, meticulously … Continue reading “Old notebooks that open a window on lost world of Wensleydale cheese”
Sounds pleasant, doesn’t it? A fishy old notebook? But this is actually a pretty cool story! One day in June 1919, workers in a busy Canadian cannery in Port Essington rushed to clean, cook, and can the bright red flesh of a huge number of sockeye salmon hauled from the nearby Skeena River. Watching the … Continue reading Century-Old Salmon-Smeared NotebooksÂ
Some of my favorite images from artists’ sketchbooks are from Eugene Delacroix’s travel notebooks. A new book now translates his notes into English for the first time. In 1832 the 34-year-old Eugène Delacroix, already well known for his Orientalist works, accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco and travelled through Algeria and Andalusia. His exposure … Continue reading Delacroix’s Notebooks, Now in English
Here’s an interesting question for those of us who have fragile antique notebooks– how do you protect and preserve them? Q: I have my grandmother’s 105-year-old notebook with her beautiful calligraphy. The ink is fading, and the pages are becoming more and more brittle. What is the proper way to preserve it? And is there … Continue reading How to Preserve a Notebook
Some fascinating historic notebooks recording the first contact between British settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia: A set of 1788 notebooks recording the first attempts at communication between British settlers and Indigenous Australians reveals language that is still in use in Sydney Aboriginal communities today. The Dawes notebooks, named for First Fleet officer William Dawes … Continue reading The Dawes Notebooks
Father Thomas Lawrason Riggs was the first Catholic chaplain at Yale. He was a member of Yale’s class of 1910, where he met Cole Porter, the composer. He later attended graduate school at Harvard, where he roomed with Porter and Dean Acheson, a future secretary of state. During World War I, Riggs returned to Yale … Continue reading Thomas Lawrason Riggs’s Notebook
A gorgeous example of a natural historian’s field notes. This belonged to August F. Foerste, an American geologist and paleontologist. From the original article at the Field Book Project website: Field notes are well known to be essential, primary material that provide details about collections and expeditions that aren’t found in published material or specimen … Continue reading August F. Foerste’s Field Notebook
I don’t remember where I first came across the work of André Mare. He was a French artist who was associated with the Cubism and Art Deco movements, and his World War I sketchbooks are quite remarkable. No discussion about Cubism can be complete without at least some mention of André Mare. Yet even in conversations … Continue reading André Mare’s Sketchbooks
I came across an article from The Economist about a new exhibition at the British Library, which sounds great: it’s all about the history of writing and note-taking. The article is behind a paywall, unfortunately, but here’s a taste: NEATLY HANDWRITTEN, with a simple diagram below a numbered list, the sheet looks like any fussy … Continue reading Writing Exhibition at the British Library
I picked up this vintage travel diary on eBay for about $7. I’m not sure exactly when it would have been manufactured, but it definitely dates from an era when travel was quite a different experience from what it is today! The diary begins with 17 pages of frontmatter, most of which consists of various … Continue reading Vintage Travel Diary