I enjoyed this article from Nature by microbiology PhD student Adeline Williams. As a scientist, she keeps lab notebooks in both digital and paper form, and she also keeps a personal journal. She has some great observations about these different forms of journaling and their benefits. Since my school days, long before I started working … Continue reading Keeping Two Journals
Extraordinary notebooks from the Terra Nova Antarctic expedition of 1911 are available for study and research for the first time. They are an important record of the natural history of Antarctica, an area now facing grave threats. However, they are best known for their infamous passages describing the penguin sexual behaviours. The Natural History Museum … Continue reading Penguin Sex Diaries!
A reader named Nicholas passed along a great tip about a notebook from the collection of the Morgan Library: “Thought of Notebook Stories while reading this article on Isaac Newton’s teenage pocket notebook. Video at the top of the page has some amazing images of his notebook.” The Morgan’s earliest acquisition related to the history … Continue reading Isaac Newton’s Pocket Memorandum Book
Another one to file under “stupid notebook tricks.” But it’s kind of a neat trick! A local news station in Denver, CO demonstrates in a video on their website: You can glue two notebooks together just by weaving together their pages. Don’t believe us? Science guy Steve Spangler explains how it works. Spoiler alert: the … Continue reading Glue Notebooks Together… Without Glue?
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
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 stumbled across these notebooks via Notizbuchblog.de and love the concept! They are blank journals with various pages of full-color illustrations and information interspersed, so you can learn about a subject while making your own notes about it. The series includes Astronomy, Weather, Butterflies (due February 2018), Home, and Trees. When I first saw the … Continue reading Observer’s Notebooks
There really is a notebook for everything… “For close to 60 years, a set of notebooks sat unused in the herbarium at the Yangambi Biological Station in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. During the colonial era, this was an agricultural research station, the National Institute for Agronomic Study of the Belgian Congo, or INEAC. … Continue reading Notebooks About Congolese Trees
This looks like a lovely book, full of travel sketches and notes on flora and fauna found in uncharted places: Explorers’ Sketchbooks. “This remarkable book showcases 70 such sketchbooks, kept by intrepid men and women as they journeyed perilous and unknown environments—frozen wastelands, high mountains, barren deserts, and dense rainforests—with their senses wide open.” Available … Continue reading Explorers’ Sketchbooks
I love stumbling on interesting antique notebooks like this! “Andrew Croswell (1778-1858) was a student at Harvard University in the late 1790s. He later studied medicine in Plymouth, MA, and practiced there and in Fayette and Mercer, ME. In the collections [at the Massachusetts Historical Society] we hold two notebooks that were kept by Croswell. … Continue reading Andrew Croswell’s 19th Century Notebooks