On notebooks and memory

Capturing life so I can be surprised by it later

Hey y’all,

I have three books at my spot on the kitchen table right now:

1. Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

2. My late summer/fall diary (started on Oahu back in August)

3. Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three, the final installment in his sketchbook series

The Notebook is full of the kind of stuff I’ve written to you about — commonplace books, the benefits of thinking on the page, movements like Mass Observation, theories like “The Extended Mind,” etc. The writing is great and well-structured: The book is 400 pages, but chunked into 30 easy-to-digest chapters.

It’s rare that you find a book that feels like it was written just for you. Even rarer is when you’re casually flipping through a book about notebooks and you find a page from your very own notebook: