Your Notebook’s History, part 4

How fancy is your notebook?

how fancy does it need to be?

For context, consider these examples —

Boccaccio recorded his reading in his zibaldoni;

Milton confided notes and quotations in five languages to his “common-place” book;

Charles Darwin used notebooks to record the flora and fauna he saw on the voyage of HMS Beagle;

Isaac Newton worked out problems in a so-called waste book, filling the margins with “diagrams of circles, ellipses, parabolas and curves . . . with tangents, chords and axes crossing them,”

Mr. Allen writes.

Agatha Christie used school exercise books to plot her whodunits.

Ernest Hemingway lost track of a trunk full of notebooks into which he had poured his thoughts and experiences; when the trunk was relocated, he used its contents to write the memoir “A Moveable Feast.”