Notebook Stories » Scientific

Notebook Addict of the Week: Futurebird

Nifty — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:00:42 +0000

This week’s addict got my attention through a post on the Notebook Stories Facebook page, where she linked to the first in a series of posts about her notebook collection:

The series continues in these other notebook posts: Notebook Collection Part Two, Notebook Collection Part Three, and Phases in the Life of a Notebook. The “Phases” post is very insightful, and features this lovely image of some of the pages inside her notebooks:

There are lots more wonderful photos and commentary in her posts, including this amusing observation:

Ever since I started loving blank books and shopping for them I have starting HATING address books, planners and photo albums. Why? Often I’ll see a notebook on the shelf, the perfect size! The perfect color! I reach for it and…. it’s a PHOTO ALBUM! ugh. So annoying.

I feel your pain! And I love your notebook collection. Thanks for sharing!

Isaac Newton’s Notebook

Nifty — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:00:08 +0000

I wish this could have been me:

I GOT a real thrill in December 1999 in the Reading Room of the Morgan Library in New York when the librarian, Sylvie Merian, brought me, after I had completed an application with a letter of reference and a photo ID, the first, oldest notebook of Isaac Newton. First I was required to study a microfilm version. There followed a certain amount of appropriate pomp. The notebook was lifted from a blue cloth drop-spine box and laid on a special padded stand. I was struck by how impossibly tiny it was — 58 leaves bound in vellum, just 2 3/4 inches wide, half the size I would have guessed from the enlarged microfilm images. There was his name, “Isacus Newton,” proudly inscribed by the 17-year-old with his quill, and the date, 1659.

From an article by James Gleick: Books and Other Fetish Objects – NYTimes.com.

New Book: “Field Notes on Science and Nature”

Nifty — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:05:46 +0000

This sounds like a great book: Field Notes on Science and Nature

Why are scientists’ field notebooks so valuable? And do notes really matter anymore, with global positioning systems, laptops and digital cameras available to document information traditionally recorded through sketches and barely legible scrawl? In “Field Notes on Science and Nature,” edited by Michael R. Canfield, more than a dozen biologists, anthropologists, geologists and illustrators explore these questions as they open up and dissect their journals, and a few of their forebears’ as well.

Some of the journals are mélanges of art and probing text, including personal revelations (“I never thought I could cry over a goose. But I did”) and copious notes to self. Though written in recent decades, their style would have been familiar to 19th-century readers of travelogues by naturalists like Wallace, Charles Darwin and Henry Walter Bates—books that were often little more than cleaned-up field journals.
Yet a few journals on display in “Field Notes” appear downright clinical, consisting of orderly measurements and lists of species laid out on graph paper. This “just the facts, ma’am” approach is the direction in which field notes have been heading for some time; the newer technologies have only hastened the course. Many of the “Field Notes” authors lament this trend, and not without reason. Journaling—the act of committing information to one’s future self or to unknown others—does more than record facts. It trains the scientific mind.

It sounds like the book includes quite a few reproductions of actual notebook pages, plus essays about scientific journaling. I can’t wait to find a copy to browse through!

Reader Week: Jessa’s Science Students

Nifty — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:04:24 +0000

Jessa sent me an email with this great notebook story:

I teach 6th grade Science at a Friends School in Philadelphia and I base a large percentage of my curriculum around the notion of observing, recording, and taking pride in a scientific sketchbook.

My students still take notes in a traditional binder, but for each unit they are required to do several annotated sketches in any way they please to help them cement the information.

Check out all the great drawings these kids have done in their notebooks, they’re amazing! This really struck a chord with me, because I loved science as a kid and was always drawing planets and eyeballs and stuff like this. Now I feel like doing it again!

Thanks again to Jessa for sharing these wonderful notebooks from her very talented students!

Morgan Library Exhibit: “The Diary”

Nifty — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:00:35 +0000

Here’s an exhibit I plan on checking out in the near future: “The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives,” at the Morgan Library in New York.
The exhibit includes these lovely items:

A diary jointly kept by Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne:

John Ruskin’s chess diary:

You can see more images in the slides shows in these reviews:

New York Times: Tales of Lives Richly Lived, but True?
DNA Info: New Midtown Exhibit Peeks at Private Diaries of Writers, Performers.

Ramanujan’s Notebooks

Nifty — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:07:09 +0000

Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician, who is quite famous if you’re into math, I guess, though his name would have meant nothing to me if I hadn’t read David Leavitt’s novel The Indian Clerk, which tells a fictionalized version of Ramanujan’s time at Cambridge University.
Although I’m sure I wouldn’t understand the least bit of their contents, I wouldn’t mind taking a closer look at Ramanujan’s notebooks:

Kolby Kirk’s First Journal

Nifty — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:14:15 +0000

I featured Kolby Kirk’s hiking journals here a while ago, but more recently, I came across a post on another blog of his, talking about his first journal. I love how he explored his interests in a variety of topics in these wonderful sketches:

The journal itself is pretty neat– a spiral bound sketchbook onto which he glued an expanding folder:

Don’t forget that notebooks make great holiday gifts! Check out the Notebook Stories Store for lots of great brands.

The Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook

Nifty — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:05:48 +0000

The Art of Manliness blog muses on the long tradition of keeping a notebook:

The idea of carrying around a pocket notebook has become quite popular these last few years, revived by the introduction of the current incarnation of the “Moleskine” into the market. It’s become so popular that I’m afraid it has come to be seen as trendy or faddish, and this is putting some men off to starting this important habit themselves. Some find the Cult of the Moleskine and its faux history understandably distasteful. The company shills their pricey Made in China notebooks as the notebook of Hemingway, Van Gogh, and Matisse, when the company that currently makes them only got into the business in 1997.

But don’t let the pocket notebook’s current image dissuade you from carrying one around. The truth is that you don’t need to use a Moleskine (unless you really like them)-even some note cards clipped together will do. And far from being a modern fad, the pocket notebook has a long, important, and manly history. Pocket notebooks were part of the arsenal of a long list of great men from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Edison (we’re working on an in-depth post of how these men used their notebooks for the future). The repositories of eminent men’s personal effects nearly always includes a pocket notebook full of their ideas and musings.

Of course, all of this can be equally valid for women too!

The best part of the article is all the examples he’s found of notebook use throughout history by different types of people, including “the farmer,” “the salesman,” “the minister,” and “the student.” Here’s an example:

The Boy Scout
“In one of the pockets there should be a lot of bachelor buttons, the sort that you do not have to sew on to your clothes, but which fasten with a snap, something like glove buttons. There should be a pocket made in your shirt or vest to fit your notebook, and a part of it stitched up to hold a pencil and a toothbrush….

No camper, be he hunter, fisherman, scout, naturalist, explorer, prospector, soldier or lumberman, should go into the woods without a notebook and hard lead pencil. Remember that notes made with a hard pencil will last longer than those made with ink, and be readable as long as the paper lasts.

Every scientist and every surveyor knows this and it is only tenderfeet, who use a soft pencil and fountain pen for making field notes, because an upset canoe will blur all ink marks and the constant rubbing of the pages of the book will smudge all soft pencil marks.

Therefore, have a pocket especially made, so that your notebook, pencil and fountain pen, if you insist upon including it—will fit snugly with no chance of dropping out.” -The American Boys’ Handybook of Camp-lore and Woodcraft, By Daniel Carter Beard, 1920

Read more, including lots of readers’ comments on their own note-taking habits at The Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook | The Art of Manliness.

Top Opening Pocket Lab Notebook

Nifty — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:24:24 +0000

Here’s something that struck me as unusual: a top-opening lab notebook.

It looks a bit like the Book Company lab notebook I reviewed, but that was side opening, as is every other lab notebook I’ve seen. Also, this one is different in that the pages are printed on only one side, which might appeal to notebook users who like a mix of lined and plain pages.
They’re $7.99 here: Scientific Notebook Company. Other styles are also available.

Notebook Addict of the Month: Paul

Nifty — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:06:58 +0000

This week’s addict had to be upgraded to Addict of the Month. Paul has been a faithful reader and correspondent for quite a while now, sharing not only photos of his own notebooks, but links to historical notebooks and other interesting trivia. Did you know, for instance, that the last entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary was dated May 31, 1669? According to Paul, who celebrates the day as a special one for diarists, Pepys “discontinued his journal (begun New Year’s Day 1660) because he feared (mistakenly) he was going blind. So, every May 31 is the day that I feel I must post a blog entry, or write in my holographic diary, even if I abandon it all other times.”

More from Paul on his history with notebooks:

I’ve been a diarist since I was in fifth grade (I just turned 47). Unfortunately, all my diaries from fifth grade (1974) until I dropped out of college (1989) vanished when I stored them in a storage locker I didn’t keep paying for. Since resuming on New Year’s Day 1990, I’ve used legal ledgers, spiral notebooks, Write-in-the-Rain, and, more recently composition books (inspired partly, I admit, by JOE GOULD’S SECRET, SE7EN, and HENRY FOOL.) I turn 50 in 2013, and I have decided I will switch to bound legal ledgers (Boorum & Pease and/or Avery) at that point.

Here are various photos of some of Paul’s notebooks:

As for historical notebooks, Paul shared these, as well as some others I’ll feature in future posts:

These are in display cases on the first floor of the William Oxley Thompson Library at Ohio State University. These are notebooks included in this display.

The first two pictures (100_0283.jpg and 100_0284.jpg) are the work notebooks and rough drafts of William Vollmann’s gigantic novel Europe Central.

The other two are the field notebooks of Dr. Richard Goldthwait (1911-1992), professor of geology at OSU.

Many thanks to Paul for sharing his love of notebooks! You can follow Paul’s blog at Melville at the Customs-House.