I recently came across a mention of notebooks used by Beethoven: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is recognized the world over as a composer of musical masterpieces exhibiting heroic strength, particularly in the face of his increasing deafness from ca. 1798. By 1818, the Viennese composer had begun carrying blank booklets with him, for his acquaintances … Continue reading Beethoven’s Conversation Books
What a cool thing: The Exercise Book Archive is a website that is preserving exercise books, otherwise known as children’s school notebooks, from around the world and over hundreds of years! You can click on each notebook and see larger images of the cover and interior. Here’s the pink one from 1980s China in the … Continue reading The Exercise Book Archive
Here’s something I came across on the website of the Morgan Library: This is the only surviving personal notebook of the French artist Édouard Manet (1832–1883). He used it in the early 1860s, when he was between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty, documenting aspects of his everyday life and work in the two years … Continue reading Édouard Manet’s Notebook
I usually don’t like to write about notebooks that are associated with crime– they usually involve the sociopathic journal entries of serial killers or mass shooters and I have no desire to give them any further publicity. But here’s a notebook that harkens back to an era of more romanticized (if not much less violent) … Continue reading Bonnie Parker’s Notebook
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