Notebook Scribbledehoy

Many of the intelligent people that I know have a favourite pen (mine is either the Pilot V fountain pen or the uniball eye micro UB-150), but what about a favourite notebook? Only Lion Kimbro seems to have taken any substantive notes about notetaking, and his system has evolved very differently from mine.

I take notes mainly to capture bits of random information when I'm not near a computer. They're also useful for diagrams and art and style, and I try to be as creative as I can be with the medium, mainly just for the sake of it. There's a story that G.K. Chesterton, one of the world's most prolific and best writers, would scribble random notes on things like scraps of wallpaper, even stopping in the middle of traffic sometimes to capture a thought on paper. Whilst I don't take notes at that level, I'm still pretty obsessive about capturing information.

So I need something that's portable, and something that allows expressivity. Only A6 paper will fit in my coat pockets, and only plain paper will allow the kind of unboundedness that I seek. But most notebooks now are ruled! I was in a shop the other day with some folk looking for a plain notebook inamidst a sea of ruled ones, and I was complaining outloud, mainly to myself, about the lack of plain notebooks. A lady was already there examining the notebooks herself, and she was kinda in my way but I didn't want to get in her way since she was there first, and I was a bit worried that she thought I was doing my own examination of the products a bit too close to her; so I was delighted when she seized on my annoyance and amplified it. She lamented the lack of plain notebooks too, and added that she didn't like lines since they made her feel like a schoolgirl again taking her GCEs. She knows how to write in straight lines now! So do I, and I'm glad there's at least a single person who shares my view.

A5 obviously isn't portable, so it's no good, but what about notecards? I tried those for a while but I don't think they give enough space. On the other hand, when I took a trip to Bristol for the FOAF meeting some years ago with Jim Ley et al., I scribbled notes for three days on a single extremely small sub-A6 sized piece of paper, and it came out to be very useful. It's harder to lose, and it makes you concentrate on information density. But when you have a notebook, that goes out of the window anyway, so you may as well give yourself as much space as your pocket can muster.

Another thing that I've found only recently is that notebooks with a spine mean that you lose a lot of the paper's surface near the inside edge. So only spiral bound notebooks will do. W.H. Smiths in the United Kingdom sell pretty good notebooks matching this description with 80 sheets in them, and for just 99p, which is quite cracking. They don't have page grips, but a rubber band would suffice, and they don't have hardcovers either, but they add unnecessary bulk anyway so that's okay. And as an addendum to my pen choice, I'll note that I use black ink almost exclusively. It provides the highest contrast, and seems as though it'll be more durable. Lion Kimbro advises colour coding, but good multicolour pens are hard to find.

So that's the hardware. Short of greppable, i.e. computerised, paper the technology isn't really going to progress much further. As long as the paper doesn't bleed through, which is my annoyance with the otherwise well crafted Moleskine notebooks, you've got yourself a winning writing surface. And perhaps writing in coloured chalks on black or brown paper would be really optimal, but who can find space in his or her pockets for a whole pack of chalks?

Anyway, onto the software—the technique. Recently I've been taking notes in the form of large bullet lists, which are essentially just scrips and scraps of information. I used to do a lot more structuring and so on, but now I find that that's mainly being channeled into creating symbols to categorise each of my scraps. I use symbols for so much that it's almost a shorthand system. In fact, it is a microshorthand really. I use, for example, my day symbols on almost every page. I like to make sure that everything is dated.

Talking of shorthand, privacy is a concern, as is speed, and I've been wondering whether learning shorthand wouldn't be a good way of getting around both of those problems—not many people can decipher shorthand by sight these days. Too few stenographers. On the other hand, privacy doesn't seem to exist anymore. I remember going into my library and asking for a particular book which I had scribbled down in my notebook—one of my most frequent uses. So the lady at the information point took my notebook and want off into storage to find what I was looking for. It was rather disconcerting given the level of information that I may have had in that notebook: bank details, passwords, and who knows what personal stuff? In fact, I rarely keep such stuff in notebooks just because of this kind of privacy worry.

And then there's the worry about the notebook being lost. I tend to stick my name and an email address that I'll only activate if the notebook goes missing on the first page. I figure that it's pretty useless but that most people will do the right thing and try to contact the owner. Incidentally, learning another language is also something I've considered just to get around the privacy aspect, though again that isn't foolproof. Shorthand is probably best, but not all that useful outside of a notebook setting. Privacywise, though, it does work wonders. Pepys's notebook went undeciphered for over a century. "The Reverend John Smith was engaged to transcribe the diaries into plain English; and he laboured at this task for three years, from 1819 to 1822, apparently unaware that a key to the shorthand system was stored in Pepys's library a few shelves above the diary volumes." - Samuel Pepys, Wikipedia.

It seems often to have been vicars and priests and rectors who've done the extraordinary literary things in history. Roget and Carroll were clergy. So was the lesser known but sometime dazzling Robert Herrick. Copernicus was a bishop. Emerson and Addison's fathers were both reverends. The Rev. Tuckwell's Biographical Study of A.W. Kinglake has one of the highest word densities in all of the shorter Project Gutenberg books; probably only someone like Joyce could rival him overall (incidentally, What Planet is This? would probably come second or third if serialised).

One irony about the lists of notes that I take is that I very rarely act upon them, but they help me to organise my thoughts internally and reinforce them to some extent, so looking back through the notes is often unnecessary. It's like essaying out in outline form. All the same, I used to do a lot of work on paper, and it would be nice to recapture some of the benefits that that provided, but I'm not entirely sure how to accomplish that, especially when the computer seems a much more useful tool overall. Part of the idea behind Strange Strands is that it lets me essay out things in much the same way, only with a bit more meat on the bones.

Joyce used to keep a series of notebooks containing scores of little phrases he picked up from various sources; and when he used them or otherwise dispensed of them, he'd strike them through with a coloured crayon. One of them, VI.A, is called Scribbledehobble. I've been thinking about doing a similar thing for What Planet and perhaps its successor project, and in fact I have been doing so digitally already. The immediacy of a computer, and the fact that, for example, I have at least three distributed backups of even this little note, really makes it unbeatably advantageous.