The Notebook

biblioasis Windsor, Ontario

Historian Jacob Soll makes a powerful claim: ‘Without double-entry accounting, neither modern capitalism nor the modern state could exist.’ When I spoke to another historian of the period, the paper specialist Orietta Da Rold, she needed only two words to evoke this intersection of conceptual innovation, advanced manufacture, information technology

Paper was made in Provence, so Farolfi may well have supplied himself locally, and we also know that the island of Mallorca exported it to nearby Marseille. But most Florentine merchants looked to a small town in central Italy, two hundred kilometres to their east, called Fabriano.

Accounts were always bound into ledgers for a similar reason: loose-leaf entries could easily be fabricated, but a ledger with numbered pages became tamper-proof.

They called their playful genre Oulipo, an acronym derived from the French for ‘workshop of potential literature’.

You couldn’t then read what was written inside, but you could trust that it hadn’t been interfered with. Traders used similar systems to close their diptychs and make them tamper-proof.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote, a century after Cennini: And take a note… with slight strokes in a little book that you should always carry with you… preserved with great care; for the forms, and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, wherefore keep these sketches as your guides and masters.

a stubborn constituency of users refused to move over into the digital sphere, and numerous peer-reviewed studies soon showed that their obduracy made sense. Something about the act of writing by hand, and the production of a physical object, makes the older technology more effective than the new. Sebregondi had, unwittingly, prompted serious inqui

Sentimentality may provide the answer. This tatty, scarred, yet practical notebook must have acquired value as it passed from hand to hand, accreting knowledge and nuance as it went. The constant companion of a succession of childless Franciscans, living and dying together in the community of their order, perhaps it came to embody the bonds that gr