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080: Notebooks

"So, when were you going to tell me about the notebook?"

Notebooks are fascinating. I've got three running right now and I get excited when a project comes up that might require the construction of a notebook. As an object which will contain everything you know about a single subject, they become grimoires -- secret texts which are the storehouses of collected knowledge. Mine tend to be filled with more than just text. There will be line drawings, newspaper clippings, scraps from magazines, charts, graphs and lots and lots of small, nearly unreadable text. That's one of the requirements of a good notebook: handwriting that is indecipherable to anyone other than yourself.

They've got to be the right size too. The one I have in the car is paperback sized because I don't use it but rarely, and when I do, I'm scribbling in it while sitting at a traffic light. I don't want something heavy and bulky. It needs to be quickly accessible and small enough that I can throw it across the steering wheel. My daily notebook is large, a full-sized book with nearly three hundred pages in it. Its fairly generic -- I get them at the University Bookstore -- and, as such, I can be assured of being able to get the same thing year after year. When you start filling them and stacking them on the shelf, there is a certain delight in having them all be the same binding.

Almásy's notebook in The English Patient is one of my favorites. It's a copy of Herodotus' Histories that he has augmented with his own notes and observations. Professor Henry Jones' Grail notebook -- though but briefly seen in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- is another tome which inspired me as a youngster. And, of course, nearly every Lovecraft story seems to contain some sort of journal that records an adventurer's descent in madness and despair.

Notebooks allow us to leave messages for those who follow us. They allows us to leave record of our obsessions and paranoia; to leave a warning in our wake. "Yes, this is what killed me." Notebooks are keys. There's a notebook in the BOOK OF LIES. There are nine actually, but only one is important in the beginning. They need the first key before they can understand how to utilize the others.

Posted by Teppo at April 12, 2004 08:09 AM

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