The Best Thing I Read This Week: The Blank Page Revolution

The best thing I read this week was The Blank Page Revolution on Adjacent Possible, about how the mass production of paper reshaped human thought and culture.

The very idea of a “notebook”—a cheap, lightweight device for capturing stray thoughts—is a relatively recent invention, because for most of human history the materials for capturing those thoughts were anything but cheap and lightweight. Writing itself has been around for at least five thousand years, but for most of that long run, the surfaces people wrote on were comically ill-suited for the kind of casual jotting that we associate with notebooks. Before the arrival of paper, if you wanted to keep track of your thoughts, you had to turn to a whole menagerie of cumbersome technologies: tablets made of hinged wood and ivory, filled with beeswax that you could inscribe with a stylus; papyrus scrolls; or the most durable of the lot, parchment, made from scraped animal hides, which was so expensive to produce that a single notebook might require the skins of an entire flock of sheep.

Centuries before movable type, the arrival of paper also likely enabled the cornerstone of modern financial accounting—double-entry bookkeeping.

Paper had another key advantage over parchment for financial record-keeping: ink soaks into paper, making it permanent … Parchment, on the other hand, could be scraped clean and re-used, which opened the door to fraud. With cheap, secure paper notebooks at their disposal, the Italian merchants developed the cornerstone of modern accounting: the system of double-entry bookkeeping.

Finally, paper democratized writing. It allowed anyone to record their thoughts, keep notes, and share memories.

paper would increasingly be used to augment our private thoughts and memories: the commonplace book, the diary, the personal correspondence, the first draft of a novel. These were tools that helped us see ourselves.