Welcome to Gabfest Reed's I'm John Dickerson for this episode our book is the

notebook a history of thinking on paper by Roland Allen of course I'm doing a

book about notebooks.

But this book is about so much more than about notebooks. It's about thought as it progressed through the history of human understanding.

It's a history of creativity. It's also just a wonderful

tour through the way in which we capture these ideas that come into our heads and I'm delighted to have Rolan Allen with us here and so we're going to jump right in.

I have to tell you my origin story before I ask you yours, Ryan Holliday, the writer who writes about stoicism,

posted some of the books he'd been reading recently,

and yours was in the stack.

And I sent him a note, and I said, did you like it?

And he said, absolutely.

So I ordered it right away and dove in and absolutely loved it. And so I wanted to tell people about that

kind of recommendation was just great.

So let's set off here.

What is your origin story with the idea?

When did you decide and why did you decide to think

about writing about notebooks and taking really hold of the world from that

perspective? Well it goes back I suppose to when I first started writing a diary, which was, I think 22 years ago, I was adult, I was about 26 at the time, and I started doing that because I discovered or come by several of my grandfather's pre-war

diaries which were completely fascinating and were from a completely different world,

tiny little things but so evocative in terms of bringing to life this

guy who I'd hardly known, my grandfather.

And so I was quite inspired by this and I started keeping my own diary over the years and got really into it. Every year I'd write a bit more and I started using

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