Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads: Understanding the World Through Notebooks
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Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2024
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John Dickerson talks with author Roland Allen about his new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. They discuss the historical origins of notebooks, how to keep a notebook and their own personal journeys documenting their lives.
If you enjoyed this conversation, you’ll love an exploration into John Dickerson’s notebooks with his podcast Navel Gazing. Season one is out now.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to GabFest Reeds. I'm John Dickerson. For this episode, our book is The Notebook, |
| 0:07.0 | a history of thinking on paper by Roland Allen. Of course I'm doing a book about notebooks. |
| 0:14.3 | But this book is about so much more than about notebooks. It's about thought as it progressed |
| 0:19.7 | through the history of human understanding. It's a history of creativity. It's about thought as it progressed through the history of human understanding. |
| 0:21.6 | It's a history of creativity. It's also just a wonderful tour through the way in which we capture |
| 0:29.6 | these ideas that come into our heads. And I'm delighted to have Roland Allen with us here. And so we're going to jump right in. |
| 0:36.7 | I have to tell you my origin |
| 0:38.0 | story before I ask you yours. Ryan Holliday, the writer who writes about Stoicism, posted some of the |
| 0:44.8 | books he's been reading recently, and yours was in the stack. And I sent him a note, and I said, |
| 0:50.1 | did you like it? And he said, absolutely. So I ordered it right away and dove in and absolutely |
| 0:56.4 | loved it. And so I wanted to tell people about that because it was just a great entry point to |
| 1:03.4 | the book. You know, I don't know Ryan at all, but that kind of recommendation was just great. So let's |
| 1:08.5 | set off here. What is your origin story with the idea? |
| 1:11.7 | When did you decide and why did you decide to think about writing about notebooks and taking |
| 1:17.3 | really hold of the world from that perspective? Well, it goes back, I suppose, to when I first |
| 1:23.0 | started writing a diary, which was, I think, 22 years ago. I was adult. I was about 26 at the time. |
| 1:30.3 | And I started doing that because I'd discovered or come by several of my grandfather's pre-war diaries, |
| 1:37.3 | which were completely fascinating and were from a completely different world. |
| 1:41.3 | Tiny, tiny little things, but so evocative in terms of bringing to life |
| 1:45.4 | this guy who I'd hardly known, my grandfather. And so I was quite inspired by this, and I started |
| 1:50.1 | keeping my own diary over the years, and got really into it every year I'd write a bit more, |
| 1:56.3 | and I started using diaries for different things, sketchbooks, for keeping lists, for keeping records |
... |
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