Do you use a notebook? Join the conversation in the comments section below I’m in the middle of writing a novel about a writer who compulsively makes notes. Trouble is, I find myself spending too much time making notes about it and not enough time writing it. This can be a hard cycle to break. Yet as Roland Allen shows in his restless, arresting new history of the notebook – which I have carefully noted and annotated – the note-making habit is nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it has made a transformative, and practically limitless, contribution to civilisation. Capitalism? It got a boost from the new availability of paper notebooks in 13th century Florence, which facilitated book-keeping. The Renaissance? It was born out of sketchbooks, which allowed the likes of Cimabue and Giotto to prepare for and achieve a new level of realism in their works. Elizabethan drama? This, too, owes a debt to the note.…