ROLAND ALLEN: We live in a capitalist environment, and that capitalist environment is entirely shaped by bookkeeping, accountancy, notions of the company, notions of profit and loss, balance sheets, all of that. And all of those are completely tied up with the use of notebooks. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is "Lost in the Stacks," the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Alex McGee. Each week on "Lost in the Stacks," we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. 

ALEX MCGEE: Today's episode is called "The Notebook Age." As you heard in the cold open, the notebook is a technology that was essential to the creation of the modern capitalist world. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: And despite that, I am a big fan of notebooks. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Roland Allen, our guest today, is also a fan of notebooks. He wrote a pop history book entitled The Notebook-- A History of Thinking On Paper, which was published in late 2023. Through a variety of notebook stories, from Italian business ledgers in the Renaissance to modern bullet journals, Allen explored the way we use paper to think and remember outside of our head. 

ALEX MCGEE: We spoke with Roland about thinking on paper, using notebooks, and why we might call our current era the Notebook Age. 

FRED RASCOE: In our conversation, the idea of memory kept popping up. So our songs today are about memories, memories in notebooks, memories of other people, and memories that we just can't keep in our minds. Let's start with a song about just how powerful memory can be and why maybe you should offload it into a notebook. This is "Memories Can't Wait" by talking heads right here on "Lost in the Stacks." 

CHARLIE BENNETT: That was "Memories Can't Wait" by Talking Heads. Our show today is called "The Notebook Age." Our guest is Roland Allen, the author of The Notebook-- A History of Thinking On Paper, published in 2023 by Profile Books and in 2024 by Biblioasis. That's UK and Canada, respectively. 

FRED RASCOE: We started by asking, what does the phrase thinking on paper mean to you? 

ROLAND ALLEN: Well, it's meant different things over time, but I guess what it means for me now is any process-- and by that, I mean writing but also drawing or writing down numbers or phone numbers or little sums or shopping lists, anything like that-- when you're taking it out of your head and putting it on paper and ultimately when you're committing something which you want to remember to paper. But that can be any kind of shape of mark. I don't restrict it to writing. 

And then once it's down on paper and you don't have to hold it in your mind, you don't have to be remembering it, then you can play with it. And it's that playful nature of thinking on paper which I really enjoy, I think, and I think a lot of people do whether or not they realize that they're doing it. So when they're doodling or listing or diary writing or whatever, I think that all comes under the broad heading of thinking on paper. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Do you separate out the mathematical stuff from language when you think about thinking on paper? You included it in the definition, but are those two different things? 

ROLAND ALLEN: No, not really. I think you're dealing with the same fundamental problem, which is that you're much worse at remembering stuff than you think you are. Like, you're really bad at remembering stuff, and I don't-- please don't take that personally. I'm not talking to you personally, but we just all are. 

So if I shout a phone number to you right now, you will forget it in tens. And if I shout out my shopping list to you, three items you'll remember, four at a stretch maybe if they're particularly conspicuous. But five or six, you're going to forget one. 

So ultimately, whatever it is to write down whatever it is to remember to hold in your mind so that you can manipulate it or play with it or just recall it accurately, getting it down on paper is the process. So the same thing applies to numbers or words. So yeah, so in my work life, I do a lot of calculations, if you like-- you know, profit and loss type. 

And it's that kind of scratch pad calculation which you have to do on the hoof all the time in business of any kind. Can we afford to do this? Is this going to be a good idea? 

And those, of course, get mixed up with diary notes or with my day to day or with the shopping list or with whatever things to-do list I've got planned. So yeah. So everything goes onto the same kind of page, I would say. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: And you said it's changed, your idea of it. Were you always in that kind of messy everything together attitude, or did you not respect thinking on paper as much as you do now? 

ROLAND ALLEN: Oh, I definitely didn't. I did not understand. I did not have a clue, really, about how versatile and how useful it could be. I suppose-- I mean, obviously I was interested in notebooks when I started researching the book. And obviously, I had half an idea of that. It was going to be an interesting subject. Otherwise, I wouldn't have looked at it. 

And I'd been working in a creative industry not doing a particularly creative job because I'm a sales guy. But I'd been working in book publishing for quite a long time. So I'd seen a lot of people with sketchbooks and design notebooks and quite interesting notebooks. 

But I'd never really had one myself. And then when I started researching the book and found out how people used them and how they worked in practice, then it just-- a switch clicked. And then I really wanted to start doing it myself. 

So in the process of writing this book, I went from using one or two notebooks at once and just writing everything down in the order I came across to being quite analytical about it and being quite focused about it and saying, right, I'm going to start a new notebook for this chapter, and I will be listing things, and I will stick a map in, and I will do a timeline and a spider diagram and then a word cloud and all of these things, which were little tips and techniques which I'd picked up on the way and which turned out to be, I think, really useful or very useful for me, anyway. So yeah, it did change as I was looking into it. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: I played a little bit with sketching into my notebooks after I read the book. I've never been a person who drew, and I never used sketches really to think things out, but it was a very enticing description you had of a notebook with other stuff in it, with drawings. And so I did one page, and I haven't done another one since. Were there parts of the things you read about that you tried, but kind of your thought patterns resisted? 

ROLAND ALLEN: Yeah, I've been a big doodler. But what I always doodle is letters and word shapes. So I doodle, like, a nice serif alphabet or something when I'm stuck in a meeting and I can't get out of it, and that's a way of not doodling anything accidentally offensive in the meeting where people can see it, just doodling letterforms instead. 

No, I'm not one of those notebookers who can jump from sketch to sort of word notes. And funnily enough, I just literally half an hour ago was reading the newsletter from Austin Kleon, who's a writer we actually feature in the book, or we use one of his pictures. He's a great graphic designer. He's, I think, based in Texas. 

And he does that. So every page of his notebook is always covered with sketches and little diagrams and drawings. I can't really do it, but it doesn't matter. I mean, everyone has their own style, I think, when they get into it. 

FRED RASCOE: As we're interviewing here, I am writing things down. We talk about the tools that we're using. I'm not using a notebook. I'm using a little Post-It pad because you're right. My memory is terrible, and I just jot down little things that you say that might spark a spark a question later. And so in the process of you thinking about thinking on paper and writing about it, how do the different tools that you use to write affect how you're actually thinking? I know I use Post-It notes, but I haven't really delved into why I'm using a Post-It note for this rather than a notebook or something like that. 

ROLAND ALLEN: I've got lots of little rituals now for different kinds of writing, and my wife, I recently had a birthday, and my wife gave me a really nice pen which is kind of a slight novelty, which is brass. So it's very heavy and permanent feeling, but then you can change the different tips on it. And so I've set it up as a felt tip pen, which is ridiculous because it's like this obviously quite expensive, precious brass thing, and I've set it up as the cheapest, nastiest kind of pen that there is. 

But I'm going to use that for a particular of note taking, I'd said to her. This is going to be big, bold ideas scratched across the page. When I'm revising a manuscript, which I'm doing at the moment, it's always pencil. 

When I'm making notes from sources, when I'm sort of writing notes from a book, then I try and mix up colors on the page so they'll have blue and black and red all on the same page. But then when I'm writing my diary, I'm absolutely particular about it's black. It has to be black, and I get quite upset if I have to leave black behind. 

So yeah, I mean, definitely. And these in a way, then, become little triggers. So when I'm doing a timeline, I like it to be lovely and multi-colored, and that helps it-- makes it easier for me to navigate it when I come back to revisit it, for instance. So yeah, there is definitely an instrument for each moment in the noting life. 

FRED RASCOE: Maybe I'm looking for analysis of why I'm using a Post-It note rather than a notebook and what it says about me. 

ROLAND ALLEN: I love Post-It notes, actually, and what I like is the way you can make a list which rolls over from day to day. So, I mean, just this morning, I was doing exactly that because I've got a list of quite substantial tasks to do. I'm not going to do them all in one day. So I've pasted it down on today's page in my diary and crossed a couple off, move it over a couple of days, without having to destroy pages of diary with one fairly simple list. 

MARLEE GIVENS: This is "Lost in the Stacks," and we'll be back with more from Roland Allen, author of The Notebook-- A history of Thinking On Paper after a music set. 

ALEX MCGEE: File this set under BF575.S37 no dot W334. 

[THE ZOMBIES, "REMEMBER YOU"] 

(SINGING) I remember your face when I think-- 

[MORPHINE, "THE WAY WE MET"] 

[VOCALIZING] 

MARLEE GIVENS: That was "The Way We Met" by Morphine and, before that, "Remember You" by The Zombies, songs about memories of your partner. This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "The Notebook age." Our guest is Roland Allen, author of the book The Notebook-- A History of Thinking On Paper. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: So you mentioned diary, and I think that means different things to different people. You have now dealt with a lot of very specific kind of notebooks and practices and definitions. So how do you define diary now? 

ROLAND ALLEN: I try not to. The big distinction, and people have very strong opinions about this, is when is a diary a journal or when is a journal a diary. And I personally think that there isn't a meaningful difference or it's impossible to carve one out. 

If you're writing about things which are happening to you in the recent past and you're involved in them, then it's either a diary or a journal, and I don't see a particular difference. I think that the key thing with either of them is that you have to be written into the story. If you're just writing about the news-- and lots of people did this in history. 

The Italian towns, for instance, would pay someone typically to keep a daily chronicle of events in Venice or Florence or whatever. Then that's great. But I think that's a sort of chronicle. That's a different thing. 

You have to write yourself into the story, and that's when it becomes a diary or a journal. It becomes what I saw, what I thought, felt about something, what it means for me. It doesn't have to be terribly introspective or analytical, but it just has to be. I was there. I saw this. I'm part of it. 

And then it becomes, I think, a really interesting kind of document. They call them ego documents, the scholars. And I find it fascinating. 

This is a big question for me that these things come up very late in history. We've been writing stuff down for thousands of years. We've had kinds of notebook, kinds of ways of keeping a diary for a very, very long time. And we only started doing it 400 or 500 years ago, and no one seems to have a really good answer for why that is. 

I think a diary is a journal is a diary is a journal so long as you're written into it yourself. And then it can be any shape. It can be five words a day. I love those little five lines a day diaries which run for years and years. Or it could be like my current one, which is hundreds of words every day. Or you could be like one of these epic Victorian journal keepers who just wrote millions of words. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: They had a lot more time on their hands than-- 

ROLAND ALLEN: They didn't have TV. Yeah, or the internet or any of that. So their lives were different. So yeah, so I tried to avoid defining it wherever I can. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Are these diaries things that you return to? Do you have a regular practice of going back to refresh yourself? 

ROLAND ALLEN: I have done, yeah. So sometimes, just to amuse myself, I will say, what was I doing 10 years ago today? What was I doing on April 14? 

And it's interesting because the entry is normally pretty minimal. And obviously, most days are pretty similar. You go to work. You look after the kids, et cetera. 

And so you don't necessarily get all of it back, but they nearly always prod a memory, some kind of specific memory. And you will remember a meal or a conversation or an argument or something that happens. The other time, it has happened recently, was my daughter. 

So I've got two kids, and there's a big gap between them, an eight year gap. And my daughter, who's now 21, and I were reminiscing about the arrival of her younger brother. And she couldn't remember how she had felt when she heard that she was going to get a younger brother, which she really, really longed for. 

And I was able to go back 20 odd years to my diary and find out exactly how it was that she learned about it and exactly how we told her and all this stuff. And it was really, actually, incredibly moving, because these had been lovely moments in our lives which had been completely forgotten. So that was amazing and, I think for her, quite moving. So yeah, so there is a kind of recreational aspect to it. But then just occasionally, you go back and look at something important. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Have you ever read the book Budding Prospects by TC Boyle? 

ROLAND ALLEN: I have not, but I'd love to read TC Boyle. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, that's a good start. It's about marijuana. But one of the bits in the book that he returns to is he's got a friend who has written almost compulsive diaries of all their time together, and he'll call up this friend and say, just read some of it to me. 

And his friend will read these detailed memories to him and soothe him and settle him. And it's quite beautiful. And I won't spoil the rest of that , but it's a striking book for many reasons, and that one is what just made me think of it. 

ROLAND ALLEN: That's very relatable. Before I started keeping a diary, when-- I had lots of fun times, obviously, as a young man, but one of the most fun was going on a very long trip around the world with my best friend, and he kept a diary of that, and I didn't. 

And then a few years later, I was just-- I'm curious about something that we'd done. And I just said to him, oh, could you read me your diary or could you let me have your diary for those few days when we-- we were in Montana, I think. And he said, no, hard no, definitely not, never. 

And I've known him since I was three. So I like to think we don't have too many secrets. But no, he definitely was not going to share. So yeah, it was quite soon after that I started keeping my own diary. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: He wasn't going to share the object or what he wrote in it? 

ROLAND ALLEN: He wasn't going to share what he'd written. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, wow. That makes me think of something about the mixing of math and shopping lists and diary and all that. It makes me edgy in a privacy kind of way. Like, if I have a notebook that has things that are important for work, but then on another page, it has some notes after a therapy session, I think I would feel too vulnerable to open that in a meeting. I wonder if there are some hard lines for you of what goes into various notebooks. 

ROLAND ALLEN: There are. Well, the first one is that I tend to write very-- when I'm writing my diary, it's very small. The handwriting is terrible, and it's not the sort of thing where you could look over a shoulder and discern what I've written. Of course, you could puzzle it out, but you'd have to really try to read my diary. 

So there's a certain level of security there. If there's something really intimate and which I definitely don't want anyone to read, I will write it in Polish but particularly bad Polish. I'm not a native speaker. 

So. I like to think it's so bad that not even a Pole would be able to read it or recognize it as such. But I don't actually take my personal diary out in a work context anymore. 

I used to. I used to mix up my notebooks to that extent, but I don't now. I've separated those two out. 

FRED RASCOE: You are listening to "Lost in the Stacks," and we'll hear more about the notebook age on the left side of the hour. 

Ian McKaye: Hello, good people. You are "Lost in the Stacks" With Ian McKaye here on WREK in Atlanta. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called "The Notebook Age," and our guest is Roland Allen, who wrote a book about notebooks-- who used them, what they did, and why. I'd like to read to you an excerpt in which Roland traces some of the thinking that led to the book. I started keeping my own journal in 2002 and each year added to a steadily growing heap of battered notebooks. 

Writing a diary made me happier. Keeping things to-do lists made me more reliable, which in turn made those around me happier. And I learned never to go to a doctor's appointment or a meeting of any kind without taking notes of what I heard. 

But there appeared to be creative benefits too. Every artist I met seemed to have a sketchbook to hand, as did graphic designers and even web designers, whose product was entirely digital. Authors all kept notebooks, as did journalists, critics, and other creative types. 

And the more assiduously they used those notebooks, the better their work seemed to be. The same applied to my colleague's work. Playful lists, diagrams, and sketches regularly disgorged surprisingly good ideas. 

How did this happen? Was there a connection between notebooks and creativity? What other parts did they play in culture and industry? What could someone's notebook tell us about them? 

Why did keeping a diary bring happiness or at least contentment? Is it significant that we keep a diary as we keep an animal, a promise, or a secret? Did the notebook's physical constraints paradoxically make it more useful than an unlimited digital device? And most fundamentally of all, where had notebooks actually come from? Who had invented them? 

ALEX MCGEE: That was from The Notebook-- A History of Thinking On Paper by Roland Allen. 

FRED RASCOE: And you can file this set under PR6065615b58. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] (SINGING) Black, black coffee in bed 

Coffee in bed 

Black, black, black coffee in bed 

Black coffee in bed. 

FRED RASCOE: You just heard "Black Coffee in Bed" by Squeeze, a song about a notebook. 

MARLEE GIVENS: And some other stuff. 

FRED RASCOE: Oh, yeah, you're right. Let me do that again-- a song about a notebook with a coffee stain. 

ALEX MCGEE: This is "Lost in the Stacks," and today's episode is "The Notebook Age." Our guest is Roland Allen, author of The Notebook-- A History of Thinking On Paper. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: So we've completely ignored the fact that we're talking about paper and notebooks in the computer age. How are you feeling about laptops and computers and the electronic nature of work right now, after putting so much thought into paper and being paper-based in so many ways? 

ROLAND ALLEN: I'm going to push back, actually. You say quite casually, this is the computer age. And just to be contrary, I'm going to say no, this is the notebook age. 

We live in a capitalist environment. And let's be honest. And that capitalist environment is entirely shaped by bookkeeping, accountancy, notions of the company, notions of profit and loss, balance sheets, all of that. 

And all of those are completely, completely tied up with the use of notebooks in bookkeeping, the practice of bookkeeping. And we do that now virtually. I guess we do it with Sage and different computer programs. 

But inasmuch as we are children of capitalism, we're definitely living in a world which is sculpted by the potential of the notebook. OK, now, that's just me being contrary. I know what you mean. We are definitely living in a digital world. 

Where do I see the notebook fitting in with that? It's definitely going to be more, I think, where people go to express themselves because there is a level of expression and externalization which you can't do on a screen, and you're tempted to do it. You think that you can do it. 

But then it turns out to be different. And they know now why or many of the reasons why this is different, why people don't fall in love with sketching on an iPad in the same way as they do with sketching in a pad, for instance. Some people do love it, I know, but most people don't. Most artists don't. 

Or why people don't keep diaries on their desktop computer, but they still write them by hand-- and it's to do with-- partly to do with the joy of making something. I compare this to drinking your coffee from a mug that you've thrown yourself, which is a particularly, I think, unique pleasure. That's going to be a better cup of coffee than one you drink from a mug that you got down the road at Walmart or wherever you get your crockery. 

So there's that. There's the idea that making something which you then interact with is a good thing to do and more interesting than just pixels on a screen. Then there's the other thing, which is whatever you do on a digital device, the second you scroll away from it, you close the window, or you just scroll down the page, it vanishes. 

And they now know that it vanishes in a really deep way to us because the geographical part of our mind likes to think about notebooks as places as well as things. So you write something down in a notebook, and it gets filed in your mental map, the same thing which takes you to work or to the store or whatever reliably and doesn't get you lost. But if that happens, if you're saving information on a computer, it doesn't go into that mental map because the computer is just a box, and your phone or your iPad are just boxes. And so whatever it is you've written there, you lose that little extra association with it, that little extra location which, in the bottom of your brain in the hippocampus, will help you find it again. So those are two reasons why, I think, there will always be a place for note taking and note keeping on paper. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: That description of spatially placing the information, I have felt so frustrated with the movement in contemporary personal computing to have everything in one big bucket. And I'm even using a material metaphor, but everything in one place and use search functions. I used to love and benefit from creating folders and folder hierarchies that kind of laid out how I was thinking about the work that I was saving digitally. But then that makes me think there's also, then, the everything in one notebook kind of style. 

And I think that's maybe why at the beginning, I was saying, where's the line? Because I want there to be a line. I want to separate some kinds of information from each other. I actually have-- and this is your fault. I have five notebooks going now. 

ROLAND ALLEN: That's good, and that's nothing. It's fine. You have room to grow. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, tell me. How many have you got going? 

ROLAND ALLEN: OK, I can see most of them from here. So I've got, at the moment in my process, where I'm at is I'm currently writing a chapter of a book which I have already taken all the notes for. So I am referring to one notebook where I have all of the book notes for that chapter. I'm referring to one where I have the plan for that chapter, the scheme, and other parts of the book. I guess, two or three other notebooks are being pulled out because they've got random fragments in. 

So that makes four or five. I've got my regular diary, which makes six. I've got a work notebook, which makes seven. 

And then I've got two or three little notebooks, which I use for preparing things like this, although I haven't made any notes for this conversation because your questions looked so fun. When I need to do a bit of public speaking, I keep the notes in a little pocket notebook so I can just slip it out and speak. And so that makes what, about eight or nine, I'm going to say. 

I'm sure I've forgotten one. My record-- not my record, but the record note taker I discovered in my investigations was Sir Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan Jacobian English thinker and politician. He counted up once 28 in use, not counting the one he was actually writing in. So that makes 29. 

And he had a job, a purpose for all of them, and I take my hat off to him. I'd love to have 29 notebooks on the go. So five, you're doing well, but you have room. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, I could do better. Well, we're almost out of time, and I don't want to just ignore totally the book that you wrote. You kind of started to talk about the things you thought about in there when you talked about ledgers and the sort of capitalism creating notebook culture. Can you think of what is right now your favorite story or profile from your book and summarize it for us? 

ROLAND ALLEN: I guess the story, which I came upon quite early in writing the book, which turned out to be one of the chapters anyway, which people love in the book, is patient diaries. And I was writing or I started writing the book during COVID. It was lockdown. 

There were, however, people who had recovered from COVID who were out and about in the world who had been in intensive care units. And through their stories, I came across the patient diary. And the patient diary is incredible. 

It turns out that when you are in a coma, effectively, in an ICU, if you're suffering from anything but COVID, for instance, in intensive care, your brain under all of those drugs can be going absolutely mental, and you lose all track of time. You might be hallucinating like crazy. You may find it when you come round from that coma, very, very difficult to get a handle on your life, and you've lost a lot of time. It could be weeks of your life when you're under. 

Patient diaries nurses keep them. They keep the diary for you while you're under. So they say you moved. We washed you. 

We cared for you. We changed your pipes. We gave you a bed bath. 

We changed your pajamas. Your grandmother came to visit, any of this stuff. They write a diary for you. 

So when you come around, it's all there. So you might have been under for two weeks, and there is a diary of what happens to you for those two weeks. And it is impossible to overstate how much people treasure those. 

They love them, and they involve the carers with their patients. They involve the family when they come to visit, and they tend to use them in the cheapest possible little notebooks, $0.50 notebooks with any kind of Biro, which is to hand they look incredibly scrappy. So they cost nothing and they really, really help people get over these traumatic experiences. And it turns out that outside of intensive care units, no one's heard of these things. And so that was a great story to be able to tell, this really ingenious new use of a notebook which no one had heard about and turned out to be, I think, really moving. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Roland, thanks so much for your time today. 

ROLAND ALLEN: Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: This is "Lost in the Stacks," and today's show was "The Notebook Age." Our guest was Roland Allen, author of The Notebook-- A History of Thinking On Paper, out now from profile books and Biblioasis. 

MARLEE GIVENS: File this set under C947.L67. That was "memory Lane" by Eddy Current Suppression Ring and, before that, "Can You Get To That" by Funkadelic, songs about memories that maybe aren't what they're supposed to be. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's episode is called "The Notebook Age." We spoke to Roland Allen, author of The Notebook-- A History of Thinking On Paper, all about how people have used notebooks for memory, organization, and identity, not to mention capitalism, advocacy, and history. So what is one way you are using notebooks right now? After reading Roland's book, I started a work diary, a marble cover composition notebook with daily to-do lists and notes on work each day. How about you, Fred? 

FRED RASCOE: My daily work and to do lists are generally on my online Outlook calendar, but I do have a notebook that I'm currently keeping. I just decided, for reasons I don't know, to keep a notebook of the different albums that I listened to on Spotify. Sometimes I just listen to random songs, but I like to listen to at least one or two albums a day. And I've just been keeping track of that. I don't know why or what I'm going to do with it, but it's in a paper notebook. 

MARLEE GIVENS: I too have a work notebook. I actually have two of them. One of them is a weekly planner, and I actually go in and write down everything that's also on my Outlook calendar because I also need those electronic reminders and a small to do list for the week. Then I have the notebook where I actually take notes in meetings, and that is where I keep my monthly to-do list. And I use post-its to bookmark where the monthly to do-lists live so I can go back and refer to them. 

But I started this habit, I guess, during the pandemic when I was at home, and it made me happy to have some fancy stationery to do all this in. And I used to actually have a separate daily to do list that I would tear off a piece of paper from a pad that was formatted for a daily to-do list, and, and that was just fun. And I don't know why I don't do that anymore, but I don't. What about you, Alex? 

ALEX MCGEE: So I guess mine's going to be a different flavor than y'all's. So I have something I got from this company called Kept, and it is a specific notebook that has a title "Childhood history," and it is for my son, Teddy. Spoiler, I had a baby last year, and it is supposed to be 0 months to 18 years of documenting moments, memories, thoughts about him as he evolves and grows. And there's different fun prompts of, like, favorite recent trip or things you like right now, things you don't like right now. And so that is probably the thing I turn to the most that would be considered a notebook of some sort. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: I love that. That's like a patient notebook but for a baby who's not yet putting the memories together. 

ALEX MCGEE: Yeah. Eventually, I think he'll help me. So-- 

CHARLIE BENNETT: I love those answers. Let's roll the credits 

ALEX MCGEE: "Lost in the Stacks" is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library Written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. 

CHARLIE BENNETT: Legal counsel and creative, what else, legal-sized notebooks were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. 

MARLEE GIVENS: Special thanks to Roland for being on the show, to the makers of notebooks that are big, small, cheap, expensive, trendy, classic, and even trashy, and thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. 

ALEX MCGEE: Our web page is library.gatech.edu/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us. 

MARLEE GIVENS: On next week's show, we learn about what happens when DOGE shows up at the office of an independent federal agency. 

FRED RASCOE: Doesn't sound great. Time for our last song today. To finish the episode, we need a song that really sums up the notebook age, writing out our thoughts to give us room to play with them, offloading memories to give them stability, creating sanctuaries for our experiences so we can share them, and a little bit of whimsical appreciation for it all. So here it is-- "I Can't Remember the Dream" by They Might be Giants. Have a great weekend everyone, and remember, you can write it out and underline the highlights.