In the autumn of 1930 Ernest Hemingway spent a night in Yellowstone, got into a car with John Dos Passos, and was in an accident that broke his arm badly enough to need surgery and most of November and December in hospital. Here is the entry in his Hunting Book: Broke right arm November enroute to Piggott Ark[ansas] That is the whole of it. The bracketed expansion of Arkansas is the archivist’s, not his. Stacey Flores Chandler, the reference archivist …
Category: Journal Examples
The most honest sentence ever written about a notebook is in the afterword to this one, and it was written by the author’s son: This notebook has been lying among Muhammad Iqbal’s papers. According to this notebook Iqbal started writing it on 27th April 1910. It appears that he continued to write it for several months and then stopped for some unknown reason. Stopped for some unknown reason. Javid Iqbal published his father’s private notebook in 1961, fifty-one years after …
The document begins with an exclamation mark: Thirty-three and an income of $50,000 per annum! It is headed St. Nicholas Hotel, New York, December, 1868. Andrew Carnegie was living in the hotel with his mother, and at some point in the last days of that year he sat down and added up what he was worth and what it was doing to him. The memorandum itself, in his hand, with 'Dec /68' and the hotel noted at the top right. …
The first surviving column opens like this: I wonder if any one else glories in cold and snow without, an open fire within, and the luxury of a tray of food all by one’s self in one’s own room? She had shut her bedroom door at half past seven. The house was full of young people. Her husband had a cold and was in bed having milk-toast for his supper. She lit her fire, read for three hours, and went …
The notebook was a present from the jail’s doctor. That is the first fact in Jawaharlal Nehru’s prison diary, and he puts it there himself, in the second paragraph, before anything about why he is in prison at all: The book is a present from Dr. Asharfi Lai the sub-assistant surgeon of the jail. I begin this diary from Dec. 3rd. He was writing on 9 December 1921, in the District Jail at Lucknow. He had been arrested three days …
On a Saturday evening in March 1897, at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in New York, the richest man in America reached into his pocket and took out a small book wrapped in paper. “It is the first ledger I kept,” John D. Rockefeller told the young men’s Bible class. Ledger A is the personal expense book Rockefeller opened at sixteen, a few weeks into his first job: what he earned, what he spent, and what he gave away, entered …
Isaac Newton kept two notebooks as a student, and neither of them is about physics. One is a pocket-book he bought blank for eightpence, whose first three pages are a coded list of every sin he could remember committing. The other is a list of things he did not know, written under headings he invented himself. Both survive. Both have been transcribed in full and put online for free. And between them they show a nineteen-year-old using a notebook for …
Most of us assume a journal is a place for sentences. But go and look at the notebooks of people who actually changed how the world thinks, and the pages are full of pictures. Not paintings. Not finished art. Quick boxes, arrows, stick figures, charts, half-finished diagrams. Drawing was not a separate hobby. It was how they thought. Across the journals of successful people I keep returning to, the same pattern shows up. The figures we now treat as singular …
I went looking for the field notebooks of a seventh-century monk and found a library catalogue entry that quietly says somebody else wrote the book. Here is Stanford’s statement of responsibility for The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions, the famous account of Xuanzang’s journey through Central Asia and India: translated by the Tripitaka-Master Xuanzang under Imperial Order ; composed by Śramaṇa Bianji Composed by Bianji. Not by Xuanzang. And here is the publisher of the English translation …
The first entry is dated 30 March 1796. Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen. In Latin, it reads: Principia quibus innititur sectio circuli, ac divisibilitatis eiusdem geometrica in septemdecim partes Roughly, and this is a plain gloss rather than a scholarly translation: the principles on which the division of the circle rests, and its geometrical divisibility into seventeen parts. What he had done was prove that a regular seventeen-sided polygon can be constructed with nothing but a compass and a straightedge …