When I started reading about famous notebooks, I expected the survival stories to be the dull part. Of course the Mona Lisa‘s sketchbooks survived. Of course we still have Bruce Lee’s training journals. They are in archives. They have institutional grants. They have laminated tabs.
Then I started reading the footnotes.
It turns out that more than one of the most-quoted notebooks in history made it to us through near-disasters: a fire that burned 6,000 pages, a drawer in a Dutch helper’s desk, a manuscript handed away and then mislaid for a century, a draft saved from a drowning, a posthumous publication that one family member called a betrayal. The archives we read today are the survivors. Quite a few siblings did not make it.
I want to walk through five of these stories. Partly because they are genuinely good stories – the kind you tell at dinner. But also because every one of them has a quiet lesson for anyone who keeps a notebook of their own. If you have ever wondered whether what you write actually matters, these five archives are the answer in five different forms.
1. Antoni Gaudí: A Fire That Took Almost Everything
In July of 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, anti-clerical mobs entered the crypt workshop at the Sagrada Família in Barcelona and set it on fire. Gaudí had died ten years earlier – hit by a tram in 1926 – and the workshop still contained almost the entire archive of his working drawings, plaster models, photographs, and notebooks. The fire took roughly 6,000 of those drawings, along with most of the model-making library he had built across forty years of designing the basilica.
What survived is almost nothing, in pure quantity. But it is enough to read him.
Architecture is the measuring and ordering of light.
- Antoni Gaudí, as quoted in The Designs and Drawings of Antonio Gaudí
One notebook escaped: the Manuscrit de Reus (the Reus Manuscript), now held at the Reus Museum in Catalonia. His surviving working method is covered at length elsewhere on the site. Inside it, Gaudí had laid out a nine-point theory of ornamentation – the principles he used to design everything that followed. There are also surviving photographs of his weighted-string funicular rigs, the upside-down hanging-chain models he used to engineer the arches of the Sagrada Família before he ever committed them to stone.
The lesson hidden inside the Gaudí archive is unusually direct: it is much easier to lose a notebook than you think. Fire, war, mold, basement flooding, a well-meaning relative who throws away “old papers” after a death. The Reus Manuscript and a handful of photographs are why we still understand him as an architect. Most of Gaudí is gone. The little that remains is still teaching architects a century later.
If you keep working notebooks of your own, the simplest preservation move is also the most boring: scan them occasionally, or photograph the most important pages with your phone, and back them up somewhere that is not your house. The same instinct that drove Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook habit – obsessive recording, multiple copies – is the same instinct that preserves Gaudí’s nine-point theory today.
2. The Brothers Grimm: The Manuscript That Went Missing for a Hundred Years
In 1810, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm finished a working draft of their first fairy-tale collection. They were not yet famous. They were brothers in their mid-twenties trying to convince a publisher that German folk stories were worth preserving. They sent the manuscript to a friend, the philologist Clemens Brentano, for an opinion.
Brentano kept it.
The brothers eventually proceeded without that draft and published Kinder- und Hausmärchen in December 1812. Their habit of annotating everything they read is a story in itself. They never expected to see the original notes again. The 1810 manuscript did not surface again until after the First World War, when it was found in the library of the Trappist monastery at Ölenberg in Alsace – which is why scholars call it the Ölenberg Manuscript. The Martin Bodmer Foundation acquired it in 1953, and it is held today at the Bodmer Library in Cologny, near Geneva.
The recovered draft completely changed how scholars read the Grimms. It showed that the brothers had heavily rewritten the tales between the 1810 draft and the 1812 publication, and again between every later edition. Snow White’s mother became a stepmother. Hansel and Gretel grew darker, then lighter, then darker again. Wilhelm in particular was a relentless editor of his own work.
It was perhaps just the right time to record these tales since those people who should be preserving them are becoming more and more scarce.
- The Brothers Grimm, preface to Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812)
Without the Ölenberg Manuscript, we would still read the Grimms. But we would read them as if they had transcribed the tales rather than revised them, which is almost the opposite of what actually happened. Whole shelves of fairy-tale scholarship rest on a notebook that disappeared in 1810 and turned up in a French abbey eleven decades later.
For anyone who edits and re-edits their own pages – the writers, the long-project keepers, the people who keep revising the same essay in their journal for months – this is a reassuring story. Versions matter. Save your drafts. Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. They are the record of how the finished work got made.
3. Mary Shelley: A Manuscript That Outlasted a Drowning
Mary Shelley drafted Frankenstein in shared notebooks with Percy Bysshe Shelley during the summer of 1816 in Switzerland and the year that followed in Italy. The first edition came out anonymously in 1818. Mary was twenty.
In July of 1822, Percy drowned off the coast of Italy when his sailboat went down in a storm. He was twenty-nine. Most of his loose drafts and letters were scattered or lost in the months and years after the funeral. Mary spent the rest of her life acting as her late husband’s literary executor, salvaging what could be salvaged.
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
- Mary Shelley, 1831 preface to Frankenstein
The notebooks with the Frankenstein draft, including the pages where Percy made edits in his own hand alongside Mary’s, did survive. They are now held at the Bodleian Library at Oxford as MS Abinger c. 56 and c. 57, and digitized through the Shelley-Godwin Archive. There is a fuller account of how those notebooks were written elsewhere on the site. You can sit at your laptop and read Mary’s eighteen-year-old handwriting describing the night the creature first opened its eyes, with Percy’s marginal corrections beside it. That she wrote it at all is remarkable. That we can still see her writing it is luck.
The reason this archive feels different from the Gaudí story is that the survival was intentional. Mary did not just keep the notebooks. She protected them. She fought publishers for her late husband’s manuscripts. She edited and republished. She made sure her son inherited the papers in good order. The archive is the result of her decades of effort to keep the writing alive after the writers were not.
If your own journals have something in them worth keeping – and most of them do, even when you cannot yet see what – the lesson is to act like Mary Shelley. Tell someone where they are. Label them. Make a note in your will if you have one. The act of taking your own notebook seriously is the first step in anyone else taking it seriously after you.
4. Anne Frank: The Pages on the Floor of the Annex
On August 4, 1944, the Gestapo and Dutch collaborator police entered the secret annex above Otto Frank’s business at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam and arrested everyone hiding there. Anne, her sister Margot, their parents, and four others were deported within weeks. The eight people in hiding for over two years scattered. The diary Anne had been keeping since her thirteenth birthday in June 1942 lay on the floor of the annex with the rest of the family’s belongings.
Paper has more patience than people.
- Anne Frank, Het Achterhuis, entry of June 20, 1942
Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two of the Dutch helpers who had supplied the family with food and news for the duration, went into the annex after the arrest and found Anne’s diary papers still scattered across the floor. They picked them up along with Anne’s red-and-white-checked autograph book and carried them to the office. Miep put them in a desk drawer. She did not read them. She kept them there until Otto Frank returned from Auschwitz in 1945 – the only member of the immediate family to survive.
Not reading was a deliberate choice, and she gave two reasons for it. One was plain respect: the pages belonged to a child, and in her account children have a right to privacy too. The other was colder. Anne had written down the addresses of other Jews in hiding. Had Gies read the diary and understood what was in it, she said later, she would have had to burn it.
The diary was eventually published in 1947 as Het Achterhuis. It has since been translated into more than seventy languages and sold tens of millions of copies. The original pages, including Anne’s own 1944 revision (Version B) and her father’s edited compilation (Version C), are held by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD).
Almost nothing about the survival of this particular archive was inevitable. The pages survived because two helpers went back into a ransacked annex and gathered them off the floor, and because the one who kept them chose not to read them. Some notebooks survive because of institutions and grants. This one survived because of a few small acts of dignity in an occupied city.
5. Susan Sontag: The Family Argument Over Posthumous Pages
Susan Sontag died in December 2004. Across her life she had filled over a hundred notebooks – the stuffed-with-feathers-and-telegrams archive now held at UCLA Library Special Collections. Her working notebooks are worth reading in their own right. She left no clear instructions about whether they should be published.
What followed inside her family was, by her son David Rieff’s own account, a slow and ambivalent decision. He has written in Swimming in a Sea of Death and in various interviews that he wrestled with what his mother would have wanted. She had not authorized publication. She had also not forbidden it. The notebooks were, by any measure, some of the most candid and personal records of a major American intellectual’s interior life.
In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.
- Susan Sontag, journal entry, quoted in Reborn (FSG, 2008)
Rieff eventually edited the first volume, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2008. A second volume, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, followed in 2012. Rieff has said, more than once, that publishing them may have been “an act of betrayal.” He has also said he is glad they are out there.
I think about this when I think about my own notebooks. Susan Sontag almost did not get posthumously published. Her son could have left the notebooks at UCLA and walked away. He decided, after long consideration, that the value of letting other writers learn from her process outweighed the discomfort of letting strangers read what she had written for herself.
This is the most uncomfortable preservation story of the five. It raises a question the other four do not: not just whether a notebook survives, but whether a notebook should be read after you are gone. There is no clean answer. But anyone who keeps a serious notebook can make their own intentions clearer than Sontag did. Leave a note. Pick a person. Say what you want done.
What These Five Stories Suggest for Your Own Notebooks
The fact that these archives barely survived is not a quirk. It is the rule. Most working notebooks throughout history have vanished into fires, basements, estate sales, and the trash. The ones we still read are the lucky ones.
A few practical things I have taken from sitting with all five stories:
- Back up the most important pages. A phone scan, a photo, a quick photocopy. Gaudí’s archive lost 6,000 drawings to one fire. Yours could lose far less and still hurt.
- Tell at least one person where your notebooks are. Mary Shelley made sure her son knew. Otto Frank knew his daughter’s diary was in a desk drawer. The notebooks that survive almost always survive because someone besides the writer knew they existed.
- Write your intentions down. If you do not want your journals read, write that on the inside cover. If you would be honored to have them read, write that too. Sontag did not do this and her family had to guess. Do not put your people in that position.
- Save the working versions, not just the polished ones. The Ölenberg Manuscript matters precisely because it is the unrevised draft. The mess is often the most useful part of an archive.
- Keep going. None of these writers knew their notebooks would be read. They kept them anyway. The same pattern shows up in Benjamin Franklin’s lifelong record-keeping, Thomas Edison’s 3,500 notebooks, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon notebooks. The habit was the point. The archive was a side effect.
If you want a small starter framework for the habit itself, my free 6-step guide to getting started with journaling is the simplest thing I have to offer. And if you want to keep digging into the notebooks themselves, the hub of journals of successful people is where I have collected what I have learned reading across Leonardo, Einstein, Bruce Lee, and others. Some of them were near-disasters too. We were just lucky enough to get to read them.
Featured image: A reconstruction of Gaudi’s funicular model for the Colonia Guell church: weighted strings that gravity pulls into perfect load-bearing curves, read upside down. The originals burned with the workshop in 1936. Photographed through the display glass. Photo by Javiermes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
