#zibaldone

In his mid-forties, surveying his many 'paper books', the English polymath Francis Bacon found that he had no fewer than twenty-eight in use at once, including a common-place book, a zibaldone-style collection of excerpts, nine notebooks for different areas of the law, and others for his household accounts and philosophical and scientific inquiries.

Osservate poi, nella stessa moderna perfezione delle arti, le immense fatiche e miserie che son necessarie per procurare la moneta alla società. Cominciate dal lavoro delle miniere, ed estrazione dei metalli, e discendete fino all'ultima opera del conio. Osservate quanti uomini sono necessitati ad una regolare e stabile infelicità, a malattie, a morti, a schiavitù (o gratuita e violenta, o mercenaria), a disastri, a miserie, a pene, a travagli d'ogni sorta, per procurare agli altri uomini questo mezzo di civiltà, e preteso mezzo di felicità. Ditemi quindi

By the end of the nineteenth century, European writers had been using notebooks for six centuries, inventing or reinventing genre after genre as they did so: the essay, the travelogue, vernacular poetry, drama, and so on. Only a frustratingly tiny handful of writer's notebooks – Boccaccio's zibaldoni, for instance – survive from the earlier part of that period, but as time passed more and more were preserved, and the student of Victorian or twentieth-century literature has thousands to refer to.

The two quotes from Brennan Lee Mulligan I have in my Zibaldone so far

"A common-place book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories;" and whereas, on the other hand, poets being liars by profession, ought to have good memories. To reconcile these, a book of this sort is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own by entering them there."