With the arrival of paper manufacturing in medieval Europe, the practice of notetaking was enthusiastically embraced by literate individuals. Whether handmade or luxurious, notebooks became an extension of the notetaker's brain, used to take spontaneous notes, to doodle and draw, to copy and share recipes, to keep a diary, or to write and rewrite drafts before copying them afresh.

Notebooks also became central to the practice of natural history: helping naturalists to take notes from the works of previous naturalists, keeping field notes, drawing the natural world, and sharing their ideas with others.

The advent of printing did not spell the end for the notebook, but rather invested notetaking with a fresh impetus. Naturalists’ Notebooks looks at some of the notebooks kept at the Linnean Society, tracing the multiple uses of an unassuming yet essential tool in the history of knowledge making.