Not to be confused with the Nicolas Spark book, as the subtitle says this is about paper and it application to notebooks. The basic premise is that when paper started to be mass produced in Italy in the 1400 this allowed the renaisanse to take off. Before this writing was done on velum, time consuming and expensive to produce and basically used the the Church to illuminated manuscripts. With paper readily available artists could carry a sketch book with them wherever they went and practice their craft. The best known of the notebooks are Leonardo Da Vinci's, of which a portion survive. Cheap notebooks allowed for diaries, journals, sketchbooks, thought diaries, lists, idea books to be carried by many people. There is also the premise that writing changed the way people think and work and the act of writing in a notebook allowed people to become better writers and thinkers.
