You may, reading Hamlet, have wondered what’s going on with all the tables in Act I, scene v:
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memoryI’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.
Or maybe you haven’t, because “table” is glossed in most footnotes as a kind of writing tablet, a notebook (and that ‘wiping away’ meant erasing, or perhaps scraping clean a piece of parchment). Hamlet’s pulling a Riff here: “Let me check my notes.”1 But, reading Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper today, I learned that in fact a “table” isn’t any old a notebook. It’s a very particular kind of notebook.
The “table-book” was a hyper-portable bound book popular in England in the Shakespearean era, & also seen on the continent. Its first few pages featured close-set collections of useful facts—times tables, weights and measures, currency conversion rates, the start and end date of terms at court, sunrises and sunsets, etc. Past the reference material, there would be a double handful of peculiarly prepared pages, made of paper thickly coated with glue and many layers of gesso. You could write on these pages with an ink pen, or with a metal stylus, or with the (recently invented) pencil—then wipe away whatever you had written with a wet cloth, by dampening the gesso. (Publishers of table-books strongly advised the users—and ‘users’ is the right term here!—not to close the books before they were finished drying.)
The advantage of the table-book over a standard commonplace book, where writers recorded thoughts—their own and others—for later consultation, is that you can take it anywhere and not worry about losing your precious (and perhaps bulky) notebook; you can note down whatever random shopping lists or bits of memoranda you care to recall, then copy what you want to keep down into your commonplace book later. (While, probably, wiping away last night’s bar-bill.)
In this way it reminds me a lot of the practical utility of a smartphone. It’s full of useful facts! You can always have a spare piece of paper around when you need one! It’s actually quite portable! But once your notes placed there have passed out of “current” use into the abyss of its forever-storage, they’re quite hard to summon back unless you remember exactly what you’ve stored, or where you put it.
It’s not a perfect comparison—after all, digital storage is ideal for particular sorts of exact recall, and a ‘wiped’ smartphone page doesn’t go away forever, unless it does. But I wonder if this distinction between the table-book and the commonplace book doesn’t still hold. I continue to be struck by the notebook’s striking utility when it comes to thinking, compared to the computer or the phone. The slight delay of handwriting occasions more pondering and reframing of thought. Ideas connect to others on the page, in space, with the analog expedience of lines and arrows and exclamation points and little diagrams. Paging through a notebook occasions discovery and review—like browsing shelves at a library. By revisiting our thoughts, we reframe them, reform them, re-think them.
Of course, there’s also the pure aesthetics—while writing in my notebook, I am using physical objects I like and respect to make a beautiful object in turn, as well as a useful one—but it does help me think in a more embodied way, and the body is the root of thought and fiction, after all.
And with that, back to it! Best of luck to you all, and to your tables.
A Sluggy Freelance reference! Are those allowed in 2025?