From Field to Philosophy: Structures, Content, and Context of Notebooks at the Natural History Museum.

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Field notebooks are new or repurposed blank books used by a naturalist to record primary observational research. Research on relationships between form and function has thus far focused on fine bindings of printed matter: literature on plain, cheap, and stationery bindings is much less prevalent. The proposed research will examine how, why, and where naturalists sourced the bound volumes they took into the field. The materials and construction of field notebooks from the early modern period (ca.1600-1800), will be compared with notebooks intended for domestic and business use. Initial research will focus on the collections of the Natural History Museum (London), before expanding to scrutinise material held at the Linnaean Society, the National Archives, and several smaller repositories. It is anticipated that items used as field notebooks will range widely in form, function, and quality - research will identify and examine relationships (if any) between the financial value of the object and the perceived intellectual value of its contents.An examination of sewing structures, paper quality, and pagination will be bolstered by the application of high-level microscopy and hyper-spectral imaging. A lack of research on stationery bindings leads naturally to a dearth of literature, so this project will consider the material in historical context. An examination of stationers' and bookbinders' records will develop a framework of costs, supply, and demand in contrast to those of printed books: existing research currently makes little distinction between the two. Data gathered will assist the NHM in identifying exploiting the research wealth of its manuscript collections, enabling a hidden collection of primary resource material to become accessible to a global research audience. The outcomes will also be of permanent value in documenting this under-explored book format which has nevertheless been an essential tool in the lives of many people over the centuries.