@chrisaldrich fabulous! I pre-ordered this a couple of weeks ago. Interesting that Roland Allen says he needed to write a history of ideas rather than a history of stationery. I see this as a very English, idealist, approach, in contrast to that of the German 'ontological techno-materialism' (!) of researchers such as https://monoskop.org/Friedrich_Kittler">Friedrich Kittler. That school foregrounded the technological media, not the ideas they supposedly present. As Hektor Harkötter, author of https://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/hektor-haarkoetter-notizzettel-9783103973303">Nottizettel (2021), suggests:
"Der Notizzettel ist Hard- und Software in einem, nicht nur ein Medium des Denkens, sondern vielleicht das Denken selbst." | "The notepad is hard and software in one, not only a medium of thinking, but perhaps thinking itself."
It's hard for English speakers to key into this German tradition of radical anti-humanism, though we may have been a little prepared for it by reading Niklas Luhmann! Anyway, I'm greatly looking forward to reading Allen's history of thinking on paper.