"The Notebook has shaped the world for eight hundred years. In medieval Italy, the blank ledger transformed international trade, and enabled the intellectual artistic advances of the Renaissance. At sea, the invention of the logbook expanded horizons on the journeys of Magellan and fellow discoverers. Artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso, thinkers from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein, writers from Chaucer to Henry all created work forged...

California, 1991. "I only ever talk to this journal. Is there an alternate universe? Another planet? Please could you beam me up, Holy Father?" Paris-born Vivienne Lebrun longs for a different life. One where she doesn't attend college three thousand miles away from her family in New York City. A life where she is sophisticated and has kissed many men, both standing up and sitting down, like the lovers in Rodin's sculpture. In that life, she would...