Baker’s cataloging makes me view him as a science writer as much as nature writer. Maybe they’re both the same. The pages of notes described below sounds like a lab work:
There was something about ‘birding’, as it was known, that appealed strongly to Baker – or perhaps more accurately, to his obsessive, systematising tendencies. Along with his diaries, he started to collect information on birds in the same way that, as a younger man, he gathered information on books and writers. He filled notebooks with meticulous columns listing all the names of species found in Essex. He wrote pages of notes on plumage, moulting, migrations, songs (even going so far as to transcribe them into musical notation), feeding habits: everything he could discover.
pp90
J.A. Baker’s meticulous notetaking and journaling paid off. Baker’s example leaves me more convinced that the best note taking app isn’t the one with the most features, but instead the one you where you’re most likely to revisit your notes.
The journal structure he chose emphasizes this sense of pilgrimage, as ‘journal’ literally means ‘a day’s travel’. When in the mid-1960s, Baker began to write up the first manuscripts of the The Peregrine, he pored over his old diaries. By then he had material that covered more than a decade of outings, with which he turned lapidary: each day’s record was cleaved, bruted, and polished before being set, gemlike, in the rosary of the book’s narrative.
pp110
His cataloging didn’t slow with age, but instead picked up with reading lists:
For his entire adult life Baker had been obsessed with recording and making lists. Now, heading into his fifties, increasingly housebound, he turned again to his first passion: books. He continued to build up his library, both fiction and non-fiction, and read and reread vast swathes of literature. In a return to his teenage habit, he catalogued his reading. A small sheaf of notepaper, attached in the top left-hand corner with a rusting paperclip, contains dense columns of titles that Baker copied down around this time. Each list appears under one of a number of headings: ‘Great Novels’, ‘Very Good Novels’, ‘Acceptable Novels’, and so on. In total there are about 260 titles listed on these pages.
pp140,141
The cataloging practice continued into his later years on old proofs:
Ever since the publication of The Hill of Summer he had been mulling over what his next writing project would be. Baker kept proof copies of both his books, and these provide clues as to the direction of his thinking. During the last ten to fifteen years of his life (taking the acicular deterioration of his handwriting an indicator of time), he went through these proofs with meticulous attention. Every page (and the red paper covers, too) was scribbled over with arcane notations. In two proofs he underlined every metaphor and simile, verb, adjective and personal pronoun, and made running totals of each at the bottom of every page. In the third he marked every stressed syllable, as poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins had often done. Another proof was filled with with ticks and crosses, little notes saying ‘Good’, ‘Excellent’, ‘Very poor’, and ‘Poetry’.
pp140 and 141
Baker’s cataloging, at times, served a specific purpose:
Until the end of his life, Baker was intent on trying to understand what the world was like through the eyes of his birds. He hoarded books and magazine articles on the biology of animal vision and on aerial photographs, works with titles such as, How Animals See: Other Visions of Our World; Britain: The Landscape Below; The Aerofilms Book of Aerial Photography.
pp72
Saunders, Hetty. My House of Sky: The life and work of J.A. Baker. Lower Dairy, Toller Fratrum, Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2017.
Floodlights and Goalposts 