Just over five years ago, I finally filled my first ever Moleskine™ notebook. As I admitted at the time, ever since I was a little kid and read Bobby Brewster, Detective, I’ve been a compulsive notebook collector. Seriously, I can't resist: I've got dozens of them.

Before the year is out—or on 31st December precisely, if I write smaller and time it correctly—I shall finish my sixth Moleskine™. Which means it takes me about a year to fill one.

None of which is at all relevant.

The reason I am suddenly banging on about notebooks is that the Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project has just published scans of two of Wallace's address books as PDF documents, and they are things of great beauty: Book 1, Book 2. (Alfred Russel Wallace, in case you are trying to remember, is the chap who came up with the idea of evolution by means of Natural Selection independently of Darwin.)

Fairly interesting stuff, if you happen to run a website about Charles Darwin, I suppose, but what on Earth has this got to do with Gruts? Well, check out page 3 of the first PDF document:

Wallace address book entry.

Rather pleasingly, F.Grut and C.Darwin appear on opposite pages in Mr Wallace's address book. Yet another tenuous link between Charles Darwin and a Grut!