The first instance of a journal written by more than one person?

October 12, 2013 9:31 AM

Does that exist, historically or theoretically, as a thing? A personal account that expands to a personal account of more than just one person? I assume that would be the structural mother of everything from ultra-niche zines to high-gloss fashion mags that retain a personal tone, or like a high-context culture. Or even of things like scientific journals incarnated as blandly academic rags. Clearly I need someone to point me in the right direction.
posted by legospaceman to Grab Bag (7 answers total)

I'll have to think about this some more, but the first thing that leaps to mind is ship's logs, which became pretty codified in the eighteenth century. Because an entry was made at regular points daily around the clock, they were written by different personnel for each entry. Though pretty dry, usually limiting themselves to details of weather, position and ship's business, they do yield really intersting insights into the life of a ship's community, sometimes mentioning celebrations, deaths, moods, holidays, natural sightings, happy incidents, etc.

Whaleships often have more detailed and revealing logbooks because they weren't in a big hurry, being out for 2-5 years as a rule. Here are a bunch of digitized ones.
posted by Miko at 10:59 AM on October 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Logbooks is where my mind went, too.

Something more personal: L. M. Montgomery had a shared journal with Nora Lefergy; it's included in this book. ~1902. There must be other instances of this, but I can't think of any.
posted by munyeca at 11:05 AM on October 12, 2013

I own my grandfather's journal, written during WWI when he was a young adult who had been deported to the work camps for ethnically Italian citizens of the Austrian empire living close to the border (what is now Trentino/South Tyrol in Northern Italy). He was in love with a woman about his age, a similarly deported school teacher, and they each wrote in half of every page of the journal, him in black and her in red. They clearly passed it back and forth and it's both a love letter and a diary.

So yes, they exist, though I don't know of any that are published.
posted by lydhre at 11:34 AM on October 12, 2013

Lewis and Clark?
posted by humboldt32 at 2:17 PM on October 12, 2013

Response by poster: These are interesting. I was thinking about it in terms of primogeniture, though. Like first accounts? Maybe parts of religious books qualify? Where along the line, from the origin of writing forward, was the first time that two or multiple personal accounts accumulated in a linear or back and forth fashion?
posted by legospaceman at 2:28 PM on October 12, 2013

I was thinking about it in terms of primogeniture, though. Like first accounts?

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Where along the line, from the origin of writing forward, was the first time that two or multiple personal accounts accumulated in a linear or back and forth fashion?

Logbooks are linear. "Back and forth" is something different. Are you looking for instances in which 2 or more people responded to one another within a single written vehicle?

I'm not that familiar with Jewish textual scholarship, but that seems like another place to look for a "back and forth."
posted by Miko at 9:06 PM on October 12, 2013

Would the Gospels be an example?
posted by superquail at 11:44 PM on October 12, 2013