View da Vinci's Virtual Notebook

It's not everyday that you can read a notebook belonging to one of the world's greatest geniuses of all-time. Personally, I find Leonard da Vinci (1452-1519) to be the most fascinating human being to ever live. da Vinci kept a collection of all his short treatises, notes and drawings which are now referred to as the Leonardo Notebook. Written entirely in Italian, the notebook features da Vinci's signature style of "mirror writing", left handed and moving from right to left. He did this so it made his work all the more difficult for someone to decipher, thus stealing his ideas.

The notebook was not originally a bound volume, but was put together after Leonardo's death from loose papers of various types and sizes. Most of the pages were written in 1508, but others come from different periods of his life. They cover practically the whole of his career. The wide range of subjects from mechanics to the flight of birds, demonstrates Leonardo's almost compulsive intellectual curiosity about scientific and technical matters.

The world's richest man, Microsoft's Bill Gates, paid $30.8 million dollars for da Vinci's 15th century notebook. It is known as the "Codex Leicester". The Codex Leicester is combined with another collection of da Vinci's scientific musings titled "Arundel Codex". Together they make up a 72-page notebook that can now be seen for the very first time. London's British Library has a virtual version of the 72-page notebook, one of the more prominent pieces in the library's collection. You can view it here...

• Leonardo da Vinci's Virtual Notebook