Nigeria, Sept. 20 -- There is something almost deceptively ordinary about a notebook.

It is paper. A surface for writing. It may sit on a desk, in a drawer, beside a bed or, under less ordinary circumstances, in a prison cell.

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are one of the great reminders that the physical circumstances in which an idea begins do not determine the distance it can travel. Written during his imprisonment between 1929 and 1935, they entered the intellectual archive of the 20th century.

The lesson is not that every notebook becomes the Prison Notebooks. It is simpler than that.

An idea has to begin somewhere.

Sometimes in a university. Sometimes in a laboratory. Sometimes in a newsroom. And sometimes, quite simply, at...