What is Listography
What is a Listography? This is a whole phenomenon related to lists! Take a look to find out what it is and what its history is.
Have You Ever Seen Yourself as a List of Lists?
If you created an autobiography, how would it look? Possibly as a set of different stories describing the most important events of your life.
Lisa Nola has a different view on this. Since 2006, she has proposed looking at your autobiography through the lens of lists. And it’s an interesting view, as it characterizes you with quite a few words. Here are a few examples from the first Listography book: “Listography Journal: Your Life in Lists” [1]:
- List your favorite restaurants.
- List your dream jobs.
- List bad things you did as a kid.
Try creating these lists for yourself. Ask your partner or friends. Doesn’t it bring you the joy you didn’t expect? Or maybe even some topics to discuss?
E.g., my wife and I have quite unfamiliar restaurant preferences. She prefers fashionable places with good names and kitchens, while I like niche fast food. Something like pancakes or mutton pies.
How did Listography Start?
Despite the whole autobiography topic, it’s a little bit hard to say when it all started. Well, maybe not when, but how. Listography is trademarked, and there is some quite specific information about the dates [2]. The trademark was registered on the 22nd of August, 2006. The request for registration was made on the 27th of May, 2004. The first-ever use anywhere happened on the 1st of April, 2002.
It appears that the website, listography.com, was the first artifact in the variety of Listography-related items. The beginning of the story on the “About” page is quite short:
A pair named LISA and ADAM created Listography.com.Listography.com is a self-funded ad-free site launched in 2006.
On Lisa’s personal website, you can find a longer story, but no dates:
While "to do" lists serve as encouragement, and propel us forward, other lists memorialize. I made lists on "my favorite memories with my mother” along with lists about the details of her life she shared with me. I also made lists on things we said or did during our last couple months together. A few weeks before I lost my mother to cancer, she said to me, "I am really going to miss eating a piece of toast." This moment has remained with me as a gift from her, like Nora Ephron’s list she composed before her death on the things she “will miss” and “not miss” about being alive. Lists can also cultivate gratitude, like "things I love," “favorite things to smell,” or "days I would relive again."
Many of us don't have the time to journal, or the inclination to write an autobiography, so I created my series of journals, and listography.com, to help capture all the experiences that make up a life in easy and sweetly CURATED topics. I've rediscovered many lost memories by making lists––all while creating a beautiful map of my life here on earth.
My mission is to inspire how you keep and collect your memories, all those elements of human experience––including a nice piece of toast!
So I don’t know the sources of the inspiration, but at least I know that Listography is here to inspire us to collect our memories.
What is Listography today?
Listography today consists of the following parts:
- Website and application,
- Books,
- Tabletop game.
Website and Application
If you miss and love the old-school Internet as much as you begin to love Listography, you’ll enjoy this place. Look at its home page, and you’ll understand everything.
You register and start creating your public lists. If you just like writing but are not very good at coming up with topics, there is no problem. The list topic generator is at your service. Once again, it’s a convenient way to shape an autobiography. Or at least write some wishlists!
There is also an iOS application as well. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated for a decade, so I can hardly say how usable it is.
Books
As Wikipedia says:
With over a million copies sold, the first Listography book was published in October 2007.
Since 2007, 16 journals have come out in the Listography book series. Several have been translated into other languages. Many of them were published by Chronicle Books. In 2025, the very first book comes back in its updated version!
Tabletop Game
The last part of Listography is Listography the game. It was released in 2016. I plan to write a more detailed overview of it as I purchased it!😀 I hope it will work for different ages, and I can have three generations playing at the table. Here is a little description [3] and a photo:
A fun board game based on the best-selling Listography journal series: Listography: The Game invites players to create and share lists based on fun and thought-provoking topics — from geography and pop culture to toothpaste and constellations! With the goal of being the first around the game board, players score points according to the number of similar or unique answers. Every round in the game results in creative thinking, surprise outcomes, and lots of laughs. May the best list win!
Concluding on Lists
One more great and fun phenomenon built around lists! By the way, if you are one of the Listography users, you automatically become the listographer!
I hope you enjoyed reading about another side of the lists’ universe! If you are deep into list-making and want to read more, subscribe to the “So List” blog! The new lists-related material are yet to come.
List of Links
[1] Lisa Nola, “Listography Journal: Your Life in Lists”, ISBN 978-0811859080
[2] “LISTOGRAPHY Trademark of Ingram, Lisa Nola” from the “Justia Trademarks” website
[3] “THE LISTOGRAPHY GAME” from the “Lisa Nola” website
