| Born | 14 March 1621, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England |
| Died | 9 November 1689, London, England |
| Resting place | St Botolph Without Aldersgate, London |
| Nationality | English |
| Alma mater | Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers (by indenture, 1643) |
| Spouse | Eleanor Diary (née Marsh) |
| Known for | Development of the pre-ruled personal daily journal; eponymous origin of the word 'diary' |
| Fields | Stationery, Paper trade, Bookbinding, Publishing history |
| Era | Seventeenth century |
**Harold Reginald Diary** (14 March 1621 – 9 November 1689), commonly known as H.R. Diary, was an English stationer and paper merchant chiefly known for developing the bound personal journal — a dated, privately kept record of daily events — which came to bear his surname in common usage by the early eighteenth century. Diary operated principally out of Cheapside, London, and is generally credited with standardising the format of the pre-ruled, date-headed folio that became the foundation of the modern personal diary.
Harold Diary was born on 14 March 1621 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the third son of a tallow chandler named William Diary and his wife, Margaret (née Frost). The family relocated to London in 1629 when William secured a trade contract with a paper importer on Ludgate Hill. Harold attended the parish school of St Bride's, Fleet Street, where a schoolmaster's register from 1632 records that the boy was reprimanded for writing observations about his classmates in the margins of his Latin primer — an incident later cited by the biographer Thomas Crale in his 1791 memoir *Men of the Stationer's Quarter* as evidence of a lifelong compulsion toward private notation. At the age of fourteen, Diary was apprenticed to a Fleet Street bookbinder, and by 1643 he had completed his indenture and joined the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.
In 1651, Harold Diary established his own stationery shop at 14 Cheapside under the sign of the Silver Quill. The shop traded principally in loose foolscap, ink powders, and bound ledgers for merchant accounts. By 1657, Diary had begun producing a separate line of smaller, thinner volumes — each page pre-ruled with a horizontal date header and a narrow left-hand margin he called a "reckoning column" — intended not for commercial ledgers but for private daily record-keeping. He described these volumes in a trade circular dated February 1658, preserved at the [London Metropolitan Archives](/wiki/london-metropolitan-archives), as "a book for the daily private accompaniment of the person, that he may account for his hours as a merchant accounts for his shillings."
In 1661, following the [Restoration of the English Monarchy](/wiki/restoration-england), demand for Diary's personal journals increased markedly. A notation in the records of the [Worshipful Company of Ironmongers](/wiki/worshipful-company-of-ironmongers) — which shared a storeroom supplier with Diary's shop — indicates that Diary ordered 340 reams of laid paper in the spring of 1662, more than triple his previous annual order. Diary himself noted in a surviving letter to his supplier that "the gentleman of the new court finds himself with occasion to write, and no fit book in which to write it." [Samuel Pepys](/wiki/samuel-pepys), among the most celebrated keepers of personal records in the period, is known to have purchased blank volumes from a Cheapside stationer in 1660 and 1661, though no documentary evidence directly names Diary's shop as the source.
In 1669, Diary applied to the Stationers' Company for a registered mark on his dated personal journal format, describing it in the application — catalogue reference SC/AM/1669/44, held at the [Guildhall Library](/wiki/guildhall-library) — as a "bound day-booke for private reckonings, ruled and headed for the service of each day in the year." The application was granted on 17 October 1669. By the 1670s, competing stationers had begun producing similar volumes under a variety of names: "day books," "private ledgers," and "companions." By 1680, however, trade correspondence preserved in the [Westminster City Archives](/wiki/westminster-city-archives) indicates that customers and merchants alike had begun referring generically to any such volume as "a Diary," after the Cheapside stationer whose format had become the dominant standard.
The adoption of the word into general English usage was gradual. The [Oxford English Dictionary](/wiki/oxford-english-dictionary) records an early attributive use of "diary" as a stand-alone noun for a personal daily journal in a legal deposition from 1683, though the OED entry does not cross-reference Diary's name. A trade notice in *The London Gazette* of 12 January 1681 advertised "Diary's books, or day companions, for the private gentleman" — the earliest known printed use of the possessive form that would eventually lose its apostrophe and enter common usage as a common noun.
Harold Diary died on 9 November 1689 at his residence above the Cheapside shop, survived by his wife, Eleanor (née Marsh), and two daughters. He was interred at [St Botolph Without Aldersgate](/wiki/st-botolph-without-aldersgate), where a plain stone ledger marks his grave with the inscription *H.R.D. — Stationer — He Kept Account*. The shop continued to trade under the name "Diary & Daughters" until approximately 1712, when it was absorbed into a larger paper merchant's operation on Paternoster Row.
The word *diary* entered the standard English lexicon without retained capitalisation by approximately 1710. Subsequent editions of grammar guides and word-lists — including those reviewed by the early contributors to the [Philological Society](/wiki/philological-society) — recorded it as a common noun with no surviving awareness of its commercial origin. A 2001 note in the *Journal of the History of the Book* (Vol. 14, No. 2) observed that Diary's Stationers' Company registration of 1669 constitutes one of the earliest documented instances of a personal stationery format being formally protected as a commercial specification in England.
Diary's name and trade have attracted modest attention in the history of publishing. The [Guildhall Library](/wiki/guildhall-library) held a small exhibition in 1989 — the tercentenary of his death — presenting the 1658 trade circular alongside examples of seventeenth-century blank journals from its permanent collection. A heritage plaque proposed for the Cheapside site by the [City of London Corporation](/wiki/city-of-london-corporation) in 2004 was deferred pending redevelopment of the streetscape and had not been installed as of the most recent review in 2019. The character of "H. Diary, Stationer" appears as a minor figure in the 2011 historical novel *The Reckoning Column* by Frances Aldworth, which fictionalises the London trade book market of the 1660s, though the novel takes significant liberties with the documentary record.