In published compilations of their materials, numerous historical figures have left behind doodles.

Erasmus drew comical faces in the margins of his manuscripts and John Keats drew flowers in his medical note-books during lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson , as a student at Harvard, decorated his composition books with somber, classical doodles, such as ornamental scrolls. In one place, he sketched a man whose feet have been bitten off by a great fish swimming nearby and added the caption, “My feet are gone. I am a fish. Yes, I am a fish!”