The essay reconstructs some events which, even though not directly concerning either the content or the composition of Antonio Gramsci’s Notebooks, crucially marked their existence. They may be included in four main groups: (1) the January 1934 shipment of the notebooks Gramsci had had in Turi prison; (2) the numbering and cataloguing of Gramsci’s notebooks made by Tatiana Schucht few weeks after Gramsci’s death; (3) their shipment to Moscow, between 1937 and 1938, their preservation in Soviet Union and their return to Rome after the end of the Second World War; (4) the differences in the ways Gramsci’s Notebooks were counted. The proposed reconstruction will stress the importance of often underestimated data: the presence of a sketchbook among those normally referred to as notebooks; the fact that Tatiana herself, while numbering thirty-one of Gramsci’s notebooks, did not number two large-format notebooks, which can be assumed to have remained separate from the others for a long time; the existence of two other large-format notebooks on which Tatiana began to prepare, without completing them, a catalogue of the topics and a complete transcription of the notebooks written by Gramsci. It will be clear that the hypotheses put forward by those who supported the thesis of the subtraction of one or more notebooks lack solid foundations and are unnecessary.