Commonplace Book

What is Commonplace Book?

Douglas Johnston

The Commonplace Books of old were series of books, stuffs with scraps, inspirations, snippets of information, sketches, clippings, photographs, poems, jokes, references, and anything else pertaining to the interest of the person who kept it.¹

Leonardo da Vinci from “The Leonardo Notebook”

A collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat.

Harvest Moon by Hand

Commonplace Books differ from journal (which are chronological and introspective) in that they are not organized chronologically. Rather, the authors of those books would have one or two themes for which they sought information from various sources. They would record the information and review it by themselves or with others who had similar interests.²

Ryan Holiday

The purpose of the books is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do.³

Sarah Mackenzie

They paint a beautiful picture of an individual’s growth over time - of his or her personal journey of learning and growing.⁴

William Cole

One gets a pretty good idea of a man, his likes and prejudices, his quirks and manias, the variousness of his mind from reading a commonplace book.

Christ Aldrich

They have generally been physical books written by hand that contain notes which are categorized by headings (or in a modern context categories or tags. Often they’re created with an index to help their creators find and organize their notes.⁵

Jack London, March 1903

Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter; and lead pencil marking endure longer than memory.

Jonathan Adrian

Once you get the hang of adding entries into your commonplace book, remember that it’s equally important not to overpopulate your book. Choose carefully. Curate information for your highly esteemed commonplace book, don’t let it flood with unnecessary information. One way to do this is to only highlight wisdom, not facts. You’re trying to put the spotlight on the author here, not on something that’s accessible through a quick Google search.

Fleming Theryn

A commonplace book might include some of the commonplace’s own thoughts and observations, but unlike a journal/daily, which typically consist of narrative entries written in chronological order, a commonplace book is non-narrative and non-chronological. Ideas are typically organized under headings rather than by date.⁶

History

IndieWeb

The general concept of the commonplace book dates to the 1500’s (though earlier precursors exist) as books became more common in society. Often due to the exorbitant cost of texts, readers would read and take notes from them into their commonplace books for future contemplation, providing direct quotations at a later date, or future reference prior to returning the book to its owner or passing it along to another.⁷

Charlotte Mason

Don’t you find it interesting that the greatest literary figures in history such as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Dickens, Stevenson, Franklin, J. London … did not take creative writing or composition courses? They copied very carefully passages from classic literature and then tried to write the same passage again from memory without looking at the model. They used their own words when needed, but tried to sound like the original author as much as possible. Eventually, this carried over into their own writing.⁸

Robert Darnton, “The Case for Books” (149-150)

Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. … early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

IndieWeb

An early how-to book entitled A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (1706) was written by philosopher John Locke in which he provided techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, and formulating speeches. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion.⁷

Alex Battersby

For the Victorian period, no better example serves to demonstrate this than the commonplace book, which by the 19th century had taken a format similar to the modern-day journal or scrapbook. Individual would write entries in bound books of blank pages, recording their interests, copying their favorite poems and verses, and producing detailed sketches and watercolours.⁹

References