 |
Commonplace Books
• Updating an old literary tradition for the 21st century
 Images |
|
|
 On the Web |
|
|
By
The Naked Reader, Editor
Tuesday,
31 October, 2006
"Commonplace-book:. Formerly Book of common places. orig. ……..a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement."
From The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. First usage recorded: 1578.
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by copying information into books.
Commonplaces were essentially scrapbooks, filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. They were used by readers, writers, students and humanists as an aid for rememberng useful concepts, ideas and fact they had learned.
Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests.
Until well into the nineteenth century, all educated readers kept commonplace books. It was even a subject taught at school and university. Whenever you came across a pithy passage, you copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. . . .
Commonplacing was particularly attractive to authors. Some, such as Coleridge and Mark Twain, kept messy reading notes that were intermixed with other quite various material; others, such as Thomas Hardy, followed a more formal reading-notes method that mirrored the original Renaissance practice more closely.
"It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, 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 in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns 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. . . . "
Robert Darnton, "Extraordinary Commonplaces," The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2000
commonplace
| |
