commonplace book

A writer's personal collection of quotations, observations, and topic ideas. Called florilegia ("flowers of reading") in the Middle Ages, commonplace books were especially popular during the Renaissance and into the 18th century. For some writers, blogs serve as contemporary versions of commonplace books.

See also:

• Commonplace
• Copia
• Diary
• Journal
• "Retirement," by Robert Southey
• Topoi
• Twelve Reasons to Keep a Writer's Diary
• "Words," by Agnes Repplier
• Writer's Notebook
• Writing for My Eye Only, by Virginia Woolf

Examples and Observations:

• "It was none other than the foremost Humanist of his day, Erasmus, in his De copia of 1512, who set the mold for making commonplace books, in a passage advising how to store collections of illustrative examples in retrievable form. One should make oneself a notebook divided by place-headings, then subdivided into sections. The headings should relate to 'things of particular note in human affairs' or to the main types and subdivisions of vices and virtues."
  (Ann Moss, "Commonplace Books." Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. by T.O. Sloane. Oxford Univ. Press, 2001)



• "Clarissa Harlowe. Have read 1/3 of. Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time."
  (E.M. Forster in 1926, excerpt from Commonplace Book, ed. by Philip Gardner. Stanford Univ. Press, 1988)



• "Professional writers still carry notebooks that resemble commonplace books. In keeping with this practice, we suggest that aspiring rhetors carry a notebook with them so that they can write down ideas that occur to them while they are engaged in doing other things. And when you are reading, or talking, or listening to others, you can use the notebook as a commonplace book, writing down comments or passages that you want to remember, copy, or imitate."
  (Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. Pearson, 2004)



• "John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Coleridge and Jonathan Swift all kept [commonplace] books, copying down proverbs, poems and other wisdom they encountered while reading. So did many women, often excluded from public discourse at the time. By appropriating others' nuggets, writes cultural historian Robert Darnton, 'you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.'
  
  "In a recent Columbia University lecture, the writer Steven Johnson drew parallels between commonplace books and the web: blogging, Twitter and social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon are often held to have sparked a renaissance of the form. . . . As with commonplace books, this linking and sharing creates not just a hodgepodge, but something coherent and original: 'When text is free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created."
  (Oliver Burkeman, "Make a Book of Your Own." The Guardian, May 29, 2010)