The common thread between most commonplace books is that the are generally organized (if organized at all) by category and not date and they generally contain not only the original content the author captured from the source material (like a quote from a book or a formula or recipe) but also thoughts about that captured material from the person keeping the commonplace book. From there the format and content of each commonplace book varied significantly as each is very unique to each person who keeps one. When commonplace books first got their start they were handwritten into a physical book. But let’s first start with the original format. Computers, PDAs, websites, and now smartphones have all opened up a whole new world of possibilities. I say originally because as new mediums and technologies came into being, the variations on commonplace books expanded significantly. Originally, the format was a handwritten physical notebook. I think that does a pretty good job of broadly defining the content and purpose of a commonplace book, but what about the format? The core item that makes a commonplace book a commonplace book and not something else is that it contains pieces of knowledge collected specifically for the purpose of remembering that knowledge, connecting that knowledge with other pieces of information, and then recalling and using that knowledge in the future. Given its start during the Renaissance, it should come as no surprise that the practice of keeping a commonplace book is still carried on today by modern colleges and universities as a teaching tool for student to learn how to capture and build upon knowledge they obtain from books. Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses.“ Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. “Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. A common definition for a commonplace book is quoted below from Wikipedia: Commonplace books specifically took hold during the renaissance, which makes sense with this period of time being where greater portions of society really started to appreciate the value of knowledge and wisdom. The concept of a commonplace book has been around for about as long as books themselves. I knew that if I started seriously reading more books that I would end up reading a lot of really fascinating information and keeping a commonplace book was a good way for me to retain that information and have it in a format I could access and use at a later date. So as you can imagine I spent a lot of time reading online short form articles. Up until that point I spent a lot of time reading news on a variety of websites and I subscribed to way too many RSS feeds. Back in 2017 I was making a change in my reading habits. I got my start with a commonplace book by reading an article over at The Sweet Setup while waiting in a long TSA line at the airport in November of 2017. I am writing a series of articles about Commonplace books and this is the first in the series, which starts by explaining what a commonplace book is. If you read books at all (and I mean even if you read just a little) you should consider keeping a commonplace book.
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