A Book for All Places, or A Place in a Book

I was reading Nicholas Basbanes’ Every Book Its Reader, and came across a term I’d never heard of before:  Commonplace Book. Thence this bit of information that you might find to be of worth, and worthwhile doing for yourself.


Early on, scholars defined the term "commonplace book" to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual, or as I would say, a scrapbook. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book is, of course unique to its creator's particular interests. An early practitioner was Thomas Jefferson. He would synopsize and capture the key points of his readings and add his own reflections, recording them in a journal which he called his 'commonplace book.' One of his biographers quoted Jefferson as saying 'I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on the subject' (Cunningham, 1987, p. 9).

Well, if it was good enough for Jefferson, it certainly is good enough for me, especially since I’ve a huge collection of things I want to remember about books, the book trade, bookselling, book restoration, book history, book-fill-in-the-blank.  Sounds like a common theme to me.  And…if you use the “Find and Replace” function in your word processing program, you have an immediate way to find what you want.
And, it's easier to hide than a diary !