Long before the internet and social media, intellectuals kept bits of writing and images and thoughts in “commonplace books,” which they carried with them. John Milton (whose book can been seen here), Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, Michael Faraday, Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden all did it. Milton’s commonplace book contains notes on 90 authors in five languages, and, after his wife left him, exhaustive notes on bad marriages. Newton’s books were written in tight, tiny script describing recipes for making coloured pigments. Sir Francis Bacon kept one he called “A Promus of Formularies and Elegancies).
From a Globe and Mail article by Wayne MacPhail: “In 1584, the then-12-year-old English poet John Donne was studying at the University of Oxford along with his younger brother, Henry. This was when the university was just beginning to get its time-burnished reputation. The revered Bodleian Library had not yet opened its doors. But every day, in his tiny Hart Hall room, the young Donne was creating his own private Bodleian in a bit of technology called a commonplace book, or a commonplacer. Donne was the first to use the word, in a sermon in 1631.
So what did people do with these commonplace books? They wrote as they read, widely and deeply. They jotted down scripture, aphorisms, quotes, turns of phrase, gossip, poems, japes and words of wisdom. They let that harvested jumble of disparate brain fodder clang together in a cacophony and chorus of ideas that echoed down the long halls of human thought. The commonplace book was their way to burn the knowledge of the world into their brains, one inkwell dip at a time.”
