A Short History of the Commonplace Book

The commonplace book can feel like a modern productivity trend. It is not.

The practice is older than the printing press. And some of the most quoted minds in history kept one. (New to the idea? Start with what is a commonplace book.)

Here is the short version, with the names worth knowing.

It began in classical rhetoric

The roots are Greek and Roman.

Aristotle, in his Topics, used the idea of commonplaces as the "seats" of arguments. The general places a speaker could go to find material.

Cicero and Quintilian carried the technique into Roman education, where students were taught to gather and memorize useful passages.

In the first century, Seneca gave the practice its most lasting image. Read widely, he wrote, and gather ideas the way bees gather nectar. Then turn what you collect into something of your own.

The principle was set early. Collect from others. Make it yours.

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance

In medieval Europe the instinct lived on in florilegia. These were anthologies of excerpts from scripture and the classics, gathered under headings so they could be found again.

The Renaissance turned it into a discipline.

The humanist scholar Erasmus, in his 1512 work De Copia, taught students to keep notebooks of striking expressions and quotations organized by theme. He kept his own, carting his commonplaces in boxes and crossing out each note as he used it.

By now the method had a clear shape. Read with a pen. File by topic. Reuse.

The age of Locke

By the seventeenth century, commonplacing was formally taught at universities like Oxford. The tradition shaped writers including Francis Bacon and John Milton.

Its most famous practitioner was the philosopher John Locke, who began keeping commonplace books as a student in 1652.

He devised an indexing system so precise that he published it. First in French in 1685, then in English in 1706 as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books.

The aim was retrieval. Locke wanted to be able to find any passage he had ever noted, which let him safely forget it in the meantime.

His method was so admired that publishers later sold blank notebooks printed with his indexing scheme built in.

The keepers worth knowing

The list of people who kept commonplace books reads like a syllabus.

The Meditations began as a private notebook Marcus Aurelius kept for himself, never meant for publication.

Thomas Jefferson kept a literary commonplace book of passages that moved him. At Harvard, both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were taught the practice, and their commonplace books survive in print.

It continued into modern times. The poet W. H. Auden published his own commonplace book in 1970, A Certain World, arranged alphabetically by subject. He called it "a sort of autobiography."

Ronald Reagan kept a lifetime of quotations on note cards, which a biographer said he guarded like the tools of his trade.

Different people, different centuries, one habit. They all understood the same thing.

Memory is short, and the right words, kept and findable, are worth more than almost anything you own.

"Great wits have short memories." Jonathan Swift, on why a writer needs a commonplace book.