Commonplace Book

I have been thinking about keeping a commonplace book and also for dd to keep one as well for 'copywork' for school. The thing is, I wasn't exactly sure just what was a commonplace book. I stumbled upon, quite by coincidence, a post at A Multitude of Mercies about this. Another great thing about internet that I am not willing to give up, is the ease of looking things up because someone else has already done the searching for me :)

I first heard of a commonplace book while reading at Harmony Art Mom's blog. I am sure that I have come across the term while searching and reading at Ambleside Online but when I read it at Barb's blog (Harmony Art Mom) is the first time it clicked. Just yesterday I had the thought again in the back of my mind about a commonplace book. It was just peeking towards the front of my mind :) And today, voila! while reading a post by Trisha, I am directed (by the You might also like... at the bottom of the post) to her post about commonplace books.

Now that I have rambled on about how I found the post... here is what I was thinking originally about posting:

What is a commonplace book? My thought that it was a compilation of quotes, passages or thought from a book or about what has been read in a book. How close is that? Well, according to the link to Wikipedia (which I rarely like to use...too unstable imho) a commonplace book is (or was)

"... essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas."

So I don't feel that I was too far off. However the inclusion of physical items or mementos were often included in a commonplace book. That is where the 'scrapbook' comes in.

Here is an interesting bit I found on the Wiki site (bold italics are mine)

"By the 1600s, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students in such institutions as Oxford. John Locke appended his indexing scheme for commonplace books to a printing of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The commonplace tradition in which Francis Bacon and John Milton were educated had its roots in the pedagogy of classical rhetoric, and “commonplacing” persisted as a popular study technique until the early twentieth century. Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were taught to keep commonplace books at Harvard University (their commonplace books survive in published form). Commonplacing was particularly attractive to authors. Some, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mark Twain, kept messy reading notes that were intermixed with other quite various material; others, such as Thomas Hardy, followed a more formal reading-notes method that mirrored the original Renaissance practice more closely. The older, "clearinghouse" function of the commonplace book, to condense and centralize useful and even "model" ideas and expressions, became less popular over time."

So the idea of condensed, centralized, useful information in a commonplace book sort of went by the wayside.

I like the idea of scrapbooking but I see it as different than a commonplace book. I have a scrapbook that has pictures, tags, handwriting, etc in it but that is simply for 'memories' sake, much like a photo album- expanded. It is for personal memories, if that makes sense.

I have heard many times that reading a passage in a book (or wherever it is read), then taking the time to write it down, correctly and exactly, has a very lasting affect. Another website that is listed on Trisha's post points this out:

"By copying passages longhand, the reader gains time to reflect both on the meaning and the construction of their favorite works."

I really like the definition for a commonplace book given in the Oxford English Dictionary:

Commonplace-book. Formerly Book of common places. orig. A book in which 'commonplaces' or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement. First usage recorded: 1578.

One last quote on the matter:

A commonplace book...is for keeping small but valuable snippets of information: phrases, sentences, paragraphs, small articles cut from the newspaper, sketches of locations, references to recommended books, meaningful chunks of statistics, inspirational quotes, handy measurements, geneological diagrams, biographical notes, and so forth. Contrary to what one keeps in a filing system, the commonplace book is an important source of finely-tuned information to help digest subjects, expand one's mind, and turn to for help on a particular topic.

For myself a commonplace book would need to be organized and logical. I am easily distracted by 'extras' so in my commonplace book, it would be a fault, not a benefit, to include much more than the written information. If I have dd start one, however, she will be free to make hers how she likes.