Three: History & Examples

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century.

#HeyPresstoConf20

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The following all had/kept commonplaces:

• Charles Darwin
• Francis Bacon
• Ben Jonson
• John Milton
• Mrs Anna Anderson
• E.M. Forster
• John Locke
• W.H. Auden
• H.P. Lovecraft
• Virginia Woolf
• Joseph Conrad
• Washington Irving
• Victor Hugo
• Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton, a mathematician and physicist, used a “Waste Book” to write his initial conceptualization of the calculus. A digitized copy of this commonplace is held at the University of Cambridge and is freely available to view online.

 

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich