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📚🕯“A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of man’s history. It is man’s duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the n...

Some of you may have been overwhelmed by the amount of things recommended to include in your commonplace book by the "John Locke" and "Jenny Rallens" methods. I'm here to reassure you that if you want to keep it simple, you can and you should. As I've said multiple times, whatever method you enjoy most is…

With the increase of information crossing your attention span each day, it's easy to forget even the most impactful experiences. Make every effort to capture these, and to ensure that they become a valuable part of your creative process.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of digital tools🛠️ available for organizing your life and work? 👉Enter Notion, a versatile all-in-one workspace that’s taking the productivity…

A trove of beautiful commonplace books by Lewis Carroll, Nancy Cunard and more, selected by The Harry Ransom Center. Plus, Kelsey McKinney says writers have been aggregating, storing and sharing information through commonplace books for centuries—it’s only the technology that’s changed.

Carlo Urbino, Codex Huygens, ca. 1560-1570, 2006.14, fol. 122

Consider these commonplacing examples to try out:

september in my commonplace - my first month ever commonplacing!

For some people, commonplacing in a book is too restrictive. It's not easy to rearrange quotes, carry around certain categories, or share them with friends. Books are also limited by the number of pages they contain. That's why some people prefer the card method of commonplacing, which is just what it sounds like: writing each…

This is one of my favorite new acquisitions: a law student's notebook in the form of a commonplace book from around 1690.  Commonplacing w...

Have you ever heard of the practice of creating commonplace books or the habit of commonplacing? Friends, I am delighted to share information with you on this

A commonplace journal is not complicated and doesn’t need to be fancy. It is simply a place where notes and quotes from our reading are kept. The simpler we keep it, the better. Let me show you how basic commonplacing really can be. It appears I am the cheapskate

The three major approaches to commonplacing as practiced by physicians and other scholars before Locke are presented--the systematic or textbook approach, the alphabetical approach and the sequential or index-based approach--and Locke himself applied them in his own commonplace books are analyzed. In 1676, the English physician and philosopher John Locke published a new method of commonplacing. He had developed this method and, in particular, a new approach to organizing and indexing the entries, in the course of 25 years of personal note-taking and it proved quite influential. This paper presents the three major approaches to commonplacing as practiced by physicians and other scholars before Locke--the systematic or textbook approach, the alphabetical approach and the sequential or index-based approach--and it analyzes the ways in which Locke himself applied them in his own commonplace books. In comparison with established approaches, his new method offered a maximum degree of flexibilitywhile facilitating the later retrieval of notes and minimising waste of space and paper. Thanks to these features, it was particularly well suited for physicians and natural philosophers who were interested in the infinite variety of natural particulars rather than in elegant quotes on a very limited set of classical topics. In conclusion, the potential epistemic impact of commonplacing on early modern medicine and natural philosophy is discussed, in particular its importance for contemporary debates about species and disease entities and for the emergence of the notion of "facts"!