Two months into grad school to study writing and editing I discovered commonplace books and fell in love. I started out
Throwback Thursday
looking into the ways they feed creative output and moved into the history of the genre and the ways the genre split and fed other social forms. I discovered a group of Quaker women in colonial Philadelphia who got together for teatime and commonplacing. Thoreau and Emerson got involved when I read their shared commonplace book. The subject snowballed into material book culture, reading habits, and brain science.
It was my first semester back in school, and I initially chose this topic because I wanted an overlapping topic to use for my two seminar papers. In one class I studied the Quaker women and their writing, and in the other I studied the genre in a more holistic manner.
For the two years that followed, I pulled more and more into this topic, and towards the end of my program I wrote a nonfiction book proposal. Today I’ve started pulling out files and putting some thoughts together.
Fun fact: Women in colonial Philadelphia (as well as in other places) raised silkworms to support the colonies in their fight for independence. By producing silk and other fabrics, they reduced the need to buy from England. Only tangentially related to commonplace books, but still interesting I think.
July 1749, from a magazine titled “Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure”
In fact, the trail of topics is precisely what makes a commonplace book interesting, entertaining, and useful. Who out there keeps a commonplace book? Who wants to start one?
Follow Your Gnose 