commonplace books

"The commonplace book began blank. The reader used it to collect premises, arguments and other quotes from the various books read. The commonplace book was always at hand for the next addition or as a conversational prompt. It might well fill up with contradictory snippets."

A commonplace book is at once a book form and a method of reading. Commonplacing was a system of using books in which readers digested the books they read by extracting, ordering and recording particular phrases or passages in notebooks of their own. This process encouraged readers to atomize books by isolating units that might later be useful in one or another discursive context. While the commonplace book allowed readers to personalize their reading by making it useful, this process of textual engagement was also highly prescribed, "common" in the sense that it filtered one's reading through social norms that determined what was textually significant and what not.