2016-05-24

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A '''[[w:Commonplace book|Commonplace book]]''' is a [[w:scrapbook|scrapbook]] used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they have learned.

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== Quotes ==

* Just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a [[w:commonplace book|commonplace book]]. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. ... The great minds of the period—[[Milton]], [[Bacon]], [[Locke]]—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

** [[w:Steven Berlin Johnson|Steven Berlin Johnson]], "The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book," Hearst New Media lecture, April 22, 2010

* The wise man will sit and collect the good saying and deeds of the prudent, as a [[w:Gleaning|gleaner]] his gleanings.

** [[Mahābhārata]], 5(51)34:31, as translated by J. A. B. van Buitenen, p. [http://books.google.com/books?id=a5w-CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA264&lpg=PA263 263]

== External links ==

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