202207081938 - Commonplace book

Author: & Robert Darnton
Historian and former director of the Harvard University Library

Unlike. modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book...Reading and writing (are) inseparable activities. The world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of you own, one stamped with your personality.

"Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life5."