Three: History & Examples

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century.

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The following all had/kept commonplaces:

Charles Darwin

Francis Bacon

Ben Jonson

John Milton

Mrs Anna Anderson

E.M. Forster

John Locke

W.H. Auden

H.P. Lovecraft

Virginia Woolf

Joseph Conrad

Washington Irving

Victor Hugo

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton, a mathematician and physicist, used a “Waste Book” to write his initial conceptualization of the calculus. A digitized copy of this commonplace is held at the University of Cambridge and is freely available to view online.