Zettelkasten and Evergreen MOC
This is (mostly) a stub
A commonplace book is a personal compilation of knowledge, ideas, quotes, notes, observations, and other information that an individual gathers from various sources like books, articles, conversations, and personal reflections. The purpose of a commonplace book is to create a central repository for recording and organizing these pieces of information for future reference, learning, and reflection.
Commonplace books have a long history and were particularly popular before the widespread availability of printed books. Scholars, writers, and thinkers would maintain these books as a way to document their learning and insights. They would copy passages or ideas from their reading into the book, often categorizing them by subject or theme. This practice allowed them to consolidate knowledge and make connections between different pieces of information.
It is somewhat similar to the idea of a personal journal or a scrapbook, but it tends to focus more on the gathering of external information rather than personal experiences. It’s a tool for capturing and curating intellectual material that can be revisited and built upon over time.
Literature notes
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. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: sententiae (often with the compiler’s responses), notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.
Entries are most often organized under systematic subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries, which are chronological and introspective.
John Lockes notes on creating a commonplace book: John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685) – The Public Domain Review
In general, the commonplace book would result in a wonderfully tangled mixture of reading and writing, where disparate ideas could be fruitfully thrown together onto the same pages, fixed together only by a formal method (and of course similar word roots).
Commonplace books were something like diaries or journals, but writers recorded favorite quotations rather than daily events or emotions. This does not mean that they were impersonal in any sense. We learn so much about early modern readers by their choice of organizational headings, chosen passages, and other materials collected in their commonplace books. In addition, they were often circulated among friends and passed down in families, demonstrating that they were semi-public repositories of knowledge and self-improvement. Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB, page 2
Quotes regarding
Make your own Bible. Select and Collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul. Emerson Journals July 1836 On_Commonplace_Books, page 4