“In “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” from 1721, Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that “a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that great wits have short memories””
“The English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was all too aware of the grip of amnesia and the shortness of memory. In his seminal Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he wrote of his rival Blaise Pascal, who he named as the “prodigy of parts”, who “forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought.””
“Locke, in reaction, attempted to simulate Pascal’s “hyperthymesia”, not in the mind, but upon the page: through the construction of a system of “commonplacing”, as a form of what Swift called “supplemental memory””
“Locke’s method built on a long tradition of commonplace note taking, most famously John Milton’s from the middle of the century”
“Locke was one of the first to formalise a method though. Developed over 25 years of personal note-taking, it was formalised in his publication of Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706) and published posthumously”
“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”
“this led to a very particular structuring of knowledge: commonplace users “broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebook.” It was a mixture of fragmented order and disorder that anticipated a particular form of scientific investigation and organisation of information”
“Locke’s humble two page method, in this sense, prefigures libraries filled with volumes of encyclopedias, from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) to Luke Howard’s classification of clouds”