From Spectre to Flame + Pidgin 30

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BBB contribution-supplement for Pidgin Issue 30.

BBB COMMONPLACE: FROM SPECTRE TO FLAME

36 Page -Boot- Booklet – CMYK on Dur-O-Tone
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286 Page Book – ft. 18 Journal Submissions

Commonplace book
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.

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. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for 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 your own, one stamped with your personality.

https://www.are.na/blog/commonplace-books

The general concept of the commonplace book dates to the 1500's (though earlier precursors exist) as books became more common in society. Often due to the exorbitant cost of texts, readers would read and take notes from them into their commonplace books for future contemplation, providing direct quotations at a later date, or future reference prior to returning the book to its owner or passing it along to another. In some sense they became repositories for marginalia, highlights and notes one wanted to keep after the possession of a book was released. Commonplaces are frequently used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they have learned. Each commonplace book is unique to its creator's particular interests.

"Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means "a general or common topic", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's example. 'Commonplace book' is at times used with an expansive sense, referring to collections by an individual in one volume which have a common theme (e.g. ethics) or explores several themes. The term overlaps with aspects of the terms 'anthology' or 'mixed-manuscript' in these productions but most properly refers to a collection of sayings or excerpts by an individual, often collected under thematic headings.

 As a genre, commonplace books were generally private collections of information, but as the amount of information grew following the invention of movable type and printing became less expensive, some were published for the general public.

By the early eighteenth century, they had become an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations, and definitions. They were used in private households to collate ethical or informative texts, sometimes alongside recipes or medical formulae. For women, who were excluded from formal higher education, the commonplace book could be a repository of intellectual references. The gentlewoman Elizabeth Lyttelton kept one from the 1670s to 1713 and a typical example was published by Mrs Anna Jameson in 1855, including headings such as Ethical Fragments; Theological; Literature and Art.

A number of renaissance scholars kept something resembling a commonplace book – for example Leonardo da Vinci, who described his notebook exactly as a commonplace book is structured: "A collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat." French encyclopediast Jean Bodin used the commonplace book as "an arsenal of 'factoids'."

During the course of the fifteenth century, the Italian peninsula was the site of the development of two new forms of book production: the deluxe registry book and the zibaldone (or hodgepodge book). What differentiated these two forms was their language of composition: a vernacular. Giovanni Rucellai, the compiler of one of the most sophisticated examples of the genre, defined it as a "salad of many herbs".

 These collections have been used by modern scholars as a source for interpreting how merchants and artisans interacted with the literature and visual arts of the Florentine Renaissance.

 "Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink." -Virginia Woolf, "Hours in a Library"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book