Long before the internet made sharing quotes instantaneous, educated readers kept commonplace books — personal notebooks filled with passages worth remembering. The practice shaped how quotations traveled through history and why certain phrases achieved lasting fame.
What Was a Commonplace Book?
A commonplace book (from the Latin locus communis, meaning a common theme or argument) was a personal anthology. Readers copied out memorable lines from books, sermons, conversations, and letters, organizing them by theme: virtue, death, friendship, fortune. The practice dates to ancient Greece but flourished particularly in Renaissance Europe and continued into the eighteenth century.
Renaissance humanists like Erasmus actively promoted the habit. In his De Copia (1512), Erasmus instructed students to keep notebooks organized by topic so they could draw on apt quotations in their own writing and speech. A well-stocked commonplace book was a mark of an educated mind.
Famous Keepers of Commonplace Books
- John Milton kept a commonplace book that survives today, showing the wide range of texts he read while preparing to write Paradise Lost.
- Thomas Jefferson compiled a “Literary Commonplace Book” in his youth, filling it with passages from Euripides, Milton, and other poets. Scholars use it to trace the formation of his thinking.
- John Locke devised a systematic method for indexing a commonplace book, published in 1706, that allowed readers to find their entries quickly by the first letter and vowel of a key word.
- H.W. Fowler, the English lexicographer, is said to have kept extensive notes on usage — a scholarly cousin of the commonplace tradition.
How Commonplace Books Spread Quotations
When a passage appeared in enough commonplace books, it entered what we might now call the cultural conversation. Printers recognized this: published anthologies of quotations — called florilegia (collections of flowers) — were popular from the medieval period onward. John Bodenham’s England’s Parnassus (1600), for instance, gathered poetic extracts from Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, helping cement their reputations.
This system had a notable weakness: errors crept in. A copyist might misremember a line, trim a phrase for elegance, or lose track of the source. Some of today’s most stubborn misattributions can be traced back to commonplace book errors that were then picked up by subsequent anthologists.
The Legacy in Modern Quote Culture
The commonplace book tradition did not die with the printing press. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, first published in 1855, is an institutionalized commonplace book. Social media quote cards are, in spirit, the same practice — extracting a single vivid line from a longer context and circulating it among one’s network.
Understanding the tradition helps explain why quotation culture values brevity so highly: a line that fit elegantly on a notebook page was more likely to be copied, shared, and remembered than a paragraph of nuance.
Related reading: preserving personal stories and memories.