What is a commonplace book? First let’s start with the term "commonplace." This concept goes back thousands of years. Commonplace is a translation of the Latin terms locus communis which means “a general or common topic." For the Ancient Greeks commonplaces included what had been said in the past about a topic and the associations the audience would have with the topic. Commonplaces are the cultural threads that bound us together. As members of families, communities, and cultures, you informally learn certain information, data, ideas, practices, and the history of specific subjects.Essentially, commonplaces are shared assumptions or premises upon which further reasoning and argumentation are builtThe practice of keeping a commonplace book can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. Scholars and philosophers, such as Seneca and Cicero, maintained personal collections of important thoughts, quotations, and ideas. Scrolls, however, were not ideal for anything portable for daily use, a better writing medium was needed. Eventually, the codex was developed. Codexes are ancient books that are made of parchment, vellum, or papyrus that are bound together. In 86 CE, Martial, a Latin poet, mentioned literary works in parchment codexes, and this seems to be the earliest remaining record like this. In poetry that he wrote during those years, he describes the codex's small size and ease of use, especially for the traveler. The earliest known codices with stitching in book form have been dated to 150-250 AD. and the earliest remaining codex manuscript is from about the 5th century. Six leaves of it survive at the Morgan Library in New York City.The shift from scroll to codex across the Western ancient world took a couple of centuries. By 300 CE that there were similar numbers of scrolls and codexes in circulation and another century would pass before the codex became the most common format for all types of literature.During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, manuscript culture thrived, and commonplace books served as a means to compile and organize knowledge. They became popular among scholars, students, and intellectuals.. These books contained excerpts from classical texts, biblical passages, legal principles, and personal reflections.The humanist movement in the 14th to 16th centuries greatly influenced the popularity and development of commonplace books. Humanist thinkers, emphasized the importance of gathering of knowledge, education and personal reflection, and the and commonplace books became a way to preserve and share intellectual ideas. The introduction of printing press in the 15th century made the dissemination of knowledge more accessible and commonplace books continued to evolved alongside the ever increasing number of printed materials.. This also impacted the content of commonplace books as individuals began incorporating printed excerpts, quotes, and passages cut from other documents into their collections, alongside their handwritten entries.Throughout the world people used different types of commonplace books. the Zuihitsu is a genre of Japanese literature consisting of loosely connected personal essays and fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author's surroundings. One book of this genre is the famous Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon from the late 10th century. She "wrote down in a spirit of fun and without help from anyone else, whatever happened to suggest itself to” her. Not only did she record her thoughts and observation on court life, providing an historical record, she also tried to encapsulate the beauty and aesthetics of her time. A zibaldone is an Italian commonplace book. The word means "a heap of things" or "miscellany" in Italian. The earliest such books were kept by Venetian merchants in the fourteenth century. The majority of these books, however, were compiled by Florentines. Due to the extremely high literacy rate in the city, copying manuscripts was a popular pastime in Florence. These personal, informal books helped preserve songs, poetry, and prose on a variety of topics. People recorded any bit of valuable information or popular culture that they found interesting and worth saving.From the 16th through the 18th centuries, Polish and Lithuanian noble families were writing multi-generational commonplace books called silvae rerum, Latin for "forest of things." The information in these books was compiled over many years and they were passed down from parents to children. They contained entries on on things like current events and personal memoirs, copies of legal and financial documents, economic information and genealogical trees. Other items that were saved included letters, poems, jokes, anecdotes and advice for their descendants.By the 1700s, commonplace books had become a common way to store and organize information and were often used in homes to record wise sayings, thoughts, and definitions. Some households had commonplace books which included portions of informative texts, recipes, and medical formulas. Many influential figures, including scientists, writers, and thinkers, kept commonplace books to record their observations, ideas, and discoveries. In the 17th century, John Locke developed a novel new way to index commonplaces books. This was revolutionary for its time, and helped many people organize their writing much more easily.Many examples of personal commonplace books are available today. Isaac Newton developed calculus in a commonplace book. Both Thomas Jefferson's and Ronald Regan's commonplace book entries have been published. Many writers including John Milton, H.P. Lovecraft and Virginia Wolf used commonplace books to record their thoughts. Commonplace books, whether labeled as such or not, continue to be used extensively today in the form of paper notebooks, scrapbooks, bullet journals, index card files, and in digital form on computers and other devices.