Book of Common Place

Whenever he or she struck by a quote, passage, poem, Scripture verse, or even a meme, encourage your child to transcribe these great thoughts.

History of the Common Place Book

Popular with the great thinkers and scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a "commonplace book" was a notebook used to gather quotes and excerpts from literary, Biblical, and other readings — a kind of personalized encyclopedia of quotations.

 Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that a scholar “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 the importance 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 formalize a method. Developed over 25 years of personal note-taking, it was formalized in his publication Organizing Common Place Books (1706) and published posthumously.

His technique of "commonplacing" always began with a stack of white, empty sheets bound together into a single volume.

This product is part of the Living Streams Charlotte Mason Curriculum published by Jeannie Fulbright Press.