A Forest of Things

What is commonplacing?

Commonplacing is the act of selecting important phrases, lines, or passages from texts and writing them down. A commonplace book is then a journal in which a reader has collected quotations from works he or she has read. These commonplace books often included comments and notes from the reader. They are a sort of reflective journal of what one read or learned during his life.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, was an avid practitioner of reflective journaling. One biographer noted that Jefferson “would synopsize and capture the key points of his readings and add his own reflections, recording them in a journal which he called his ‘commonplace book.”

Jefferson himself reflects on his practice:
"I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on the subject."

Jefferson’s tutor, James Maury, commended the practice as a means ‘to reflect, and remark on, and digest what you read’.

Also known as a silva rerum, a forest of things, a commonplace book is a collection of thoughts and maintained as a document of where the writer's mind has traveled and how the soul has been inspired.