Guest Notebook: Roland Allen on the Birth of the Notebook

How the humble notebook greased the wheels of learning and literature

The common-place book of Elizabeth Browne, daughter of Sir Thomas Browne, begun in the 1770s, in which father Thomas lists the books Elizabeth has read aloud to him at night. Erasmus did not approve of education for women, but surviving common-place books and other notebooks reveal women pursuing learning privately and within the family.

Erasmus of Rotterdam, who began as an Augustinian monk in Holland and later became a priest, taught, studied, networked, travelled, and above all published throughout Europe, translating the Church Fathers and collecting classical proverbs and adages. His schoolbooks and religious handbooks sold in huge numbers—perhaps one in ten of all books printed in the 1530s.

One of his top sellers was 1512’s De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia (“On the Foundations of the Abundant Style”), now usually known as De Copia—in which he gave his readers a guide to composition and rhetoric. Writing for teachers and students, he showed how to create convincing arguments using the arts of copia, or abundance. Students were to gather written examples representing variety of expression and subject matter that would help them to present their arguments—whether in debate, from the pulpit, or in a courtroom—in novel and persuasive ways.

A range of knowledge was also desirable in its own right. A man could only be called learned, Erasmus wrote, if he mastered “every kind of author.” So he encouraged students to read, and collect “stories, fables, proverbs, opinions, parallels or comparisons, similitudes, analogies, and anything else of the same sort … things done or said in the past, or derived from the customs of various nations … from historians, poets, philosophers, or the books of the Bible … early times, recent history, and things in our own lives.” It was up to each reader to assemble their “mass of material” according to their needs, and to logically arrange each selection, by topic, in “common places.” Although De Copia didn’t give any more practical instruction than that, its readers knew what to do. In their thousands, they picked up notebooks, and started noting excerpts and quotations as they read.

De Copia’s sales broke all contemporary records. Erasmus personally issued three revised editions over the following two decades, and more than eighty more were produced by others in his lifetime. Developing the basic idea, humanist scholars like Juan Luis Vives, Philip Melanchthon, and Francis Bacon also publishedbooks that explained in practical detail how to keep common-place books using headwords and indexes to organize the raw material.

The collection of quotations was not Erasmus’s invention: Pliny the Younger, fourteen hundred years earlier, had written that his uncle, Pliny the Elder, “never read without taking extracts, and used to say that there never was a book so bad that it was not good in some passage or another.” This constant note-taking had left the younger Pliny with a legacy of 160 commentarios “written on both sides of the scrolls, and in a very small handwriting.” Literate Romans referred to this skill as the ars excerpendi, the art of excerpting, but with the collapse in written culture that followed the fall of Rome, it had more or less vanished. A book was usually copied at length or not at all, and few scholars had the luxury of their own private codex to write in.

The arrival of paper notebooks with mass production of paper in thirteenth-century Florence changed that, creating a craze for personal notebooks, or zibaldoni, in Florence that fuelled that city’s cultural awakening. But that Italian custom was mostly recreational in nature, and very few had any organizing principle beyond what their owner happened to enjoy. In systematizing the arrangement of information, Erasmus’s common-place—just as merchants’ ledgers had revolutionized finance—turned the notebook into information technology, a piece of hardware in which data could be stored, categorized, and retrieved as necessary. “By the end of the sixteenth century,” scholar Angus Vine, explains, “anybody who went to a grammar school or university would have been instructed in how to take and keep their notes. But common-placing is never an end in itself. It’s always about producing something afterwards, or preparing you for public life.”

Common-placing’s advocates pointed to intellectual benefits, that made it more than just a way to frame a more convincing oration. Firstly, any reader tasked with making a selection from a given text would read it with greater concentration. The selection of a passage to excerpt required the exercise of judgment, a benefit summarized by Justus Lipsius, another Dutch scholar, in the Latin tag Non colligo, sed seligo (“I don’t collect, I select”). Selecting the appropriate common place (or locus, under a headword) for a given excerpt demanded still deeper engagement with its ideas, and once an excerpt was in place, juxtaposition with what had already been written tended to generate further shades of meaning. The physical labor of copying by hand also fixed the quotation more firmly in the mind. As yet another scholarly excerpter, the Jesuit Jeremias Drexel, put it, Notae propriae, notae optimae: “your own notes are the best notes.” Finally, the well-arranged common-place functioned as a kind of externalized memory, which, as historian Ann Blair notes, “liberated the reader from the task of memorizing the selected passages.” This in turn “freed up mental capacity for ... reasoning and reflection” and was particularly useful in an age when the rate of arrival of new books far outstripped anyone’s ability to master their contents.

In the wake of De Copia’s success, the common-place book rapidly became a fixture of the European schoolroom. A story of two sixteenth-century teachers illustrates its impact. Born in Cheshire in 1540, four years after Erasmus’s death, the young John Brownsword attended school in Witton, where he was taught by John Brechtgirdle according to a syllabus which, as Brownsword recorded, included De Copia and other writings by Erasmus, as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Horace, Virgil, and many other Latin writers. In 1560 Brechtgirdle left Witton to become a vicar in the Midlands and, five years after that, recruited his former pupil to teach in his local grammar school. Brownsword taught there for a few years before returning to Cheshire; he was replaced by one Simon Hunt, who taught a boy that Brechtgirdle had baptized in 1564, a glove-maker’s son named William Shakespeare.

The curriculum that Brownsword left behind gives us a clear idea of what Shakespeare learned at school and how he learned it, and common-placing played a key role, as did another technique that Erasmus recommended, the performance of Latin debates or colloquies—scripted arguments over the importance of subjects like philosophy or cookery. The common-placing habit stood the young poet in good stead. Nearly all his plays adapt existing source material such as Holinshed’s Chronicles, Plutarch’s Lives, and Boccaccio’s Decameron, using their plots, characters, and imagery in fresh ways—“a style that mixes multiple sources and transforms them,” as Vine puts it. Shakespeare’s peers—Jonson, Marlowe, and Webster among them—all worked in similar ways. As another contemporary, the polymath Francis Bacon, put it, “there can hardly be anything more useful’ than a common-place to supply “matter to invention.” Without Erasmus’s invention, London’s theaters would have offered much poorer fare.

Vine points to another literary genre that emerged from the common-place book: the essay. Assembling examples and counterexamples under headwords allowed the French aristocrat Michel de Montaigne to explore and examine subjects as varied as Fear, Age, Cannibalism, and Posting Letters. In each of his 107 essays he tested ideas and precedents, piling anecdotes, folk wisdom, and references from the classics into short pieces that examined every topic from multiple angles. First published in Paris in 1580, they became hugely popular and sparked imitators across Europe—including Francis Bacon.

Common-place books were important to the Jacobean dramatists, but none of theirs survive. Fortunately, we can see John Milton’s notebook, now in the British Library, which collects a wide variety of materials, in five languages, under headings like Rex, Respublica, and De Divortio—King, Republic, and Divorce. Later in the century the philosopher John Locke would write an entire book devoted to his personal system of alphabetic and thematic common-placing, which, it is fair to say, overcomplicates a method that at its heart has an elegant utility. Forty years later Jonathan Swift wrote, in his Advice to a Young Poet, that “a commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without,” for “poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories.”

A century later, the London publisher R. Pitkeathley described a “man of letters” who “treasures passages most replete with humor, elegance, wit, or satire, and circulates them … at the social evening party.” The process became somewhat circular. Vine recounts how people took their common-place books to the theater and to church, to “preserve the best lines,” and writers started to self- consciously create quotable texts with common-placing readers in mind—seventeenth-century soundbites. In due course, any such truism became known as a “commonplace,” and the word quickly came to mean “ordinary” or “unremarkable.”

Common-placing might have been a sweat, if you took it seriously, but at least the act of writing was becoming easier, as paper became steadily finer, smoother, and cheaper. Italy, southern Germany, and France had long made the best paper, but in the century after Erasmus, the industry spread north and east, and towns from Dartford to Lviv gained commercially successful paper mills. This process accelerated during the Thirty Years’ War, which forced many German papermakers to relocate, dispersing their expertise across the continent. Ever-rising demand for paper pushed up the price of linen rags and old clothes, which the millsgraded prior to pounding, the coarsest and oldest cloth making cheap papers for printing books. Printers realized that they could get away with a rougher, more absorbent surface, and the quality of book paper (as measured by folding endurance) started a long decline. Writing paper, though, was made of better raw materials, and became ever finer, stronger, and smoother.

In the late eighteenth century a serial entrepreneur called John Bell opened a bookshop on London’s Strand, the center of a city with a fast-growing literate population. Bell saw an opportunity, anticipating the invention of the paperback in the same city by Penguin’s Alan Lane two centuries later, he issued one hundred and nine volumes of the Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill at a price of just six shillings each. He followed this with British Theatre (in twenty illustrated volumes), the Works of Shakespeare, a gossipy newspaper called The World, and La Belle Assemblée, an innovative ladies’ magazine that carried politics, science, and book reviews alongside color plate illustrations of the latest fashions.

But Bell’s biggest earner was his Common-Place Book, first issued in 1770 and aimed at those aspiring souls who knew they ought to keep a common-place book but didn’t know how to go about it. Bell’s Common-Place Book Form’d generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised By Mr Locke condensed Locke’s method of excerpting into a few pages, then offered examples for both “a student, or man of reading” and “the traveller, or man of observation.” (Despite La Belle Assemblée, Bell didn’t perceive a female market for the book.)

The simple invention sold briskly, and Bell must have enjoyed a decent profit: his two-hundred-and-fifty page Common-Place Book, in which all but the first few pages were blank, went for one pound and five shillings, four times the price of a volume of the Poets of Great Britain, and needing little typesetting or printing. He smartly followed up with a pocket edition, in which nearly four hundred blank pages followed even briefer instructions, and this also a proved a success.

Several examples of each format, completed by their owners, survive in the British Library. To page through them is to build up a peculiarly incomplete picture of the writer: you find out plenty about their preoccupations, but very little about the person themselves. One example includes cut-out newspaper stories, poems in Latin and English, Suffolk gravestone inscriptions, comic verse, snippets of East Anglian local history, letters from family, a long account of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, and so unpredictably on. There are repeated references to the business of brewing stout, and even a recipe for the “Irish Method of Boiling Potatoes” (“a little salt thrown in during the boiling is a great improvement”).

Common-place books gradually fell out of favor in the nineteenth century […]. By the middle of the twentieth century, the phrase had ceased to mean much to anyone apart from publishers of unremarkable miscellanies. Bucking this trend, W.H. Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book, published in 1970, is a magnificent throwback, spanning four hundred pages, from entries on Accidie (“tedium or perturbation of the heart”) through to Writing, and is a rare thing indeed, a classical humanist common-place that you can read from start to finish while retaining the will to live. The actor Alec Guinness’s Commonplace Book was gathered from two exercise books he left at his death in August 2000. This is a modern(ish) gem of a zibaldone, with quotations from favorite books, anecdotes from the theater, and remarks overheard on the street.

Contemporary writers even occasionally admit to the habit. The novelist Nicholson Baker essays entertainingly about his own “copybooks.” Copying, he says, “can calm and steady your state, not to mention improve it, for while the transcribing may appear to be a form of close and exclusive concentration, it has an equally important element of peaceable meditative mindlessness as well, like playing with a paper clip.”

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This Notebook is drawn from The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen, who lives in Brighton, UK, and also works as a publisher.

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