Description

Keeping a Commonplace Book has been the habit of many great minds throughout the centuries. Notable names like Blaise Pascal, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis Carroll, Napoleon Bonaparte, John Milton, Mark Twain, and many others are known to have kept a Commonplace Book. These little journals are receptacles of wisdom as you read through the Great Books and find examples of powerful writing, well stated truths, beautiful poetry and prose, and more. Copying extracts from the Great Books into a Commonplace allows serious readers and writers to gather into one place some of the very best of what they have encountered in the written word and, subsequently, to have in their possession a source of inspiration and aid for their own writings.

Study The Great Books is pleased to offer our own take on this practice and to present to you The Commonplace Book. In our uniquely designed journal we offer practical guidance as to what kinds of things you can look for while reading the Great Books, to help you identify treasures in the text as you come across them. Our new Commonplace Books offer you categories to look for known as “The Great Ideas, Virtues and Vices” along with definitions for each. Further, our unique tagging system and index in the back of the book allows you a simple and highly effective way of finding the kinds of extracts/quotes you want when you want them. The fun of entering great extracts while you read at your pleasure meets the helpful utility of finding them again without endless flipping through the journal.

If you love to read or write (or both) this is just the book for you!

Here is how it works

1. 1. When you are reading a Great Book and locate a great quote that is worth recording, copy it down in this journal.
   2. Write down the quote verbatim (i.e. word for word, exactly as it appears)
   3. Write down the name of the book from which the quote comes
   4. Write the locator (i.e. write the name of the book as well as the chapter, page number, or line number if it’s poetry).
   5. Tag it with a Great Idea, Virtue, or Vice (Our Commonplace Book provides you with a solid list of these with definitions).

These first five steps should look something like one the following examples:

Example Quote 1:

“He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, “whole and undefiled,” when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those “sensible” synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.”

C. S. Lewis is talking about Athanasius in his essay, On Reading Old Books, in his preface to On The Incarnation by Athanasius. Pg. 14. (Great Idea: Perseverance)

Example Quote 2:

I am the weakest, I am aware, and in wit feeblest,
and the least loss, if I live not, if one would learn the truth.
Only because you are my uncle is honor given me:
save your blood in my body I boast of no virtue;
and since this affair is so foolish that it nowise befits you,
and I have requested it first, accord it then to me!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien. Stanza 16 (Great Idea: Humility)

Example Quote 3:

“…no man ought to be blamed, for seeking his own good and happiness.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 11, Ch. 15 (Great Idea: Happiness)

Once you have entered a quote into your journal in manner similar to the above examples then there is a sixth and final step:

6. Index your quote in the back of the journal.

In the back of this journal you will find pages with a list of Virtue, Vices, and Great Ideas, in alphabetical order, with blank lines following them. On those blank lines you can write the page number from this journal for each quote you enter according to its Tag. For example if you wrote a quote which related to the idea of adoption (literal or figural) on page 4 of this journal and then again on 17, 42, and 44, then you would enter it as the below example shows. The same goes for every other Tag you make use of, such as Appearance vs. Reality.
Adoption:__4,_17,_42,_44___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Appearance vs. Reality: __7, 10, 11, 22, 24, 29 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________