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A commonplacing book is where one records interesting things they happen upon in life.
The dearmitt dot com website is a form of this, but what you find in the other sections of this site (monorail, troyscripts, galleries) predominately contains personal and playful observations.
My commonplacing book records the more serious and studious tidbits that catch my eye or ear. This is a practice I've been doing since before starting this site in 2000.
I intend to share select parts of this database more publicly.
The problem is, I have not figured out how I want to do that yet.
But when I do, this is where it will go.
In example of what you might expect, here is an entry from the collection that describes the commonplacing practice. Let's call it the first publicly shared morsel.
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Steven Johnson
Where Good Things Come From
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Darwin's notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a "commonplace" book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters - just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period - Milton, Bacon, Locke - were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, "commonplacing," as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one's reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing's virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to "lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life."
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