Sunday, December 6, 2015

William Gass on Commonplace Books


http://learni.st/users/maggiemessitt/boards/68777-the-history-of-commonplace-books-and-john-locke
When Ben Jonson was a small boy, his tutor, William Camden, persuaded him of the virtue of keeping a commonplace book: pages where an ardent reader might copy down passages that especially pleased him, preserving sentences that seemed particularly apt or wise or rightly formed and that would, because they were written afresh in a new place, and in a context of favor, be better remembered, as if they were being set down at the same time in the memory of the mind. (William Gass, "In Defense of the Book," Harper's Magazine, 1999-11, p. 45)

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