Scholarly and Pedagogical Resources
for Teaching with Commonplacing

Web Articles & Resources for high school instructors.

There are many articles and blog posts encouraging modern-day writers to create their own commonplace books, sharing methods of organization, indexing, and formatting in both handwritten notebooks and in digital spaces. Scroll down for links to some of these web articles. Please reach out if you have more suggestions that could be added to our mini-archive!

About this image: John Hoppner, The Frankland Sisters (1795)

Link to: Commonplacing homepage | Resources for middle school instructors | Resources for undergraduate instructors

Articles and Book Chapters | Undergraduate Teaching Materials

Below are links to scholarship on annuals, friendship albums, commonplace books, and scrapbooks that would be useful as secondary readings for college-level courses.

If you have some more articles or book chapters that you would like to see included on this site, please send them our way!

Link to: Commonplacing homepage | Primary sources | Teaching Materials

Jonathan Budington, Father and Son (1800)

Scholarly and Pedagogical Resources:

Mai-Lin Cheng, “Domestic Extracts” Studies in Romanticism, Volume 60, Number 4, Winter 2021, pp. 467-485. 

Jillian Hess, How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums. Oxford University Press, 2022.  (Please contact the organizers for a PDF copy of Chapter 5 on “Social Commonplacing” chapter, generously shared by the author.)

Deidre Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History. University of Chicago Press, 2015. 

“Coda: Female Collectors and their Paper Cabinets” (here)

Deidre Lynch, “Paper Slips: Album, Archiving, Accident” Studies in Romanticism 57, No. 1 (Spring 2018): 87-119. 

Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 2012. 

Shelley AJ Jones, “Digital Experiments in Romantic-Era Commonplacing.” Images missing from the article can be found linked here.

John Hoppner, The Frankland Sisters (1795)

Please contact us if you have more secondary source suggestions that you would like shared on our resources pages!