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
The practice of commonplacing has much to offer today’s high school students. Some of the articles below give practical advice on how to get started.
“Create a Digital Commonplace Book,” by J.D. Biersdorfer, New York Times, February 10, 2021
Jillian Hess’s Substack account “Noted,” which explores notebooks of the world’s best note takers
“The Commonplace Book as a Thinker’s Journal,” by Kevin Eagan, Bullet Journal, April 3, 2023
Charley Locke / Commonplace Book website
“Speaking of Commonplace Books,” by William Cole, New York Times, May 3, 1970
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.