# Allan, *Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England*, 2010 > [!cite] > Allan, David. *Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England*. Cambridge University Press, 2010. [https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511760518](https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511760518). > [!abstract] > This pioneering exploration of Georgian men and women’s experiences as readers explores their use of commonplace books for recording favourite passages and reflecting upon what they had read, revealing forgotten aspects of their complicated relationship with the printed word. It shows how indebted English readers often remained to techniques for handling, absorbing and thinking about texts that were rooted in classical antiquity, in Renaissance humanism and in a substantially oral culture. It also reveals how a series of related assumptions about the nature and purpose of reading influenced the roles that literature played in English society in the ages of Addison, Johnson and Byron; how the habits and procedures required by commonplacing affected readers’ tastes and so helped shape literary fashions; and how the experience of reading and responding to texts increasingly encouraged literate men and women to imagine themselves as members of a polite, responsible and critically aware public. --- ## quotes ‘“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.” Charles lamb, ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, *The Essays of Elia* (1833)’. [[Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England, 2010|(Allan 2010, 3)]] ‘After all, the label “commonplace book” was no original coinage, newly minted in Augustan civilisation.’ [[Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England, 2010|(Allan 2010, 26)]] ^ea5ba2 ‘And even before 1700, the same name had increasingly been assigned to a bewildering variety of different handwritten productions. accordingly, as Cameron Louis has argued, it had long served as little more than a “catch-all for any MS of a miscellaneous nature”, invoked by default to describe variegated compositions for which “there appears to be no satisfactory alternative term”.’ [[Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England, 2010|(Allan 2010, 26)]] ^0f161c ‘\[…] true commonplace books, for all their endlessly differentiated forms and functions, did have at least one defining feature in almost all cases. This was a discernible relationship with a very much older set of ideas and assumptions about note-taking that revolved specifically around what had come to be known as “commonplaces”.’ [[Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England, 2010|(Allan 2010, 34)]] ^55f9b2