# Dolbear, ‘John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books’, 2019 > [!cite] Citation > Dolbear, Sam. ‘John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685)’. *The Public Domain Review*, 8 May 2019, https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685/. --- ‘Popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a “commonplace book” was a notebook used to gather quotes and excerpts from one’s literary wanderings—a kind of personalized encyclopedia of quotations.’ [[Dolbear, ‘John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books’, 2019|(Dolbear 2019, n.p.)]] ^4abc19 ‘In general, the commonplace book would result in a wonderfully tangled mixture of reading and writing, where disparate ideas could be fruitfully thrown together onto the same pages, fixed together only by a formal method (and of course similar word roots).’ [[Dolbear, ‘John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books’, 2019|(Dolbear 2019, n.p.)]] ^4f103c ‘In “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” from 1721, Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that “a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that great wits have short memories”.’ [[Dolbear, ‘John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books’, 2019|(Dolbear 2019, n.p.)]] ^606859 ‘The English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was all too aware of the grip of amnesia and the shortness of memory. In his seminal *Essay Concerning Human Understanding* (1689) he wrote of his rival Blaise Pascal, who he named as the “prodigy of parts”, who “forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought.” Locke, in reaction, attempted to simulate Pascal’s “hyperthymesia”, not in the mind, but upon the page: through the construction of a system of “commonplacing”, as a form of what Swift called “supplemental memory”.’ [[Dolbear, ‘John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books’, 2019|(Dolbear 2019, n.p.)]] ^7b2c8f