Commonplacing and Commonplace Books

Vol. 3

Co-Editors: Kacie L. Wills & Olivia Loksing Moy
October 2024

This third volume of the K-SJ+ special issue explores the social uses of commonplacing, fostering connection through new networks. The essays below investigate the knowledge-building experiences of creating commonplace books digitally (among global readers today), professionally (at academic conferences), across generations (through early modern “physic-books”), pedagogically (among students), and artistically (across author and audience). While Volume 1 posed the idea of a “commons” as central to the construction of the university and the very idea of a college (Yood; Droge), Volume 3 features commonplacing as a way for building community, traversing distance or time.

Shellie Audsley (University of Camrbidge) and Hannah Blanning (University of Colorado, Boulder) report on their work of actively coordinating commonplacing projects in present day, creating commons spaces both digitally and materially for others to inhabit and exchange ideas. Audsley designed the 2023-2024 global platform through a digital commonplace book of Romantic readers, while Blanning compiled a commonplace book from the British Women Writers Conference held in the summer of 2024. Sam Mohite (The Morgan Library & Museum) and Olivia Loksing Moy (City University of New York) delve into commonplace books at the Morgan Library and Museum, Huntington Library, Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, and the Pforzheimer Collection. These commonplace books serve as time capsules that tell the stories of communities sharing knowledge, whether early modern women writing recipes “to pickle wallnuts” and “to make carret pudding,” or young Victorian poets circulating out-of-print work, connecting a young D.G. Rossetti to Robert Browning.  Pedagogical contributions by Melissa Ganz (Marquette University) and Alina Romo (Allan Hancock College) find new venues for commonplacing to support student engagement with literature, in the pursuit of legal and social justice in upper-division legal fiction courses or at the community college. Finally, our Artist Spotlight on poet Andrew Mitchell’s epic-length poem on Keats, “A Scattering of Words on Water,” shows how commonplacing techniques can enrich both the creation and literary reception of a work. Mitchell discusses his artistic process and invites K-SJ+ readers to use indexes, headings, and footnotes to engage piecemeal with his long poem. His contribution highlights the relationship between notetaking and commonplacing as conversation-creating practices. We have ordered the essays to display commonplacing’s variety and distinctive uses, as well as the ways in which thematic connections can arise from those distinctions.

K-SJ+ is the digital supplement to the K-SJ print journal.