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Commonplace books

From Library of Congress Subject Headings


us: Commonplace books



  • URI(s)

  • Instance Of

  • Scheme Membership(s)

  • Collection Membership(s)

  • Variants

    • us: Adversaria
    • us: Commonplaces (Books)

  • Broader Terms

  • Sources

    • found: The Greenwood encyclopedia of American poets and poetry, 2006 (Commonplace book; a notebook in which the keeper enters textual memorabilia, usually by hand. The items recorded in the books are called "commonplaces"; commonplaces include maxims, excerpts from literature or philosophy, bits of scientific data, excerpts from friends' letters or other writing, and records of oral conversations; often includes commentary by its keeper; served many functions: scrapbooks, containers for memories; pedagogical tools in early modern schools; sites of self-improvement)
    • found: RBMS controlled vocabularies: genre terms, via WWW, Mar. 5, 2013 (Commonplace books. Scope Note: Use for personal notebooks in which the owner has copied passages of interest or written his or her own compositions; use also for printed versions of such works. Broader Term: Notebooks. Related Term: Diaries)
    • found: Wikipedia, Mar. 5, 2013 (Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe. Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests.)
    • found: -Ologies & -isms, c2008, via TheFreeDictionary.com, Mar. 5, 2013 (adversaria 1. a commonplace book. 2. a miscellany, in published or other collected form)
    • found: The American heritage dictionary of the English language, ©2000, updated in 2009, via TheFreeDictionary.com, Mar. 5, 2013 (commonplace book n. A personal journal in which quotable passages, literary excerpts, and comments are written.)
    • found: Collins English dictionary - complete and unabridged, ©2003, via TheFreeDictionary.com, Mar. 5, 2013 (commonplace book n (Literary & Literary Critical Terms) a notebook in which quotations, poems, remarks, etc., that catch the owner's attention are entered)

  • LC Classification

    • PN245
    • PN6244-PN6246

  • Change Notes

    • 1986-02-11: new
    • 2013-05-02: revised

  • Alternate Formats

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