Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book: Organizational Structure & Digital Selections

At the time in which Jefferson was writing, commonplace books were a way for people to keep a written record of a variety of things. Some chose to keep track of random life tidbits, like recipes, notes, or pictures, whereas others would have a more focused collection, such as transcriptions of poetry, prose, or quotes or excerpts from philosophers. Jefferson’s literary commonplace book was more like the latter in that he kept written records of materials that were more than likely related to his academic life. Jefferson’s book was strategically organized into two sections: 1.) memory and 2.) philosophy, with a series of subsections in each. The organizational structure of Jefferson’s book and some of the selections within it were surprising to me. For example, I am curious as to what he means by memory as the title for his first section header. Are the selections within the memory category writings he aspires to memorize or has at least partially memorized? I am not sure, but maybe I am taking the word memorized too literally, but in that case, that is more the reason I am interested in understanding what he meant by it. Also, I would have liked to see which selections were featured under the subsections titled “9. Surgery,” “10. Medicine,” “11. Animals Anatomy,” and “12. Animals, Zoology.” Because there has been much advancement in those fields of study since the time Jefferson was writing, I feel it would be the most interesting to see where medicine and zoology were at in those moments.

In respect to commonplace books as a genre, I thought about the way it has changed since then, like at the time Jefferson was compiling his literary commonplace book, to now. I feel like people are keeping modern-day equivalents of commonplace books through digital platforms. For example, many social media platforms, like Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr, offer features that allow users to save or upload images or text that can be published onto a blog or into a collection. Depending on your motivations, an individual’s personal assemblage will vary, but the functionality of the platform is what allows such variation amongst users. In that way, I think commonplace books and digital blogs or collections are very similar-- the author or user has complete creative control of why they want to use their platform (e.g personal, practical, professional) and how they can do it given the constraints of their selected medium or platform.

Works Cited

Jefferson, Thomas. Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book. Edited by D.L. [Douglas L.] Wilson, Princeton University Press, 1983.