The Commonplace Book
18 Nov 2005, 2:38:59 pm
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I hate linking to other blogs who are linking to someplace else, but Metafilter has a nice summary about commonplace books. These are books of interesting subnotes, not worthy to devote an entire book of, but worth writing down for posterity. While some of the writers were famous, other commonplace books are noteable simply for their subject matter: they contained information that maybe wasn't considered particularly earthshaking or relevant at the time but remains otherwise lost in history from today's vantagepoint. They demonstrate a purpose for books that's quite lost today, and missed by the whole eBook phenomenon: Books aren't simply created to be read temporarily. They are printed in a universally available and interactive format so that they can sit on a shelf until ready to be read again at any time in the future, from months to years to centuries later.
MeFi considers blogs to be an analogue of this old technique: not a diary (a list of daily activities), but a journal of interesting facts, a cyclopedia of the writer's interests assembled in a taxonomy that most likely makes sense to the writer and nobody else. The commonplace books were often published and distributed, as blogs are, but blogs are not permanent: missing a month's hosting fees could result in deletion, or if Blogger suddenly closes their doors and formats the blogspot servers for privacy reasons, it's gone -- not just damaged or misplaced...gone.
Let's connect this to the ease of self-publishing today, allowing anybody to bind their thoughts on archival paper for nothing more than the cost of a single copy for their shelves. The world of Blogspot could be a universe of Pepyses who could be led to the next level, creating books published from their blogs as actual books -- not just chronologically, but organized for reading -- and silently waiting to be rediscovered, hundreds of years from now, ready to be read and translated.
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