A commonplace book is a personal manuscript designed to compile quotations and other information deemed valuable or worth preserving for future use. This tradition was ushered into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most prominently by seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. In 1685, he wrote a treatise, A New Method of a Common-Place-Book, in French, and, in 1706, it was published in English posthumously. Locke inherited the practice from early modern humanists, who advocated for the systematic collection of quotations under topical headings to facilitate efficient retrieval while composing essays (Blair, Ann M, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, Yale University Press, 2010). The term “common place” originates from the classical rhetorical technique of common places: loci communes (Latin) and koinos topos (Greek), which referred to general strategies of argumentation. One such strategy, as outlined by Cicero, involved referencing authoritative quotations to support one’s claims. Eventually, this rhetorical technique evolved into a foundational principle of the commonplace book tradition (Moss, Ann, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, Clarendon Press, 1996, 6 & 136).