The Commonplace Book of Joshua Humphreys, Volumes 1, 2, and 3
The Commonplace Book of Joshua Humphreys, Volumes 1, 2, and 3

COMMONPLACE BOOK (n.)

a work into which notable extracts from other books are copied;

a compendium of the best that has ever been written, said, or done;

a repository of lost causes and impossible loyalties;

a trove of intellectual wonder & an armoury of audacious thought.

COMMONPLACE BOOK (n.)

a work into which notable extracts
from other books are copied;

a compendium of the best that has
ever been written, said, or done;

a trove of intellectual wonder

& an armoury of audacious thought;

a repository of lost causes

& impossible loyalties;

3 years into a history degree I became utterly bored with the official narratives & unthinking politics that were taught

at my university—and looked elsewhere

for intellectual inspiration.


Hidden in my university library I started taking notes on
my wider reading: transcribing exceptional sentences,
capitalising the highest thoughts, underlining
the rarest insights. A year later I
had filled 6 A4 notebooks.

Watch a Commonplace Book begin and evolve.

In 2016 I decided to clean up, organise, digitise, & index those notebooks, and after months of proofreading
and editing they became Volume I
of my Commonplace Book.


As I began  travelling the world & writing novels

I continued my note-taking habit, & my

first 6 years of work ended
up as Volume II.

3 years into a history degree I became utterly bored with the official narratives
& unthinking politics that were
taught at my university—and looked elsewhere for intellectual inspiration.


Hidden away in my university library,

I started taking notes on all my reading: transcribing exceptional sentences, capitalising the

highest thoughts, underlining

the rarest insights—
and a year later I found that I had
filled up 6 A4 notebooks.

Watch a Commonplace Book evolve.

In 2016 I decided to clean up,

organise, digitise, & index those notebooks, and after months of proofreading & editing they
became Volume I of my
Commonplace Book.


As I began travelling the world & writing novels I continued my note-taking
habit, & my first 6 years of work
ended up as Volume II.

Now containing the notes from

a decade of reading, writing, & travelling
the Commonplace Book

runs to over 1500 pages

across 5 volumes

Now containing the notes from a decade of reading, writing, & travelling,
the

Commonplace Book

runs to over 1500 pages

across 5 volumes

VOLUME I

VOLUME I

The Commonplace Book of Joshua Humphreys Volume 1
The Commonplace Book of Joshua Humphreys Volume 1

is the notes from 2-and-a-half years of reading;

1200 quotations from 320 separate authors
on 375 different subjects—

including:

Sallust, Les Miserables,

Rosa Luxembourg, Eric Hobsbawm,

Proudhon’s "What is Government?", The Accursed Questions,

Paradise Lost, the Earl Of Rochester, Rhetorica ad Herennium,

A.D. Hope’s Australia, Untimely Meditations, Molière, Revolt of the Masses,

Darkness At Noon, Vaclav Havel, Waugh’s Decline And Fall, Gatsby, Carlyle’s French

Revolution, King Lear, Brideshead, Modernity on Endless Trial, The Greeks & The Irrational,

The Nine Worthies, J.G. Hamann: Magus of the North, Euripides, Friedrich Schiller, The Gay Science, Broch’s Sleepwalkers, Stefan Zweig and The World of Yesterday, Heraclitus, Redemption by War, La Setta

d’i Cattivi, Charles Hamilton Sorley, La Vendée,  Burke’s French Revolution, Beethoven, Charles I, Macpherson’s Lament, Nietzsche’s House, Thomas Browne, the Ave Verum Corpus, a Masonic Prayer, Critics of Modernity, Karl Kraus and Die Fackel, the Tyranny of the Eunuchs, Baudelaire’s Journaux Intimes, Thomas Mann, South Park, Cicero’s Speeches, Chesterbelloc, Paul Valéry, The Nature of Gothic, Newman’s Definition of a Gentleman, Daphne and Apollo, William Drummond, Zarathustra’s Prologue, The Stones of Venice, Jonathan Swift and the Battle of the Books, T.S. Eliot, Charles Péguy, Dante, Hamlet, Strega Cream and more Hamlet, Lucretius on The Nature of Things, Ayn Rand, Chateaubriand’s Memoirs, Peter and Wendy, 4 definitions of Acedia, Waugh on Ruskin, Berlin on Verdi and Tchaikovsky on Brahms,
even more Hamlet, Pascal’s Pensees, Eugène Delacroix, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
Rupert Brooke, Nikolai Berdyaev, Christopher Dawson, Dostoevsky, Savonarola,
Ruskin’s Earth Veil, John the Dwarf, a Sicilian Cathedral,
Kenneth Clark’s The Young Michelangelo

and travelling to measure

with our hearts & see

with our eyes...

is the notes from

2-and-a-half years of reading;

1200 quotations from 320 separate authors on

375 different subjects—

including:

Sallust, Les Miserables,

Rosa Luxembourg, Eric Hobsbawm,

Proudhon’s "What is Government?",

The Accursed Questions, Paradise Lost,

the Earl Of Rochester, Rhetorica ad Herennium, A.D. Hope’s Australia, Untimely Meditations, Revolt of the Masses, Darkness At Noon, Vaclav Havel, Waugh’s Decline And Fall, Gatsby, Carlyle’s French Revolution, King Lear, Brideshead, Modernity on Endless Trial, The Greeks & The Irrational, The Nine Worthies, J.G. Hamann: Magus of the North, Euripides, Friedrich Schiller, The Gay Science, Broch’s Sleepwalkers, Stefan Zweig and The World of Yesterday, Heraclitus, La Setta d’i Cattivi, Charles Hamilton Sorley, La Vendée,  Burke’s French Revolution, Beethoven, Charles I, Macpherson’s Lament, Thomas Browne, the Ave Verum Corpus, a Masonic Prayer, Critics of Modernity, Karl Kraus and Die Fackel,Baudelaire’s Journaux Intimes, Thomas Mann, South Park, Cicero’s Speeches, Chesterbelloc, Paul Valéry, The Nature of Gothic, Daphne and Apollo, William Drummond, Zarathustra’s Prologue, The Stones of Venice, Jonathan Swift and the Battle of the Books, T.S. Eliot, Charles Péguy, Dante, Hamlet, Strega Cream and more Hamlet, Lucretius on The Nature of Things, Ayn Rand, Chateaubriand’s Memoirs, Peter and Wendy, 4 definitions of Acedia, Waugh on Ruskin, Berlin on Verdi and Tchaikovsky on Brahms, even more Hamlet, Pascal’s Pensees, Eugène Delacroix, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and HellRupert Brooke, Christopher Dawson, Dostoevsky, Savonarola, Ruskin’s Earth Veil,
John the Dwarf, a Sicilian Cathedral,
Kenneth Clark’s The Young Michelangelo

and travelling to measure

with our hearts & see

with our eyes...

VOLUME II

VOLUME II

is the distillation of 6 years
of reading & travel;

1200 quotations from 420 separate authors on
385 different subjects—

including:

is the distillation of 6 years of study & travel;

1200 quotations from 420 separate authors

on 385 different subjects—

including:

The Prophet Ezekiel,

Nietzsche versus Ruskin,
St Augustine and Wagner, Gulliver’s Travels, the Renaissance, William Morris & Socialism, Joan of Arc, Futurism, Peacocks, Oxford University, The Aeneid, Lord Byron, Switzerland, P.G. Wodehouse, Juvenal, Ancient Rome, the pre-Raphaelites, Jerry Seinfeld’s Three Rules of Life, Camille Paglia, John Henry Newman, Verona, Henry James, C.S. Lewis and the Weight of Glory, Lao Tzu & the Tao Te Ching, Tsunemoto’s Book of the Samurai, Buddhism, the history of Thailand, The Aeneid, Tennyson’s Ulysses, General Patton, Jerusalem, Gandhi, Rome, The Man Who Would be King, Cambodia, Scotland and the English Civil War, Bangkok, Spoliation, Napoleon, the Book of Proverbs, Gustav Mahler, Winston Churchill, Einstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Casanova, Chaucer, the Vietnam War, the Koran, Thucydides, John F. Kennedy, Romanticism, Anarchism, Albrecht Dürer, Hinduism, World War 2, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo and the History of Art, Ares the Greek God of War—Murugan: Hindu God of War, Love, and Youth—Freud, Evelyn Waugh, Travel, and Writing, Theodore Roosevelt, God & Atomic Warfare, Humanism, Dorothy L. Sayers, Zeus Ammon, The Kings of Thailand, more Nietzsche: Beyond Good & Evil, Southern India, the Nuremberg Chronicle, Durga the Serene Mother Goddess, Harold Bloom, Nostalgia, the Death of the Greek God Pan, Gibbon’s Decline & Fall, Titian, Jim Carrey on ‘making it’, Atheism, As You Like It, Ruskin on Turner, Turner’s Approach to Venice, the Wrath of Achilles, Goethe on Nature,
Ernst Haeckel’s dead wife seen in a jellyfish, Rousseau, some Walter Crane Peacocks,
and Culture as 'Sweetness and Light'.

The Prophet Ezekiel,
Nietzsche versus Ruskin, St Augustine & Wagner,
Gulliver’s Travels, the Renaissance, William Morris & Socialism,
Joan of Arc, Futurism, Peacocks, Oxford University, The Aeneid, Lord Byron,
Switzerland, P.G. Wodehouse, Juvenal, Ancient Rome, the pre-Raphaelites, Camille Paglia,

Jerry Seinfeld’s Three Rules of Life, John Henry Newman, Verona, Henry James, C.S. Lewis & the
Weight of Glory, Lao Tzu & the Tao Te Ching, Tsunemoto’s Book of the Samurai, Buddhism, the history of Thailand, The Aeneid, Tennyson’s Ulysses, General Patton, Jerusalem, Gandhi, Rome, The Man Who Would be King, Cambodia, Scotland and the English Civil War, Bangkok, Spoliation, Napoleon, the Book
of Proverbs, Gustav Mahler, Winston Churchill, Einstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Casanova, Chaucer, the Vietnam War, the Koran, Thucydides, John F. Kennedy, Romanticism, Anarchism, Albrecht Dürer, Hinduism, World War 2, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo and the History of Art, Ares the Greek God of War—Murugan: Hindu God of War, Love, and Youth—Freud, Evelyn Waugh, Travel, and Writing, Theodore Roosevelt, God & Atomic Warfare, Humanism, Dorothy L. Sayers, Zeus Ammon, The Kings of Thailand, more Nietzsche: Beyond Good & Evil, Southern India, the Nuremberg Chronicle, Durga the Serene Mother Goddess, Harold Bloom, Nostalgia, the Death of the Greek God Pan,
Gibbon’s Decline & Fall, Titian, Jim Carrey on ‘making it’, Atheism, As You Like It,
Ruskin on Turner, Turner’s Approach to Venice, the Wrath of Achilles,
Goethe on Nature, Ernst Haeckel’s dead wife seen in a jellyfish,
Rousseau, some Walter Crane Peacocks, Culture

as 'Sweetness and Light'.


Care to indulge your intellect right now—to sample what Depths of Wisdom & Heights of Elegance could all yours be??

READ 25

COMMONPLACE BOOK

PAGES


Care to indulge your intellect right now?

To sample what Depths of Wisdom &
Heights of Elegance could all yours be?!?

READ 25
COMMONPLACE BOOK

PAGES

VOLUME III

VOLUME III

is 18 months of reading notes;

1300 quotations from
470 separate authors

on 300 different subjects—

including:

is 18 months of reading notes;

1300 quotations from 470 separate authors

on 300 different subjects—

including:

Freud and Shakespeare,
Orson Welles & Vienna, Carpaccio & faith,
James Joyce on love, Richard Burton’s diaries, Elizabeth Taylor’s haemorrhoids, Autotelism, Festina Lente—making haste slowly—Csikszentmihalyi (good luck with that one), Martin Luther King, Romeo & Juliet, Zoöphagy, Charlie Chaplin, Furta Sacra—Holy Theft, Lord Byron’s life, letters, & manuscripts, Bayesian Networks, Russia & Sovereign Democracy, Creative Destruction, The Story of Adventure, William F. Buckley, Thomas Jefferson, Israeli Honey Traps, Tancred de Hauteville, The Battle of Marathon, Booze, Birds, The Western Canon, Origen’s testicles, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Harold Bloom, Divine Madness, Plato, To Save a Forest Virgin, Flaubert’s Letters, The Twilight of the Idols, The Rite of Spring, Theodore Herzl, Robert Hughes, Rossetti’s wombat, Aldus Manutius and the Aldine Press, Dido & Aeneas, Eric Cartman, Sartre on Tintoretto, Religion and War, Erasmus’ Proverbs, Shokunin and Samurai, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, Robert Byron, Byzantium, Danny McBride, The Fourth Crusade, the letters of Henry James, A Christian Preface to Paradise Lost, Utagawa Hiroshige, Democracy in America, the Oath of the Peacock, Rembrandt, the Wicked Bible, Emerson’s Essays, The Sitwells, Hokusai, the Kranok, jade peacocks, Fra Angelico, Holy Fools, Nabokov’s reputation, The Vietnam War, Waugh on Greene and Greene on Waugh, Read’s English Prose Style, Himmaphan—Thailand’s Enchanted Forest, The Quiet American, James Thurber, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Moshe Dayan, Solzhenitsyn, Don Quixote, An Apology for IdlersA Moveable Feast, Luigi Zoja and the limits of growth, The Greeks & Hubris, Rumpelstiltskin, Stephen Fry on Art, Stalin and his Purges, Humour under Communism, a biography of Wagner, Burton’s Anatomy of MelancholyNorm Macdonald, The Ring Cycle, Banksy on Brandalism, Kundera
on Europe, and Spengler’s
Decline of The West.

Freud and Shakespeare,

Orson Welles & Vienna, Carpaccio & faith,

James Joyce on love, an 18th-century map of Da Nang, Richard

Burton’s diaries, Elizabeth Taylor’s haemorrhoids, Autotelism, Festina Lente—

making haste slowly—Csikszentmihalyi (good luck with that one), Martin Luther King,

Romeo & Juliet, Zoöphagy, Charlie Chaplin, Furta Sacra—Holy Theft, Lord Byron’s life, letters,

& manuscripts, Bayesian Networks, Russia & Sovereign Democracy, Creative Destruction,

The Story of Adventure, William F. Buckley, Thomas Jefferson, The Crusades, Israeli Honey Traps,

Tancred de Hauteville, The Battle of Marathon, Booze, Birds, The Western Canon, Origen’s testicles,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Harold Bloom, Divine Madness, Plato, To Save a Forest Virgin, Flaubert’s Letters, The Twilight of the Idols, The Rite of Spring, Theodore Herzl, Robert Hughes, Rossetti’s wombat, Aivazovsky, Hungarian Chieftains, Aldus Manutius and the Aldine Press, Dido & Aeneas, Eric Cartman, Sartre on Tintoretto, Religion and War, Erasmus’ Proverbs, Shokunin and Samurai, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, Robert Byron, Byzantium, Danny McBride, The Fourth Crusade, the letters of Henry James,
A Christian Preface to Paradise Lost, Utagawa Hiroshige, The Dutch East India Company, Democracy in America, the Oath of the Peacock, Rembrandt, the Wicked Bible, Emerson’s Essays, The Sitwells, Hokusai, the Kranok, jade peacocks, Fra Angelico, Holy Fools, Nabokov’s reputation, The Vietnam War, Waugh
on Greene and Greene on Waugh, Read’s English Prose Style, Himmaphan—Thailand’s Enchanted Forest, The Quiet American, James Thurber, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Moshe Dayan, Solzhenitsyn,
Don Quixote, An Apology for Idlers, A Moveable Feast, Luigi Zoja and the limits of growth,
The Greeks & Hubris, Rumpelstiltskin, Stephen Fry on Art, Stalin and his Purges,

Humour under Communism, a biography of Wagner, Burton’s
Anatomy of MelancholyNorm Macdonald, The Ring Cycle,
Banksy on Brandalism, Kundera on Europe,

and Spengler’s Decline
of The West.

VOLUME IV

VOLUME IV

is 15 months of reading notes;

1700 quotations from
450 separate authors

on 315 different subjects—

including:

is 15 months of reading notes;

1700 quotations from 450 separate authors

on 315 different subjects—

including:

Ruskin’s Two Paths, Brave New World Revisited,

White Elephants, Hokusai’s Li Bo,  Spengler’s Faustian Cathedrals,

Ezra Pound, The Forest Rebel, Thai Cremation Books, Lost Japan & Bangkok Found,

Burmese Sacrifices, a 4000-year-old griffin, Bob Dylan on Rock & Roll, Lai Thai designs,

Freedom and its Betrayal, What the Buddha Taught, Scruton’s Conservatism, God and the Atom,
The Denial of Death, The Birth of Tragedy, Michelangelo’s Dream, Edith Hamilton’s Greek Way,
The Ship of Theseus, Gilbert Murray on Greek Religion, Nietzsche’s Pre-Platonic Philosophers,
The Founding Fathers at Home,  The Anatomy of Restlessness, Burckhardt’s Greeks & Greek Culture,
Slavoj Žižek on freedom, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Chiron and Wisdom & Strength, Pope’s Iliad, ‘Plato to Nato’, Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism, a prayer to elephants—and their human wet nurses, Ted Kaczynski, Siva Nataraja, Malraux’s Anti-memoirs, Ayn Rand in Playboy, Alan Watts and fools, Vietnamese Scroll Seals, Oscar Wilde’s Soul of Man, Thomas Wolfe on Loneliness, Tintoretto’s only peacock, Adorno & Horkheimer and The Culture Industry, The Devil’s Dictionary, Euripides and Free Speech, Diogenes on Exile, Tolstoy on Government, Achilles and Fate, Nietzsche and Socialism,
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth, Theognis on Hubris, Plato and the Gods,  The Old Oligarch,
Bertrand Russell in China, Gad Saad and The Parasitic Mind, Werner Jaeger on Aeschylus,
South Park’s Mohammed, The Scorpion & the Frog, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor,
de Tocqueville and Individuality, Simone Weil’s Need for Roots,
Madison’s 10th Federalist, Sophocles and Hope, 

Ruskin’s Athena, and Homer on Death.

Ruskin’s Two Paths,

Brave New World Revisited,

White Elephants, Hokusai’s Li Bo,
Spengler’s Faustian Cathedrals, Ezra Pound, The Forest Rebel, Thai Cremation Books, Lost Japan & Bangkok Found, Burmese Sacrifices, a 4000-year-old griffin,
Bob Dylan on Rock & Roll, Lai Thai designs,

Freedom and its Betrayal, What the Buddha Taught, Scruton’s Conservatism, God and the Atom,
The Denial of Death, The Birth of Tragedy, Michelangelo’s Dream, Edith Hamilton’s Greek Way,
The Ship of Theseus, Gilbert Murray on Greek Religion, Nietzsche’s Pre-Platonic Philosophers,
The Founding Fathers at Home,  The Anatomy of Restlessness, Burckhardt’s Greeks & Greek Culture,
Slavoj Žižek on freedom, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Chiron and Wisdom & Strength, Pope’s Iliad, ‘Plato to Nato’, Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism, a prayer to elephants—and their human wet nurses, Ted Kaczynski, Siva Nataraja, Malraux’s Anti-memoirs, Ayn Rand in Playboy, Alan Watts and fools, Vietnamese Scroll Seals, Oscar Wilde’s Soul of Man, Thomas Wolfe on Loneliness, Tintoretto’s only peacock, Adorno & Horkheimer and The Culture Industry, The Devil’s Dictionary, Euripides and Free Speech, Diogenes on Exile, Tolstoy on Government, Achilles and Fate, Nietzsche and Socialism, The Illusion of Explanatory Depth, Theognis on Hubris, Plato and the Gods,  The Old Oligarch,
Bertrand Russell in China, Gad Saad and The Parasitic Mind, Werner Jaeger on Aeschylus,
South Park’s Mohammed, The Scorpion & the Frog, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor,
de Tocqueville and Individuality, Simone Weil’s Need for Roots, Madison’s 10th Federalist,

Sophocles and Hope, Ruskin’s Athena,

and Homer on Death.

VOLUME V

VOLUME V

is 16 months of reading notes;

1300 quotations from
470 separate authors on

350 different subjects—

including:

is 16 months of reading notes;

1300 quotations from 470 separate authors

on 350 different subjects—

including:

Antifragility,

The Comforts of Unreason,

Ezra Pound on Patronage, The Red Terror,

Peter Cook,  Isaiah Berlin on Alexander Herzen, Alexander Herzen on Liberty, The Overton Window,

The Rigveda, The Iliad, Marxism, Mass Psychology, Jaywalking, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, Schrödinger’s Cat, Tobacco, Jack Handey, Albert Einstein, Whaling,

The Manhattan Project, Wendell Berry, Skin in the Game,

Original Debt, Sophocles’ Antigone, Risk, Khmer Art, Kahneman on Thinking, John Locke, Norm Macdonald, The Life of Themistocles, The Gulag Archipelago, Powys’ Meaning of Culture, Hunter S. Thompson

Le Grand Autre, Pluralism, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, The Bacchae, Churchill on Bolshevism,

Žižek on Totalitarianism, Communist Science,

The Road to Serfdom, Penguins, The Oresteia,

The Marx Brothers, Marcuse & Memory, Melville & Annihilation, Electra & Orestes, Schopenhauer on Tragedy, The McNamara Fallacy, War in Ukraine,

Abe Lincoln on Equality, Thucydides on Hope,

Quantum Physics, Nikolai Vavilov, Touristification, Fuck-You Money, Bureaucracy, Auden on Nietzsche, Hazlitt on Hamlet, Soviet Morality, Niels Bohr,
Feynman on Education, The Golden Rule, 'Live & Let Live', Political Correctness, Evolutionary Epistemology, Chomsky on Bakunin, Stefan Zweig on Travel, 

Essentially Contested Concepts, Kleos Aphthiton,

Mark Twain on Statistics, Mycenaean Art,

God's Dice-Playing, Euripides on Knowledge,

Lev Landau, Penis-Shrinking Syndrome, Monism,

—and Ancient Greece’s worst

possible insult.

The Comforts of Unreason, Antifragility,

Ezra Pound on Patronage, The Red Terror, Peter Cook, 

Isaiah Berlin on Alexander Herzen, Alexander Herzen on Liberty,

The Overton Window, The Rigveda, The Iliad, Marxism, Mass Psychology,
Jaywalking, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, Schrödinger’s Cat, Tobacco, Jack Handey,

Albert Einstein, Whaling,  The Manhattan Project, Wendell Berry, Skin in the Game,

Original Debt, Sophocles’ Antigone, Risk, Khmer Art, Kahneman on Thinking, John Locke,

Norm Macdonald, The Life of Themistocles, The Gulag Archipelago, Powys’ Meaning of Culture,

Hunter S. Thompson, Le Grand Autre, Pluralism, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, The Bacchae, 

Churchill on Bolshevism, Žižek on Totalitarianism, Communist Science, The Road to Serfdom, Penguins, 

The Oresteia, The Marx Brothers, Marcuse & Memory, Melville & Annihilation, Electra & Orestes, Schopenhauer on Tragedy, The McNamara Fallacy, War in Ukraine, Abe Lincoln on Equality,

Thucydides on Hope, Quantum Physics, Nikolai Vavilov, Touristification, Fuck-You Money,

Bureaucracy, Auden on Nietzsche, Hazlitt on Hamlet, Soviet Morality, Niels Bohr,
Feynman on Education, The Golden Rule, 'Live & Let Live', Political Correctness,

Evolutionary Epistemology, Chomsky on Bakunin, Stefan Zweig on Travel, 

Essentially Contested Concepts, Kleos Aphthiton, Mark Twain on Statistics,

Mycenaean Art, God's Dice-Playing, Euripides on Knowledge, 

Lev Landau, Penis-Shrinking Syndrome, Monism,

—and Ancient Greece’s worst

possible insult.


The 5 volumes of
The Commonplace Book

contain 7000 quotations,

excerpts, paragraphs, essays, poems, jokes, stories, paintings, symbols,  inscriptions,
epitaphs, maps—


from 1300 writers, poets, philosophers, playwrights,
painters, saints, sinners, scientists, generals, geniuses, adventurers, explorers, kings, comedians, & composers— 


on over
950 different subjects,

the most frequent of which are:

The 5 volumes of The Commonplace Book

contain more than 7000 quotations,

excerpts, paragraphs, essays, poems, jokes, stories,

paintings, symbols, inscriptions, epitaphs, maps—


from 1300 writers, poets, philosophers,
playwrights, painters, saints, sinners, scientists,
generals, geniuses, adventurers, explorers,
kings, comedians, & composers— 


on over 950 different subjects,

the most frequent of which are:


WRITING

ART

ANCIENT GREECE

ACTION

CHRISTIANITY

HISTORY

LIFE

CIVILISATION

FREEDOM

VENICE

WORK

RELIGION

WEALTH

STRUGGLE

TRUTH

PROGRESS

MODERNITY

GOD

DEATH

& HAPPINESS

– WRITING –

– ART –

– ANCIENT GREECE –·

– ACTION –

– CHRISTIANITY –

– HISTORY –

– LIFE –

– CIVILISATION –

– FREEDOM –

– VENICE –

– WORK –

– RELIGION –

– WEALTH –

– STRUGGLE –

– TRUTH –

– PROGRESS –

– MODERNITY –

– GOD –

– DEATH –

– HAPPINESS –

– BOOZE –

– PHILOSOPHY –

– THE HEROIC –

– MYTH –

– CULTURE –

– SHAKESPEARE –

– LOVE –

– ADVENTURE –

– THE MIDDLE AGES –

– DEMOCRACY –


And,

most importantly,

they form the splendid cornerstone
—& are 
the exclusive privilege—
of members of


And,

most importantly,

they form the splendid cornerstone
—and are t
he exclusive privilege—
of members of