Commonplace books

I recently came across the notion of commonplace books on Pinterest. For the record, I'm addicted to Pinterest and could quite literally spend days browsing the beautiful images and pinning them to my own boards. You can follow my boards at NickyPopplewell if you feel so inclined.

So, back to commonplace books. The pin I found the idea on had the following caption: “Silva rerum, they were called, commonplace books that contained a ‘forest of things’. Excerpts of exceptional thought were dutifully copied into these bound books for further reflection and digestion. Commonplace books were considered necessary tools for learning that commonplacing was taught in universities such as Oxford. Milton, Hardy, Emerson, and Thoreau all kept their own commonplace books. - (Artisanhistory Blogspot)"

Isn't that just beautiful? I checked my trusty OED (Oxford English Dictionary) to see what it had to say about the matter.

"Commonplace book: noun. A book into which notable extracts from other woks are copied for personal use."

Basically, it's a combination of what I think your social media sites are for - one place to keep info, quotes, inspirations, images, words of wisdom and other such like from people who inspire and motivate you. I'm a social media addict. In fact, it's so bad, I rather refer to myself as a social media slut - I'll sign up to anything that everyone else is on. So far, I'm on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, Wordpress, Pinterest and last week I started on Tumblr.

There really is no hope for me, is there?