On Commonplace Books, Index Cards, and Scraps of Paper

The historian Keith Thomas writes about his experience gathering reading notes. There are two kinds of reading: casual and attentive. It is increasingly clear to me that serious, attentive reading requires note-taking, unless one has superhuman memory (Thomas cites the example of Macaulay).

In the one project of historical writing which I've undertaken, I laboriously copied quotes and notes into a single notebook, instead of onto cards and slips, because I had this notion of not wasting paper. Back at home (this was before I owned a laptop) I would transcribe my notes onto a word processor, and when I actually started writing I would cut and paste the individual notes and citations in order before stitching them together with prose and paraphrase. It was both Baroque and Byzantine but it worked. Two observations: the constant re-writing and the necessity to recall where a relevant previous note was within the physical context of the notebook made me more familiar with my material, and without the final cut-and-paste on the computer this project would never have been finished, because I was keen to use every single scrap of information that I found.