1. Scholarship on the history of commonplace books includes Peter Beal, “Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, N.Y.: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), 133-47; Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Susan Miller, Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2001); and David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the decline of the commonplace book in the later nineteenth century, see Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England, 255-67. On the gaps between the prescriptive rules for commonplace books and the messier practices of commonplacing, see Adam Smyth, “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits,” in Women and Writing, c. 1340-c. 1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (Woodbridge: York Medieval, 2010), 90-110. In this essay, I use commonplace book in its looser sense to refer to a collection of extracts copied primarily by hand and scrapbook to refer to a collection of materials clipped from printed sources and pasted in a separate album. However, these terms were far more interchangeable during the nineteenth century than they are today, and the formats often overlapped. See Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 15.
2. James Davie Butler, “Commonplace Books: Why and How to Keep Them,” American Journal of Education 32 (1882): 513-44, 515, 519, 524.
3. For an early modern example of the relationship between textual fragments, commonplacing, and embroidery, see Whitney Trettien, “Isabella Whitney's Slips: Textile Labor, Gendered Authorship, and the Early Modern Miscellany,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 3 (2015): 506-14. For a Romantic-era British comparison of an album to “a patchwork quilt,” see Corin Throsby, “Byron, Commonplacing and Early Fan Culture,” in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750-1850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 227-44, 229. Throsby notes that this is “a common comparison” for early nineteenth-century British commonplace book culture. On quilting in relation to women's literary work in nineteenth-century America, see Elaine Showalter, “Piecing and Writing,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 222-47.
4. See Claudia Stokes, "Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority," American Literary History 30, no. 2 (2018): 201-21, 203-4
5. and Todd S. Gernes, "Recasting the Culture of Ephemera," in Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics, ed. John Trimbur (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 107-27, 114-15.