The Cartographer's Blank Space: On the Uncharted Territory of a Commonplace Book
We often imagine our personal archives as vast, meticulously organized libraries. But what of the early explorers of information, those who ventured into the wilderness of print with nothing but a blank book and a quill? Consider the figure of the 17th-century intellectual, armed with a commonplace book. This was not a simple diary or a ledger of facts; it was a tool for wayfinding, a personal map of the known world of thought. And like any good map, its true power often lay not in what it contained, but in the empty spaces it left behind.
John Locke, the philosopher, is a famous and surprisingly practical example. He didn't just fill a book with quotes; he engineered a system for their retrieval. In 1685, he published his "Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils," which detailed a complex alphabetical indexing scheme. He would assign each two-page spread a topic, and his index would point not to a page number, but to a letter—A, B, C, etc.—that he had handwritten in the top corner. This was personal knowledge management, 17th-century style.
But here is where the cartographer’s mind reveals itself. Locke’s method was brilliant precisely because it anticipated the unknown. By leaving vast swathes of each page blank under a topical heading, he created room for future discoveries. A note on "Government" from 1670 could be amended in 1690 with a new clipping, a contradictory thought, or a refined conclusion. The blank space was an invitation for intellectual growth, a visual representation of a mind that understood its own incompleteness.
This stands in stark contrast to our modern digital urge to capture everything, immediately and completely. Our apps promise seamless, infinite storage, encouraging us to hoard every fragment without the necessary friction of selection and placement. Locke’s blank space imposed a discipline. It forced a decision: Is this new idea significant enough to earn its place on this specific plot of land? The physical limitation of the page fostered curation, not just collection.
His commonplace book was not a perfect mirror of his reading; it was a selective terrain, charted by his unique interests and biases. The empty corners were as telling as the filled ones, marking the boundaries of his curiosity or the topics he deemed settled. In this way, the historical commonplacer wasn’t just building an archive; they were drawing a map of their own intellectual journey, with all its detours, dead ends, and vast, unexplored territories waiting for the right idea to sail over the horizon and claim them.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: