A Lecture with Julie Park, Scholar and Curator

The commonplace book in eighteenth-century England was both a writing and book format designed to capture and store personally significant information during the course of daily life. Owners of commonplace books developed or relied primarily on the drawn line as a critical design tool, especially in the creation of grid-based indexes that followed seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke’s system of making commonplace books. The drawing of lines to form grids affected the disposition and organization of information, and turned the two-dimensional properties of paper into storage and retrieval spaces. Lines and the need to make them to store information arose during the course of living, and made personal information access more efficient and fluid. Information management through such graphic means as line-making in commonplace books was undertaken as a consequence of being alive, and constituted a form of life writing.

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Julie Park is the author of The Self and It (Stanford University Press, 2010) and editor most recently of Getting Perspective, a special issue for Word and Image, and Organic Supplements (University of Virginia Press, 2020). Her recently completed monograph, My Dark Room will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023. She is currently writing Writing’s Maker, a book on the materiality of life writing in the eighteenth century. In addition to Portable Devices, 1574-1998, she has curated a virtual exhibition The Interactive Book for NYU Libraries, where she is Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow in Special Collections. Starting in July 2022 she will be the Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and an affiliated member of the English department at Penn State University.

About Portable Devices, 1574-1998: Notebooks from NYU Special Collections.

Before computers, how did people store and manage information that was critical to the functioning of their lives? This exhibition, highlighting notebooks in NYU Library’s Special Collections, shows how the blank book has for centuries served as an infinitely adaptable form of portable information storage.

On view beginning April 14 in the gallery at NYU Special Collections.