Tom Standage compared the commonplace books as an early form of social media and that’s exactly what I envisioned as I was writing my own. I did also notice that a point was made that these journals used to be done as a way to update friends and family about what was going on in their lives. While this is unlike what we had used the commonplace books for, I think that they are a digital (hard copy for some) copy of what was going on in our lives in our ENG 420 class. In a sense it was like a diary of the class and I think that’s a neat idea. When I was younger I always tried to keep a diary, however, I was never really good at keeping up with it or sometimes I never felt like I had anything worth writing. The commonplace book also allowed me to deepen my understanding of the novels we read as well as exposing me to an array of topics that I otherwise would not have been exposed to.
I usually started off my common place book with researching a main part of the sections of the book we had to read. If that proved to be unhelpful I would look up the name of the book, just to see what would come up. I did this from the beginning and that is where my fascination with the adaptations from the novels came. It started with Frankenstien and I saw that at the time, it was made into a play and the “monster” was a very beautiful man. I liked this contrast so much because you can see, throughout the years if you look at the progression where things started to change and morph and sometimes become even more “modernized.” Especially with Frankenstein because of how he is depicted now, as a green, ugly monster. But he wasn’t always that way. And to me that is the most fun part about the adaptations because it gives you a visual and allows you to see the book you’re reading.
Many times I wanted to take my commonplace book completely hand written because I wanted to incorporate the original way that commonplace books were written because they did not have the internet or computers or anything like that when they first came to be. However, since I wanted to keep sticking with the adaptation route, it just didn’t make sense to do it that way. I also feel that keeping my whole commonplace book digital allowed me to sort of modernize the idea of keeping a commonplace book but also sticking with the fact that it resembled social media anyway. One of my favorite commonplace books to do, although I did not get much from it adaptation wise, was the commonplace book for The Beetle. The Beetle has very little record that there was ever an adaptation for it. This intrigued me so I decided to deep dive as I thought it would just be very hard to find. While I didn’t actually find the adaptations, I did find many reviews about it, the cast list for the silent film that was made of it, and that there was a play and a radio show based off of The Beetle. It was like a fun scavenger hunt and I enjoyed getting to look for it.
If I were to have changed anything about my commonplace book or do it again and add on to what I have already researched, I would explore similar novels and stories from other time periods and make comparisons that way. Or I would look at similar stories that were written in different parts of the world from people with different cultures and such to see if they were writing about similar things around that time.
