Bill Mead on the Commonplace

"A commonplace book has no ending; the snapping up of unconsidered trifles continues"

A little post in response to a post by Ryan Bate over on his blog from earlier today.

Ryan talked about the idea of the commonplace book.

He describes them as:

notebooks which act as a record of any and all interesting quotes, facts and ideas that a person would come across in the course of their reading and other pursuits.

I guess a blog is a modern example of a commonplace book. I mentioned a Commonplace Book that I own, whose cover is pictured here, compiled by Professor Bill Mead.

It was published in 2015, and was unfortunately published posthumously by John T Smith, who had been working on the book with Bill - who died just over a week short of what would have been his 100th birthday.

Bill was GA President in 1981. I met him several times when he came to Solly Street, and also at GA Conferences. He was a true gentleman and also an expert on Scandinavian geography.

The book is a collection of lecture transcripts (some previously unpublished - often on the theme of Finland and Scandinavia but ranging over a great many themes), including landscapes, statistics and Bill's own varied and rather wonderful life. He describes how he jotted down quotes from books in his home, and filled over 20 notebooks over the years - filling them with extracts and things which drew his attention. 

Such work relies on serendipitous discovery, and I've certainly done that over the years.

The book also includes a quote from a Historian called Zachris Topelius which I appropriated from my GA Presidential Lecture.

Bill provides a copy of the Maconochie Lecture he delivered at UCL forty years ago called 'Changing Lives, Changing Landscapes'. It also includes images of GA Presidents at a gathering, which was helpful for the research for my GA Presidents Blog.

There's also an excellent piece on the changing language of geography, which references the work of another former GA President Sidney Wooldridge who (with G Gordon East) wrote 'The Spirit and Purpose of Geography', of which I have a 1955 copy along with Dudley Stamp, Frank Monkhouse (the definitive text for my own 'A' level geography revision) and Torsten Hägerstrand.

There are some great quotes which I've gleaned for my own version of a 'commonplace book': these include:

"the principle of progress is the principle of superfluity' - Edwin Muir

"Rocks are metaphors for lansdscapes past" - Robert MacFarlane

"What makes life worth living is not the pursuit of happiness, but the happiness of the pursuit" - Brian Little

and this with which I shall conclude this post:

"Every continent has its own spirit of place. Every people is polarised in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth hafe different vital effleuence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars; call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality." - D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical Americal Literature, 1924

A Commonplace Book

This book was published posthumously, having been put together by Hugh Clout and Bill Mead over a period of a year. It collects a number of lectures by Bill Mead, and some additional content including quotes that Bill had collected for some time. I will post some elements from this book over the next few weeks as I read through it.