Gass

“When Ben Johnson was a small boy, his tutor, William Camden, persuaded him of the virtue of keeping a commonplace book: pages where an ardent reader might copy down passages that especially pleased him, preserving sentences that seemed particularly apt or wise or rightly formed and that would, because they were written afresh in a new place, and in a context of favor, be better remembered, as if they were being set down at the same time in the memory of the mind. Here were more than turns of phrase that could brighten an otherwise gloomy page. Here were statements that seemed so directly truthful they might straighten a warped soul on seeing them again, inscribed, as they were, in a child’s wide round trusting hand, to be read and reread like the propositions of a primer, they were so bottomed and basic.”

William H. Gass, “In Defense of the Book, On the enduring pleasures of paper, type, page and ink”
July 11, 2000