Commonplacing has become popular again recently, and of course a florilegium is a type of commonplace book. On the other hand, Susanna Clarke says:

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fairies in England were fond of adding to their magic, exhortations to random Christian saints. Fairies were baffled by Christian doctrine, but they were greatly attracted to saints, whom they saw as powerful magical beings whose patronage it was useful to have. These exhortations were called florilegia (lit. cullings or gatherings of flowers) and fairies taught them to their Christian masters. When the Protestant religion took hold in England and saints fell out of favor, florilegia degenerated into meaningless collections of magical words and bits of other spells, thrown in by the magician in the hope that some of them might take effect.

—but then, is not Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell itself a commonplace book?

What is a commonplace book, anyway? Most broadly, commonplace books are personal repositories of information in the form of quotations and sayings, often grouped according to theme or topic. Many of my generation mourned the passing of del.icio.us, a social bookmarking website favored in no small part for its subjectivity. Both social bookmarking sites and commonplace books share an air of the armchair academic, the curator, the trivia buff, the fanatic. At their core, such collections are, as Edward Hirsch has it, “determined to make linkages, to create a continuity and tradition…” between works that might be directly unrelated, but which explicate similar themes. They’re collections of tendrils that might braid only for the collector.

Clarke’s magnum opus has a plot—several, all painstakingly deployed, developed, and paid off—and characters, beautiful and descriptive prose, vivid settings, all the things that compose a novel. Yet part of its immediate and long-term power is as a meta-novel: not a story within a story, but a fiction functioning as a survey of the English fantastic. The book’s famous footnotes are only the most obvious element of this survey. Someone better acquainted with the English fantasy canon has probably created a map of all the intertextual references and connections within Jonathan Strange. But even for a more casual reader, these linkages present themselves, flickering like heat lightning through the pages.

(I recently read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for the first time [I know, I know] and am currently re-reading Piranesi, so I’ll be Clarke-posting for the foreseeable future, apologies in advance)

Anyway, during my reading and listening in the entrance to summer, I’ve accidentally accumulated a collection of fragments. Motifs of bones, antlers, and skeletons have appeared in very different places. I was struck by an image in Clarke’s book; then related images rose in my memory or from other sources as I moved on, forming a new skeleton. Here are several favorites, a little osseous florilegium.

• “It was a world from which all flesh had been stripped, leaving only the bones.” —Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

• “cold comfort now, the future and hope. Replaced by a scene of collapse.” —”old bones,” HUSH

• “you turn back into / an animal in my presence / turn further back and / inside out // enough light / to blacken bones / deep into summer” —”Both Sides Cut,” The Sky Broke More, Garth Graeper

• “It was the skeleton of a giant horse, staring with the blind eye-sockets of a skull, running and leaping and prancing on legs of bone driven by ghostly muscles long rotted away.” —Silver on the Tree, Susan Cooper

• “Inscribed clear into the tangled antlers was a story of the mute and furious struggle that had taken place, the two deer that had charged across the earth and hit with a loud noise and become locked together so that even when they had lost their strength and given up their anger they could not separate. Then each did fall to his knees conjoined with his enemy and gave up his breath in the company of the one he hated.” —The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff

• “they are invited / mundalaey—found / here in my miscarried city / looking for books / and books / and always / the ones with the diagrams / of bones” —”The Bone Broker,” The Bone Broker, Lillian Necakov

• “Lucretius (De rerum natura, I, 830) attributes to Anaxagoras the doctrine that gold consists of particles of gold, fire of sparks, bone of tiny imperceptible bones…” “A New Refutation of Time,” Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges

And a few favorite commonplace books:

• A Primer for Forgetting by Lewis Hyde. Hyde is, in general, an OG for armchair academics, serious amateurs of all types, and woolgatherers, and is in particular fine form in this book, which challenges Western cultural norms around memory. Eternal thanks to the friend who lent me Trickster Makes This World.

• Bluets by Maggie Nelson. I think about this book constantly and recommend it profligately! It’s a poetry collection, but its singular focus lensed through an expansive format give it—to me—a commonplace feel.

• Dream State by Alana Levinson-Brosse. Its subtitle is “A Commonplace Book,” but what does that mean for a single-author collection containing other people’s translated words? Hirsch’s linkages are on display as Levinson-Brosse explores the collaborative nature of translation and cultural preservation.

Do you like commonplace books? Do you keep one? Might you start?