Every in-library item filed under this category, newest first, with its research summary and organization.
The Goncourt journal says "I" for forty-five years, and for the first nineteen of them the "I" was two men, one of whom held the pen while both dictated. Edmond’s preface of 1872 explains how that worked, what the brothers thought they were doing to the people they wrote about, and why the diary could only be published, in his lifetime, in part.
Aulus Gellius spent the winter nights of a year in Attica copying out whatever struck him in the books he read and the talk he heard, and then, unusually, published the notes in the order he had made them. His preface to the Attic Nights is the earliest full account we have of what a commonplace book is for, and the best guide to reading one.
On 22 January 1852, Thoreau wrote about a friend who could not hear him finely, then described how a journal preserves one thought and invites the next.
A blank notebook given to Thomas Traherne became the Centuries of Meditations: hundreds of reflections written for one unnamed reader and first published more than two centuries later.
