The viewer juxtaposes two panes: one contains an excerpt from the commonplace book held at the Princeton University Library, the other contains the printed pages of the book, André Thevet’s Cosmographie Universelle, from which the citations or “common places” are found. As you hover over a line on the left, the right pane locates the passage in the printed text—often depicting the non-linear trajectory of the reader, skipping and backtracking pages.

A commonplace book was a notebook for collecting excerpts, quotations, and ideas from reading. By organizing material under thematic headings, early modern readers built personal archives of knowledge for reuse in study, writing, and conversation.