Welcome back to Honing In and to my interview with Jillian Hess.

Jillian Hess is Professor of English at Bronx Community College, part of the City University of New York. She is the author of How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information, a 2022 book from Oxford University Press about commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums. She also writes the weekly newsletter, Noted, exploring how brilliant people have taken notes and she is currently writing a new book, "Noteworthy" which uses the history of note-taking to offer an expansive how-to guide to note taking--forthcoming from Penguin Life in the US and Viking in the UK.

Here are some of the things Jillian and I discuss:

Jillian’s newsletter Noted as public intellectualism and an extension of her role as a teacher
The experience of writing an academic book vs. one for a general audience
Why reading creative thinkers’ notebooks humanizes them and empowers us
The iterative and expanding nature of inherited note-taking styles
How Jillian keeps the commonplace book tradition alive with the Commonplace Book Club

Resources & Links:

The Noted Substack
Jillian's Commonplace Book Club
Explorations of notes by Octavia Butler and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Jillian’s academic book, How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information

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Podcast editing and support by Softer Sounds Studio.
Theme song by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter.

Commonplace Books and the Material World with Jillian Hess