‘The building of the prompt book took hours,’ Coppola recalled, ‘and the tedious activity of cutting, reinforcing and organising the pages provided many meditative hours during which one could use the other side of the brain to roam over the ideas and essential themes of the playwright’s intention.’

In 1988, Donald Norman wrote The Design of Everyday Things, in which he adapts the notion to describe design features that encourage instinctive use. When we approach a door with a flat panel at elbow height we unthinkingly push it; when we see a handle, we tend to pull.

We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and

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And they copied not in the formal gothic or antique scripts that took years to master, but the rapid cursive scripts used by merchants and notaries; people who had to write accurately, but also quickly.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote, a century after Cennini: And take a note… with slight strokes in a little book that you should always carry with you… preserved with great care; for the forms, and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, wherefore keep these sketches as your guides and masters.

He left paintings unfinished for decades – Lisa del Giocondo sat for the Mona Lisa when she was in her early twenties, and was thirty-nine when Leonardo died, still working on it – and he evidently felt similarly about his manuscripts and notebooks.

When Jones collated her own results, she found that keeping a diary for a patient cut the risk of PTSD by over 60 per cent, prevented panic attacks, flashbacks and nightmares, and reduced anxiety and depression.

The process became somewhat circular. Vine told me that people took their common-place books to the theatre and to church, to ‘preserve the best lines’, and writers started to self-consciously create quotable texts with common-placing readers in mind – seventeenth-century soundbites. In due course, any such truism became known as a ‘commonplace’,