John Julius Norwich

Commonplace book

Kept from antiquity, particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems. [...] Each one is unique to its creator's particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler's responses.¹

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Many moons ago, Lady Diana Cooper gave her only child a beautiful book, bound in blue Nigerian goatskin. Her son, John Julius Norwich, was living with his wife at the time in the Middle East and Lady Diana hoped the book’s blank pages would be filled with messages from the couple’s visitors. Instead, Norwich used it to record various phrases, quotes and literary ends he heard and liked, all written in his own hand. Over the following years, more leather volumes joined the pile, resulting in his very own collection of commonplace books.

In 1969, John Julius Norwich began sifting through his personal archives collating the various pieces he’d gathered over the years to compile into a short booklet. His creation was to send to his friends at Christmas as an alternative to the traditional card. As a writer, broadcaster and historian Norwich was a natural storyteller and the work was filled with his enthusiasms, witty narratives and heartwarming tales. Word of these collections quickly spread and the fruits of his labour became widely admired. Encouraged, Norwich eventually published the pamphlets, and so, the annual publication of A Christmas Cracker began. Its success led friends and strangers to send him their own findings over the course of the year to include in his latest edition and his charming Crackers soon became popular across the globe.

John Julius died in June 2018 having delivered his forty-ninth Cracker six months earlier. His family believed this to be his last, but shortly after his death, his wife, Mollie found that he’d already chosen half the pieces for his fiftieth booklet. Despite the collection being incomplete, Mollie and one of his daughters, Artemis Cooper, published his final work for Christmas 2019. The Ultimate Christmas Cracker includes Norwich’s last collection alongside a selection of previous gems chosen by his daughter, marking fifty years of this glorious publication.

Norwich’s Crackers have been a staple of my family’s Christmas for as long as I can remember, with my dad devouring his by the fire every Boxing Day, stopping to share his favourite anecdotes at regular intervals. It was these commonplaces, in fact, that serve as part of the inspiration behind The Zest. A space in which I could collate my own enthusiasms and inspiration. Whilst I’ve never been very good at religiously keeping a journal, I have always been a great collector of stuff; filling endless notebooks with my favourite quotes, ideas and snippets of stories alongside pages torn from newspapers and magazines, articles I’ve earmarked to read and extracts from pieces that have resonated with me. My idea to create a more concrete form of these collections has been brewing for many months and I’m excited to finally be able to share it.

So here it is, my very own commonplace, a collection of stories, reviews, playlists and recipes as well as some of my favourite thoughts, notes and quotes from brilliant writers and thinkers.

via @whatwesee