Grafton on the Liber locorum communium

"How better to put the case against the humanist practice of compiling commonplace books full of decontextualized quotations than to say that

like a good sausage machine, it rendered all texts, however dissimilar in origin or style, into a uniform body of spicy links that could add flavor to any meal--and whose origins did not always bear thinking about when one consumed them."

Keith Thomas, reviewing Anthony Grafton's What was history? The art of history in early modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007), in "Fighting over history," The New York review of books 56, no. 19 (December 3, 2009): 66.