News and topical observations were not the only discourses relating to the world around them that struck a resounding chord with many readers. Indeed, travel, something that contemporary theorists of education insisted would extend people's knowledge both of themselves and of their wider environments, was another increasingly important focus for note-taking. It would be wrong, however, to think of this as a rejection of the conventional reading-oriented concerns of commonplacing. For as far back as the Odyssey, as Jean Viviès has pointed out, fictional tale-telling and the factual travel account have been ‘not clearly demarcated categories but poles which reveal a continuum’, a situation that commonplacing, so forgiving of generic ambiguity and cross-fertilisation, was advantageously placed to exploit.