Jilly Cooper’s beloved typewriter could fetch £8,000 at auction<br /> by [[Jamie Grierson]] in The Guardian<br /> accessed on 2026-11-12T12:01:01

Jilly Cooper using "Monica 2" an Olivetti Underwood Lettera 32.

Did Jilly Cooper call her Lettera 32 "Monica 2" because her other typewriter was an actual Olympia Monica, which the image here seems to be?

Jilly Cooper appears to enjoy typing "topless" based on these two photos. The article mentions "famously claimed to work topless in the sun", but doesn't make the clear connection to the typewriter not having a hood on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmita

During shmita, the land is left to lie fallow and all agricultural activity, including plowing, planting, pruning and harvesting, is forbidden by halakha (Jewish law).

The sabbath year (shmita; Hebrew: שמיטה, literally "release"), also called the sabbatical year or shǝvi'it (שביעית‎, literally "seventh"), or "Sabbath of The Land", is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah in the Land of Israel and is observed in Judaism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_rerum

Presumably these are the same sylvae mentioned by Earle Havens on page 10 of his book Commonplace Books (Yale, 2001).

Where do these fit into a historical commonplace tradition? From a timing and logical perspective they certainly could be a transplant from other parts of Europe in modified forms.

I'll note that some of the pattern is similar to printed bibles in the 1900's (and perhaps going back earlier) in the United States which held pre-printed pages for adding this sort of historical personal family data that would likely be handed down from generation to generation.

Compare and contrast this form to the idea of the Relatio chronicle in Jennifer Paxton's essay Forging Communities: Memory and Identity in Post-Conquest England.