The commonplace book: what it is and how to keep one today

A commonplace book is a notebook of the passages, quotes and thoughts you gather from your reading, sorted by theme so you can find them and use them again. For about two thousand years, readers have kept one. Most of them never called it that.

I didn't either.

#What is a commonplace book?

A commonplace book is a personal collection of passages copied out from other people's writing, kept under headings or themes. A line about grief goes under grief. A line about the sea goes under the sea. Over time, the headings fill up, and you can open the book at grief and find what twenty writers across four centuries had to say about it, in the order you happened to find them.

It is not a diary. A diary records what happened to you. A commonplace book records what you read, and it is sorted by subject, not by date.

It is not quite a journal either, though the two often share a notebook. Many keepers add their own thoughts between the copied passages, and some of the best commonplace books are mostly the keeper talking back.

Long before I knew the name, I was already gathering lines of my own.

#The sentences I couldn't throw away

I read in bed, before I turn off the light. On my bedside table there is a small marble lamp with a brass dog on top, and it gives off just enough light to read by while my husband dozes off next to me.

I read with a pencil.

(At university, studying literature, it was neon highlighters. Underlining was a survival mechanism then, and I ruined a great many books with it. I'm sorry, books.)

I underline two kinds of sentences. Ones so beautiful that I have to stop. And ones that say something I've always half known, in a way I have never seen it said before.

For years, that was where those lines stayed: in the margin, in a book on a shelf, in a room I wasn't in when I needed them.

Some of them escaped. Into physical notebooks. Into loose Apple Notes, into Google Docs, into Evernote, then Obsidian, then Scrivener, then Notion.

I tried them all. They were either too technical or not joyful enough. None of them had been made with books in mind, and none of them made me want to open them again.

And the getting in was always the hardest part. I have spent hours, probably days of my life, typing passages out of books and into whatever system I was faithful to that year. Dictation, when I discovered it, helped a little.

Two lines made it as far as my skin. One is Jane Eyre's: Now I want to read. The other is from a writing podcast, an episode of The Eleventh Hour, the University of Iowa's writing podcast, that I have never been able to find again: It's so quiet looking out.

I love that sentence so much that it's tattooed on me, and I cannot tell you where exactly it came from.

For years I wondered what to do with all the beautiful sentences I read.

I had been keeping the beginnings of a commonplace book without knowing its name. Then I went looking for where that name came from.

#Why is it called a commonplace book?

The name is a translation of the Latin locus communis, from the Greek koinos topos: a "common place". In classical rhetoric a commonplace was a general theme an orator could return to, like justice or death, with arguments and examples stored under it. The commonplace book was where you kept them. Only much later did "commonplace" come to mean ordinary.

#A very short history, told through the people who kept one

Being who I am, I went looking for where the habit started, and then I couldn't stop.

• Seneca and the bees. In the first century, Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius that a reader should behave like a bee: wander, gather, then sort what you've gathered so it becomes something of your own. He didn't call it a commonplace book. But every keeper since has been doing exactly this.

• Monks and flowers. In the Middle Ages, monks copied excerpts from scripture and the church fathers into collections called florilegia: gatherings of flowers. By the thirteenth century they were sorted under headings, which is to say that the medieval monastery had tags.

• A salad of many herbs. In fifteenth-century Florence, merchants kept a zibaldone, a hodgepodge book of poems, prices, recipes and letters, all in one cheap paper volume. The merchant Giovanni Rucellai called his "a salad of many herbs". I have never read a better description of my Notes app.

• Erasmus and his chest. Erasmus of Rotterdam travelled Europe with a chest of notes, and in 1512 published De Copia, which taught students to read with a notebook open and copy out anything useful under headings. It became a school method. For centuries afterwards, schoolchildren and Oxford students learned to read this way, and some of them never stopped.

(I like to imagine Erasmus in a coaching inn, guarding his chest of notes with more care than his luggage. This is the sixteenth-century version of panicking that your phone is about to die.)

• John Locke's index. The problem with a commonplace book is the same problem as with any collection: the more it holds, the harder it is to find anything. In 1685 the philosopher John Locke wrote down his solution, a method for indexing a commonplace book by the first letter and first vowel of each heading, so that any subject could be found on a two-page grid. It was published in English in 1706 as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. Decades later, printers were still selling blank notebooks with Locke's grid already ruled in.

The famous keepers.

• John Milton kept one, with page numbers, which he mined for his pamphlets.

• Thomas Jefferson kept a literary commonplace book as a young man, full of poets and philosophers he went on quoting for the rest of his life.

• Emerson and Thoreau were taught the method at Harvard and kept theirs for decades.

• Virginia Woolf filled reading notebooks with passages and her own replies to them; some are now held at Smith College.

• E. M. Forster's was published after his death simply as Commonplace Book.

  I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

  — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, 1849

  They were not keeping these out of discipline. They kept them because a line that has been copied out by hand belongs to you in a way a line you've only read does not.

  #Why keep a commonplace book?

  I can only answer this for myself.

  I keep one because I forget. I read a sentence that rearranges something inside me, and a week later I can tell you the colour of the book's cover but not one word of the sentence.

  Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

  — Francis Bacon, Essays, "Of Studies" (1625)

  I keep one because lines talk to each other. A passage from a novel about a dying man and a line from an essay about trees turn out to be saying the same thing, but only when they sit on the same page. You don't notice that in the books. You notice it in the collection.

  I keep one for the people I love. Every December, for each friend and family member I manage to send a card to, I choose a whole poem: one for each person, picked for what they went through this year, or for what I learned from them.

  I'm not sure the gesture is always appreciated. But it's a ritual I love, and finding the right words for the right person gives me a great deal of joy. Without a collection to choose from, I would be choosing from memory, and you have just read what my memory does.

  And I keep one because, read back after a few years, a commonplace book is a self-portrait you didn't know you were drawing. It shows what you were circling: which themes you kept returning to, which writers you couldn't leave alone, what you were afraid of in a particular winter.

  Mine, at the moment, circles five headings: existence, death and dying, the earth, writing and oneness. I didn't choose them. My reading did.

  #What goes into a commonplace book

  Anything that stops you. Traditionally that meant passages from books, but keepers have always been less strict than the textbooks:

  • passages and lines from books, poems and essays

  • something overheard on a tram

  • a line from a film or a podcast

  • a post you scrolled past and couldn't forget (save the line and the link, or you'll lose both)

  • a word you didn't know

  • your own thought, in reply to any of the above

    Two rules have survived every century, though. Copy the words exactly as they were written. And note where they came from: author, title, and ideally the page, because the line you will most want to find again is always the one you didn't source.

    I learned this the slow way. While writing my novel, Crash Course in Loneliness, I needed a line I had once underlined: that hospitals are, in a sense, an immune system we have built outside ourselves. I was certain it came from Bernd Heinrich's Life Everlasting. I spent an hour going through that book and every underlining in it.

    Then I remembered I might have saved it in Filament. I had. It was from a different book altogether:

    "Hospitals, in the most fundamental sense, are external immune systems that people have built."

    — Melanie Challenger, How to Be Animal

    #How to keep a commonplace book today

    You don't need a method from 1706. You need a few habits.

    • Keep one place. The reason my lines were lost is that they lived in six places. Pick one: a notebook, a document, an app. The moment it splits in two, half of it dies.

    • Harvest it fresh. Catch lines as you go, or sit down the evening you finish a book and spend five or ten minutes going back through it. Don't wait: once the next book begins, the mood shifts, and the lines go quiet. I harvest in bed, or in my big reading chair, whose name is Charlie. A star in the margin is a promise you will not keep.

    • Give it a heading. One theme is enough. Existence. The earth. Writing. Being alone and liking it. The headings are what make it a commonplace book instead of a pile.

    • Add one line of your own. Why did this stop you? It doesn't need to be clever. In two years it will be the most interesting part.

    • Go back. A commonplace book you never reopen is a box in the attic. Read a few pages on a quiet evening; look up a heading when you're writing something. That's what it's for.

      The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

      — Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read a Book?" (1926)

      #Paper or digital?

      Both work, and the old keepers would have taken either.

      Paper is slower, and the slowness is part of the pleasure: copying a passage by hand makes you read it twice. But paper doesn't search, it fills up, and it lives in one place.

      A digital commonplace book keeps the habit and loses the copying: you can photograph a page and keep the text, find a line by what it was about, and carry the whole thing in your pocket. Locke would have wept.

      This is why I built Filament: I wanted a commonplace book where getting the lines in is the easy part. In Filament your commonplace book is called your library, and every line you keep is a fragment. I snap a page while I'm reading, or go back through a book once I've finished it, reminiscing, and keep everything I underlined in a few minutes. All the old Notes and documents I simply dropped in, and Filament suggested the fragments on its own. If you're curious, here's what a digital commonplace book looks like.

      But the tool matters much less than the habit. Seneca had wax tablets.

      #Start with the last line you underlined

      Somewhere in a book on your shelf there is a sentence you once marked and have since forgotten.

      Go and find it. Copy it out, with the author and the page. Give it a heading.

      That's the first page of your commonplace book.