Commonplace book examples, from Locke to now

A commonplace book example is the clearest way to understand the habit: a real notebook, kept by a real reader, full of lines they couldn't let go of. Below are some of the most famous ones, from the sixteenth century to my own.

None of them were written to be published. That's what makes them interesting. A commonplace book is a reader with their guard down.

If you'd like the long story first, start with what a commonplace book is.

#Erasmus: a chest of notes

Erasmus of Rotterdam travelled through Europe with a chest of notes. Out of it came the Adagia, his enormous collection of proverbs and sayings, and De Copia (1512), the book that taught generations of students to read with a notebook open.

His method was a hierarchy of headings. Big themes at the top, smaller ones under them, and the lines filed beneath. It's the ancestor of every tag you have ever given a note.

#John Locke: the index

John Locke's commonplace book is famous less for what he kept than for how he found it again.

His problem was everyone's problem: the more lines a notebook holds, the harder it becomes to find one. So he invented an index. Each heading was filed on a two-page grid by its first letter and its first vowel. Any subject, found in seconds, in a notebook of any size.

He published the method in French in 1685. It came out in English in 1706 as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, and printers went on selling blank notebooks with his grid already in them.

#John Milton: page numbers

Milton kept a commonplace book of his reading, with careful page references, and went back to it when he wrote his pamphlets and poems. It's a working notebook: a commonplace book kept so that the reading could be used.

#Thomas Jefferson: a young man's library

As a young man, Thomas Jefferson kept a literary commonplace book, copying out the poets, playwrights and philosophers he was reading. He went on quoting some of them for the rest of his life. He also kept a separate legal one, which tells you something: even then, people kept more than one notebook, one for each part of their life.

#Erasmus Darwin: the great book

Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, kept a large commonplace book from 1776 to 1787: inventions, observations, ideas. When Charles later wrote his grandfather's biography, he worked from it and called it "the great book".

I like that a commonplace book can turn into a biography. It is already one.

#Emerson and Thoreau: taught at Harvard

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were both taught to keep commonplace books at Harvard, and both kept writing in theirs for decades. Emerson's journals and notebooks run to many volumes. He thought of all writing as a kind of quotation; the line at the top of this note is his.

#Virginia Woolf: reading notebooks

Virginia Woolf kept reading notebooks: passages copied out, often with her own responses next to them. Some are now held at Smith College. Her notebooks are less about sorting and more about talking back, which is a kind of commonplace book too.

#E. M. Forster and W. H. Auden: published at last

E. M. Forster kept a commonplace book for most of his adult life. After his death it was published simply as Commonplace Book.

W. H. Auden went further and published his while he was alive: A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970), the passages he loved arranged alphabetically by subject, with his own comments in between. It's the closest thing to walking through someone else's head.

#H. P. Lovecraft: ideas, not quotes

Lovecraft's commonplace book holds hardly any quotations. It's a list of strange ideas for stories, jotted down over years: a dream, an image, a sentence that might become something. Some of them did.

It's a reminder that a commonplace book doesn't have to hold other people's words. It holds whatever you don't want to lose.

#A modern commonplace book: mine

I'll add one more example, because I can show you its insides.

My commonplace book lives in Filament, the app I built for it. As I write this, it holds 263 lines: 103 from books, 102 poems, 45 quotes, a handful of articles and podcasts, one film and one note.

When I look at it the way Filament shows it, it tells me which voices keep coming back: Elif Batuman, Vivian Gornick, Rainer Maria Rilke, Maggie Nelson, Julie Otsuka, William Carlos Williams. And it sorts my lines into what it calls the neighbourhoods of my mind: earth and animal presence, grief and fleeting time, human resistance and belonging, the work of existence.

I didn't choose those neighbourhoods. My reading did. Locke would have needed a long evening and a sharp quill to see that. I needed a second.

#What every example has in common

Five hundred years apart, they share three things:

• The line, copied exactly. Not a paraphrase. The words as they were written.

• Where it came from. Author, title, often the page.

• Some way back in. A heading, an index, a theme, a search.

Everything else is up to you: paper or digital, tidy or chaotic, one notebook or six. If you'd like to start your own, here's how to keep a commonplace book you actually return to, and what to put in it.