The Commonplace Book
11th July 2024
A commonplace book isn’t a book, to begin with. It is more akin to a butterfly collection, or perhaps pretty rocks, or fossil bits, or whatever catches your eye and you pick up, sticking it in your pocket to pull out and look at later, arranged in a system that pleases you. In this journal, you would write down parts of books. Quotes, passages, something that sparked a thought and caught your eye, pulled out of a much larger book and jotted down. The very act of capturing it would help you remember it later, and if you did this all through reading a book, then went back at the end of the book to review what you noted during your read-through, you might find that you had captured in a nutshell what the book meant to you.
This site contains my Commonplace Book; look under Pages on the left. I read through it about once a month, and enjoy my time doing so.