On keeping a commonplace book

For most of my life, I read a great deal and remembered very little. I’d finish a book, feel changed by it, and a month later struggle to recall a single idea.

Then I started keeping a commonplace book, and that changed.

An old idea

A commonplace book is simply a notebook where you collect things worth remembering: quotations, passages from books, overheard phrases, half-formed ideas, recipes, lists. The practice goes back centuries. Scholars, writers, and scientists kept them as a way of gathering knowledge from everything they read.

Unlike a diary, a commonplace book isn’t about recording your days. It’s about recording what you’ve encountered and what it made you think.

How I keep mine

My system is deliberately simple:

• One notebook at a time. When it’s full, I start the next and number them.
• Anything goes. A line from a novel sits next to a note about a conversation, which sits next to a sketch of a building I liked.
• Always the source. I write down where each idea came from, so I can find it again.
• A short index at the back, listing a few topics and the pages where they appear.

Writing something down is the first step to thinking about it properly.

Why handwriting helps

I’ve tried keeping a digital version, and it never sticks. Copying a passage by hand forces me to slow down and choose. I can’t save everything, so I save only what really matters, and the act of writing it helps it stay with me.

There’s also something wonderful about flipping through an old notebook years later. Ideas I’d long forgotten sit side by side with ones that have since become central to how I think.

Getting started

You don’t need a special notebook or a perfect system. Pick up any blank book and write down the next sentence you read that makes you pause. Add where it came from. Then do it again tomorrow.

Within a few months, you’ll have something much more valuable than a notebook. You’ll have a record of how your mind has grown, one borrowed idea at a time.