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.
I’ve dabbled in this for years, part of school for me when I was a younger woman (and not, I’ll note, in a traditional school setting as most Americans perceive it). As a mindful way of dwelling in a book, picking up the shiny bits of it and rolling them through my mind to admire the sparkles. It’s a useful practice, particularly if you must rely on library books that will be returned, and even now in the age of the internet when you can google a quote at a whim without even resorting to the doughty Bartlett, it is useful. For one thing, you have to remember a quote well enough to google it with some hope of finding the thing. Having written it down will help lock it into memory. For another thing, searching the ‘net only works well on significant saying that have entered the popular culture.
For a third thing… it’s a useful tool for writers. Who won’t be looking at a book in a way that others may be. I find myself collecting Kindle quotes from books, then putting them in the special channel I created Book Club with Spikes for (Discord server, link is invite if you want to join in). Which is, as someone there pointed out not long ago, my commonplace book. With participation and debate, to make it even better! What follows, then, are a number of quotes I’ve grabbed from my recent reading (last few weeks) arranged to suit my whimsy.
You might try it! Studying how words work together by writing them out is an old-fashioned quirk, perhaps, but it works with how our brains function. Even the act of highlighting and saving, which is all I’m doing for the above quotes, helps them become more memorable to me. And then coming back to talk about them with friends, or simply arrange them in an amusing cascade as I have above, creates it’s own tale.
Mad Genius Club 
10 responses to “The Commonplace Book”
What happens if you feed those quotes into MidJourney — anything amusing?
I do occasionally feed something in. Haven’t done any of these. In the beginning (like, a year ago LOL) we discovered that Midj plays very well with segments of poetry and song lyrics.
Alec Guinness kept a commonplace book. I found it interesting reading.
I’ve never heard of this concept – though it occurs to me that in a lot of ways, my Facebook timeline is my Commonplace Feed. Though in all honesty, you’d probably have to combine that with my blog (now migrated over to Substack), my Twitter feed from the past few years, and that Scrivener doc that I keep open with interesting links and ideas and snippets, and …
And finding things is the problem! LOL
I used Pinterest for that for awhile.
Which is very useful, but I tend to think of it more in terms of the visual.
Actually, I’d say that most of my Pinterest stuff has turned out to be quotes, like you do. FWIW.
Oh, it makes sense! I just hadn’t thought of it.
I’ve also done this for years, calling them my “DaVinci Notebooks”. I also, “save” videos and posts either in bookmarks or playlists. Which I really need to transfer to paper before they disappear and are only found on the Archive.
I have heard the term Commonplace book a lot lately on the internet, sort of an addendum to day planners and bullet journals. There are even paper companies that are creating Commonplace books now. And YouTube gurus talking about the best ways to use them and to annotate books. Here’s a couple of my favorites:
Annotating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XxBTu2VGN8
Commonplace Book ideas for indexing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4h2rZgniyk