Commonplacing
A commonplace book collects the passages, observations and ideas a reader wants to remember.
An old habit of good readers
Readers have copied out passages worth keeping for as long as there have been books. By the Renaissance the habit had a name, the commonplace book, from the Latin loci communes: the “common places” where a speaker stored arguments and examples.
Erasmus taught schoolboys to keep one under headings, and he mocked writers who copied Cicero word for word: a borrowed sentence has to fit its new time and place. John Locke published a method for indexing one in 1706. Thomas Jefferson kept one as a young man, copying out the poets and lawyers he meant to remember.
Moving it into the book
In a short essay, How to Mark a Book, the philosopher Mortimer Adler urged readers to write in their own books, and the sentence on our home page comes from it. Marking a book, as he saw it, keeps a reader alert, puts the reader’s thinking into words, and leaves a record of it to come back to. He thought of reading as a conversation with the author.
A commonplace book sits beside the book being read. The Commonplace Edition puts the practice on the page itself: a ruled column in the outer margin for the passage, the question and the cross-reference, and a prompt at the close of each chapter that turns the reader back into it.
A prompt from the first chapter of Moby-Dick:
Commonplace
“This is my substitute for pistol and ball,” Ishmael says, a sentence after owning the urge to knock people’s hats off in the street. How seriously should we take the gloom he confesses so lightly? Put a line in the margin wherever the joking voice drops, if it ever does.
How to use the margin
Use it however you like. These are the habits we had in mind when we ruled it.
Mark the line
A short stroke beside a passage, with its line number, is enough to find it again next week or next year.
Copy it out
When a sentence matters, copy it into the margin in your own hand. Copying is slow, and the slowness helps you remember.
Ask the question
Write down the question a passage raises, and leave room for the answer when it comes.
Connect
Note where the same word, image or argument turns up again, by page and line.
Weigh the example
When someone in the book does something worth imitating, or worth avoiding, mark it and write which.
Answer the prompt
At each chapter’s end, the prompt gives something small to do before the page turns.