Self-care express: The Commonplace Book

You may already know of the commonplace book. It’s been in use since antiquity, far pre-dating movable type, index cards, bullet journals, and, of course, Pinterest (a platform with some overlap in function). But I did not get interested in this small-but-mighty tool until I saw some sexy French influencer do a show-and-tell about hers on Parisian Vibe. (You don’t say, said no one.)

A (single) place for everything.

What is a commonplace book, you ask? It is not, as its name suggests, some bestselling thriller from the Little Free Library. Nor is it a journal or even necessarily a chronological project.

Its name comes from the Latin locus communis, meaning not humdrum, but a shared location for passages and quotes copied out from your purposeful reading.

The practice comes from a time when a book was a far more rare and precious object. Darwin, Linnaeus, and Mark Twain are among the best-known users, but many notable and perhaps more artful examples of the form come from non-famous gentlewomen who recorded important takeaways from their studies.

Some uses for a commonplace book.

• it’s a nice way of keeping track of your reading
• the act of making analog entries helps consolidate your learning
• if you have a flexible system, you can group by subject matter, which obviously is good for sparking new ideas and deepening your knowledge in an area
• but the opposite is also true—having unlike things together and reviewing them can also spark new ideas and unexpected connections
• a commonplace book allows you to make more use of the public library, or to declutter books with a lower density of takeaways. Just copy and preserve the material of highest value to you! (Obviously I am not suggesting you apply this method to every book in your collection—you will always have many keepers.)
• but say you have a large number of self-help books, a genre known for being 82% too long. (Not my book of course!) Just go in there and grab that 18%, the core of wisdom.
• and it goes without saying that the commonplace book would make an excellent repository for your collected self/care knowledge: the Basics! Your Emergency Kit!

What to use.

There really aren’t any hard rules here. I like a standard Midori MD lined A5 notebook with its heavier horizontal line on each page—gives a nice subsection. Or get something without lines if you like to include drawings and other embellishments. The Leuchtturm 1917 (which you can get here in some new and fabulous colors) is a good pick, as it comes printed with page numbers and includes an index for you to populate. You could also find a small three-ring binder or some other system that would allow you to group pages as you see fit.

One thing’s for sure: if you’re a reader and a learner, you’ll fill your commonplace book quickly, and it will be something you treasure.

I am keen to know how many of you have you already been using a commonplace book. If you have, please tell us in the comments below what you’ve noticed about the practice. What do you like about it, and what are its challenges? Has it changed your reading? The quality of your learning? And if you haven’t been using one, do you plan to?

Image credit: The Letter Writer, ‘F. van Mieris fecit Anno 1680,’ Rijksmuseum. Used with permission.