“I write what I observe in my notebooks. I do this for two reasons. The first is that Writing inculcates habits of precision and carefulness. The second is to preserve whatever knowledge I possess for you1 […].”
I’ve long been a fan of using notebooks. Though I’ve never been a regular diary keeper, writing my thoughts and feelings or the events of each day as they pass, I still love writing in a good notebook. Back in 2011, when I was doing my PhD, I started building a system of notebook use for my thesis. What I did was on the one hand very straightforward, but … it got complicated. You see, especially since I was working with a lot of books from the library now, this meant I could write in them like I normally would and then pull the quotations from them as I needed them. So I started writing them in a notebook. At the top of the entry, if it was a new book or journal article, I would write out the complete bibliographic information, both as a footnote and as a bibliography entry. This meant I could return the book without having to worry about the necessary information. Then as I wrote down quotations or summaries, I would preface them with the page number. So far, this was farely straightforward.
Later, I started keeping an index on a separate sheet of paper so I could easily find the sources again. This too, was not terribly difficult. That came next, when I would then type up my entries in a digital facsimile (meaning that I would keep the page breaks in the same place). I don’t know why I did this. Typing it up made some sense because then I could just copy and paste (instead of prefacing each entry with the page number, I would add a footnote to my Word Doc). What I didn’t know at the time is that I was keeping something rather like a commonplace book.
A while back, I made an attempt at a podcast episode here on Substack where I talked abotu commplace books and other things. I have since learned a lot more and last week, I started keeping my own commonplace book alongside a reading notebook. Let me explain.
Right now, for a book club I run, we’re reading Piranesi (quoted above). I love this book and have marked out a variety of important passages. But I’ve never done anything with any of them. So now, as I’m reading back through the book, I first right all the quotations I want to keep in a reading notebook. In that notebook, not unlike my old research notebooks, I simply write down the book I’m reading and then under that I add quotations with the corresponding page numbers. Now, however, I’ve added margins where I write down potential commonplaces, topics by which I might want to order these quotations in my commonplace book.
After I write the quotations down in my reading notebook, I then re-write them in my commonplace book. This redoubling of effort means I don’t have to decide right away what commonplace a given passage is going to go with (sometimes there are multiple that could work for a given passage). Once I’ve decided, I put it in my commonplace notebook under that heading and move on. So far, this has been working fairly well. For this post, all I had to do was looking for the commonplace writing, turn to that page in my commonplace book, and type out the quotation for this post. But why am I doing this at all?
Commonplace books have a rich tradition, and have likely lead to both the modern scrapbook and the modern quotebook you can buy from any bookstore (as well as the unchecked versions on websites like BrainyQuote.com). Given these published and digital versions made by someone else, why would I try keeping my own? The answer is to use them. Yes, I can go buy a quote book, but it’s unlikely to have Piranesi in there or the Summa or Leisure the Basis of Culture. All books that are or will be in my commonplace book. And that’s the answer right there. These are passages I have selected. They’re important to me. Maybe I’ll use them in substack posts (meaning maybe I’ll write here more often). Maybe I’ll use them in my teaching, or in writing books (both fiction and nonfiction). Maybe I’ll use them to grow as a man of faith. Really, I can use them however I want. And that’s the beauty of a commonplace book that I make myself. I get to decide and that will lead to new ideas, new combinations no one else has noticed or hasn’t noticed for a long time.
I’m still working on my system for how I’m organizing my notebook. My original plan had me coming up with 46 potential commonplaces which would each getting about 5 pages in my notebook. But then I worried, what if I didn’t fill them? Then there’s unaccounted empty space. Or what if I needed more space for certain commonplaces, but already had quotations written for a different commonplace on the very next page? Then the whole point of saying Beauty is on pages 6-10 is ruined. So, for now, I’ve decided to use an ad hoc method, where I as I find new quotes and they don’t match a set commonplace in my notebook already, I just add a new one. I’m still hoping to leave the back of my notebook for a bibliography and possibly even a cross-reference index (I’ve left the margins in this notebook for secondary commonplaces).
There’s more I could say, but I’ll leave you here for now. If there’s interest, I’ll do another post going into more detail on what commonplace books are, their history (what I’m learning from a book on how Romantics and Victorians kept commonplace books, written by Jillian Hess who has her own substack). But for now, if you’re interested, you can check out Parker Settecase over on YouTube who has a bunch of videos on keeping notebooks, particularly commonplace books.
1 Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 12.
I put everything in one notebook, sequentially, which means I don't worry about organization. But each note, which can be one sentence or a whole page - each note has a unique identifier, like an IP address, which allows me to reference and link notes in a hyperlink-like system. This ability to link eliminates the concern about sequence.
Add to that some simple color coding: green is reading notes, yellow is my journal, blue for scripture, etc., while orange is the hyperlinks, both hyperlink addresses and hyperlinks themselves. A hyperlink is just a number, in a box, and colored, inserted anywhere on the page.
The unique number for each note is just the page number plus the number of note on that page. So note 23.4 (page 23, note 4)might be connected to reading note 76.2. These are highlighted in color so I can see them quickly as I flip back through.
Then a simple table of contents, in front, lets me see in a glance what's on each page.