What is a Commonplace Book?

A commonplace book is a home for the words, phrases and sentences you come across and want to remember. This blog post from Ryan Holiday is a great introduction. It was those words that got me hooked on the concept many years ago.

Being connected to interesting thoughts and beautiful sentences from the books I love has given me a feeling of closeness to minds I’ve never met and minds already long gone. It has become a valuable and enjoyable ritual that continues to ground me in a world filled with noise.

Like Ryan, I’m not a big fan of automating this note taking process. Highlighting things on a Kindle and automatically having it transfer the quotes somewhere. To make words your own you have to spend time with them. Underline by hand, come back to them, transcribe them by hand. Let it take time. 

The details of how you categorise and store things don’t really matter. Find what works for you. A process that you enjoy coming back to. For me I love seeing how things connect visually and I use Obsidian to link my notecards together with #category-tags and connections to similar notes. 

But I remember the hesitation when I was starting out and could not find any detailed examples of how people structured their notes. So I have made my note-library open for anyone who is curious, wanna look around and maybe start their own commonplace book. Steal what you like, ignore the rest. Happy note taking!