A commonplace book is simply a notebook of things worth keeping: quotations, recipes, overheard remarks, the odd fact about whales. Writers from Montaigne to Virginia Woolf kept them, and the habit is overdue for a revival.
How mine works
I keep one notebook per year. Each entry gets a date, a source and a single line of my own about why it mattered. No highlighters, no apps — just the pen and the slightly cramped handwriting that copying forces on you.
Copying a sentence by hand is the slowest, and therefore the deepest, way to read it.
What surprised me is how often old entries start talking to new ones. A line from a 2019 novel answers a question raised by a 2026 essay. The notebook becomes a conversation across years.
Start small
You do not need a beautiful journal or a system. Buy the cheapest notebook you will not be afraid to ruin, and copy one sentence a day. In a year you will own the best anthology ever assembled — because it was assembled for exactly one reader.
