They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.” (The New York Review of Books, 2000)
Keeping a commonplace book will probably prevent you from passively skimming over the words in a book. You may not be able to read while lying down; but your understanding of the material is likely to increase by leaps and bounds.
How to Start a Commonplace Book
Creating a commonplace book is actually very simple. Remembering to take it off the shelf and add to your entries is the hard part.
Step 1: Choose Your Medium
Like journals, commonplace books vary. You can choose a blank, hard-bound book, a cheap spiral notebook, or a pricy moleskin book. Some people prefer to use a three-ring binder for their commonplace book so that pages can easily be added or removed.
Alternatively, you may prefer to create a digital commonplace book. Journaling software or even a word processing program will work. I keep my commonplace book (pictured here) on Microsoft’s OneNote, where I can create a new tab for each section.
If you don’t mind making your private thoughts public, you may choose to use a blog as your commonplace book. You can select your own domain and use a blogging platform such as WordPress. Or, you can make use Blogger to create a simple, no-cost blog.
Step 2: Choose Your Content
Next, you’ll need to decide how to use your commonplace book.
As you’ve seen, commonplace books can be an excellent way to keep track of your reading. If you choose to use your book as a kind of reading log, you may want to include the following components:
- Lists of books to read
- Quotes from books you’re reading
- Book summaries in your own words
- Your reactions / thoughts about books you’ve finished
Remember that this is your book – you can choose to include anything that you want to remember or come back to. Here are some other things you may want to store in your commonplace book: favorite recipes, quotes from your favorite movies, a list of your heroes, life goals, poems, insights into life, travelogues, important photos, clippings from newspapers, etc.
Step 3: Choose an Organizational System
You may want to have separate sections for books lists, quotes, and other topics, or you may prefer to have all the information in one place. You can organize your commonplace book by adding dividers to your three ring binder, stick-on tabs to your notebook/moleskin, or links to your virtual book.
Decide how you want to organize your commonplace book before you begin writing. That way you won’t be frustrated when searching for entries as the book grows.
Step 3: Keep it Up
Once you’ve started a commonplace book, keep up the work. In a few years, you’ll have an amazing record the books you’ve read, the subjects you’ve studied, and the way your self-education has affected your life.
Share Your Commonplace Book
If you don’t mind sharing, I’d love to publish a collage of sample pages from commonplace books. Often it’s hard to visualize, and a set of pictures would help future readers get a better idea of how they can begin this project.
You can send a photo of your commonplace book (or a screenshot, if you have a digital one) to selfmadscholar at gmail.com. The page doesn’t have to be completely legible in the picture; it just needs to show how a commonplace book can look.
Once I have enough photos, I’ll post on this subject again.
Photo 1: Beinecke Flickr Laboratory – Anonymous manuscript containing poems by various authors, in various hands. Includes Shakespeare’s second sonnet.
Photo 2: ChrisL_AK – My commonplace book of quotations and pictures using the Moleskine japanese fold style notebook