You might wonder why this site calls itself a commonplace book. It feels like an old-fashioned phrase and I can’t argue; it is a throwback. A commonplace book is one of the oldest reading tools we have: a personal anthology, kept by hand, of passages worth keeping. It might be a sentence from Seneca, a verse, a recipe, a turn of phrase you want to borrow. People wrote and copied things into their commonplace book not to publish them but to live with them.
The practice is properly old. The Renaissance humanists called the headings loci communes (common places) the shelves under which you filed what you gathered. Erasmus taught schoolboys to keep one. Locke went so far as to design an indexing scheme for his, so a lifetime of scattered notes could still be found. Across three centuries the habit was simply what literate people did: read with a pen in hand and let the book accrue.
I use it here because a commonplace book was never pretended to be finished and never pretended to be for anyone but its keeper. It is the opposite of a feed or a social media channel. There is no audience to perform for, no metric to achieve. It is only for the slow accumulation of things you didn’t want to forget.
So that is what this is. Rooms instead of headings but with the same intent: a place to set down what I’m reading, what I’m listening to, and the occasional thought that survives my inevitable cognitive decline. Kept for myself first, and for whoever wanders in.