On keeping a commonplace book
I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.
Michel de Montaigne (via John Bartlett)
A commonplace book is a notebook for copying out passages you want to remember.
The act of keeping a commonplace book is old. The first time I was made aware of the concept was in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Renaissance students kept them as a way of remembering random bits of information. Locke wrote a treatise on how to index one. The system he proposed for organizing one is a bit overengineered, but his impulse is right. JFK kept one. Bill Gates and Virginia Woolf both kept theirs into adulthood. The list of practitioners doesn’t tell you much except that the format outlasts every technology that’s supposed to replace it. Moleskine notebooks are popular for a reason!
The internet was supposed to replace the commonplace book. Read-later apps have just become read-never apps, getting acquired or sunset. After enough years of dealing with those, what’s actually produced becomes largely illegible to the author in the absence of any serious curation.
Why public
A private commonplace book is mostly a hoard. However, there are benefits to maintaining a public notebook of sorts. Writing anything for a hypothetical stranger forces clarity that writing only for yourself doesn’t, even if no stranger ever reads the thing. A commonplace book is meant to be returned to.
What I’m trying to do here
Posts have one of three statuses: draft, in-progress or finished. The status tag is freeing. You can publish something incomplete without pretending it isn’t. Drafts stay out of the published build. In-progress posts go up and get edited over weeks, months or years.
Internal links are common, and the site previews them on hover when you’re on a blog post. Justified text with hyphenation is on by default. There’s no email capture, no popup, no engagement metrics. Here you’re a reader, not a funnel.