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# The commonplace book
- URL: https://proza.site/the-commonplace-book/
- Published: 2025-09-17T07:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-14T10:49:32.000Z
- Description: Keeping a notebook of other people’s sentences.
- Author: Daniël van der Winden
- Tags: Reading, Essays

For several hundred years, educated readers kept a commonplace book: a notebook into which they copied passages worth remembering, sorted under headings of their own devising. *On friendship. On the sea. On the shortness of life.* It was not a diary and it was not a scrapbook. It was a way of reading with a pen in hand, so that reading became a kind of making.

I started keeping one again about two years ago, after realising that I could remember almost nothing of what I had read the year before. Not the plots, which come back easily enough, but the sentences. The particular arrangement of words that made me stop and read a line twice. Those were gone.

✎

The rule is simple: if a sentence makes you stop, copy it out by hand. The copying is the point. You cannot copy a sentence without reading it slowly.

## How mine works

There is nothing clever about it. A plain notebook, a pen that does not skip, and a few habits I have settled into:

- One passage per entry, with the author, the title and the page.
- No commentary on the same day. If I have something to say about it, I say it a week later, underneath.
- Headings are added afterwards, in the margin, when a pattern shows itself.
- An index at the back, kept in pencil, because it is always wrong.

The index is the part I did not expect to enjoy. Readers have always needed help finding their way back: a Nuremberg devotional book of 1491 printed a pair of numbered hands so that its readers could remember where its contents lay, finger by finger. Every few months I go through the book and find that I have been circling the same handful of subjects without knowing it. Weather. Walking. Rooms. People being kind to each other in small ways. It turns out a commonplace book is less a record of what you have read than a portrait of what you were looking for.