A commonplace book is the oldest form of what we're trying to build. It's a personal volume where you copied, commented on, and connected the passages that mattered. Marcus Aurelius kept one. So did John Locke, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Jefferson. So do you, if you use Froots.
Three essays worth reading this week if you want to understand what you're actually doing when you keep notes:
1. Robert Darnton, "Extraordinary Commonplaces" (NYRB, 2000)
Darnton is one of the great book historians, and this essay is his Rosetta Stone for the form. He walks through the surviving commonplace book of a 17th-century English merchant, page by page, and makes a precise argument: commonplace books are not journals. The author isn't there to record their own life; they're there to harvest and arrange what they've read, so that later they can find it again by theme. That indexing impulse — not the writing impulse — is the thing that makes a tool-for-thought useful. If you're tempted to write your notes "for a future self who will enjoy reading them," Darnton will helpfully talk you out of it.
Why we link to it: to explain why we care so much about the graph, the backlink drawer, and tags that aren't folders.
2. Alan Jacobs, "Attending to Technology: Theses for Disputation" (2015)
Jacobs is a gentler reader than Darnton and a slower thinker, which is welcome. His theses on technology are a set of 79 propositions about what it means to actually dwell in a digital medium — not just use it. Theses 42 through 51 are specifically about commonplacing, tagging, and how most of our notes apps have replaced thinking with collecting.
Why we link to it: because we've been trying to build an app where collecting feels like thinking, not a substitute for it.
3. Steven Berlin Johnson, "The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book" (2010)
Johnson's short essay (published the same year as Where Good Ideas Come From; they're companion pieces) is about what happens when the commonplace book becomes digital and, critically, networked. He argues that the commonplace book always wanted to be a hyperlinked, queryable, graph-connected document — it just took 400 years for the substrate to catch up. He makes the argument for why the adjacency the commonplace book encouraged (things appearing next to each other without being "about" each other) is the mother of all good ideas.
Why we link to it: because this is essentially the design brief for a vault.
Three essays, maybe 90 minutes total. If you read them, your habit changes. That's the best thing we can say about any writing.
Shelved in: Library → Reading lists