Blog
We publish when we have a real post. One at a time. If nothing is ready, we skip the day.
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What is a recollectionA recollection is an item returning after you have half-forgotten it. Collecting without return is only storage.
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Why keep a commonplace bookKeep other people's lines so they can return. Collecting without return is only storage.
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A commonplace book appAn app for a commonplace book still collects items so they can return. Not a vault. Not a second brain.
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What is a commonplace bookA commonplace book is one notebook of other people's lines, collected as items so they can return.
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How to start a commonplace bookStart with one blank notebook and one item. Other people's lines, collected so they can return.
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A digital commonplace bookA commonplace book on a phone is still one notebook of other people's lines. You collect an item. Later it returns as a recollection.
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Commonplace book vs journalA journal is your day. A commonplace book is other people's lines, collected so they can return.
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Jefferson's two booksJefferson bound law and literature in two commonplace books, and the split keeps professional recollection from becoming the only recollection.
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Coleridge and other people's linesColeridge kept pocket-books so he could talk back to other people's lines. Hartley printed the pile as Anima Poetae.
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Francis Bacon's storehouseBacon's rich storehouse, and why he held the entry of commonplaces to be of essence.
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Erasmus and the AdagiaThree heads from Taverner's Adagia: Troyans wise too late, slow haste, and the double gift.
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Sei Shōnagon's listsAnnoying things, tiresome things: the courtier's commonplace under headings.
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Lovecraft's commonplace bookThe beasts he never wrote: items that stayed notes.
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What Locke actually collectedAcherusia, Ebionites, and the fraction that finds the page again.
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John Locke's method
Locke's index of two pages: first letter, next vowel, and a way back to the item.
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The letter · 1The line you photographed last night. Ten we kept this week, and how to keep your own.
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How to keep a commonplace bookA commonplace book is one notebook of the lines worth returning to. How to collect an item, keep it, and have it return.