How-To

How to Keep a Commonplace Book: A Modern Guide (With Templates and Examples)

April 19, 202614 min read

Quick Answer: A commonplace book is a personal, thematically organized collection of quotes, passages, and ideas that you transcribe from your reading. Unlike a reading journal (organized by book) or a bullet journal (organized by date), a commonplace book is organized by theme — so a passage from Marcus Aurelius on death, a line from Joan Didion on grief, and a paragraph from Atul Gawande on mortality all end up under the same heading, cross-pollinating. The form dates to 16th-century Europe; John Locke published a formal indexing system in 1706. Modern versions live on Notion, Obsidian, or a paper notebook. To start one: pick a medium, define 10-20 initial themes, set a weekly transcription habit, and build a simple index. The benefit compounds: by year five, your commonplace book is more useful than most books in your library, because it contains only what you cared enough to transcribe, organized by what you cared about.

You finish a book you loved. You underlined thirty passages. You close it, put it on the shelf, and within six weeks you have forgotten every single one.

This is the core problem a commonplace book solves. Highlights trapped inside a book are almost useless — they are organized by the author's logic, not yours. A commonplace book is a lifetime project to extract the best passages from everything you read and rearrange them under your own headings, so that when you are thinking about, say, grief, you have the collected wisdom of the twenty best authors you have ever read on the subject, on one page, in your own curation.

People have been doing this for four hundred years. The form has persisted through every shift in reading technology because it solves something no reading technology alone can: the problem that books are organized for the author, but you need them organized for you.

What A Commonplace Book Actually Is

The word "commonplace" comes from the Latin locus communis, meaning a shared or common place — originally a topic or theme around which arguments could be gathered. A commonplace book is literally a book of shared places: a book of themes, with quotations and ideas gathered under each.

Practically, a commonplace book has four defining features:

It is indexed by theme, not by source. Passages from different books live together under the same heading.
It is selective. You transcribe only passages you find striking, valuable, or worth remembering. Quality over quantity.
It is personal. Your themes reflect what you care about. Your commonplace book will look nothing like anyone else's.
It is permanent. You keep it over years or decades, so it accumulates compounding value.

This distinguishes it from close cousins:

A reading journal records your thoughts about each book, organized by book. Commonplace books are organized by theme.
A bullet journal is organized chronologically for productivity. Commonplace books are organized thematically for thinking.
A quote collection may be thematic but is usually passive. Commonplace books invite annotation, juxtaposition, and active synthesis.
Highlights in a Kindle or notes app are organized by source and rarely revisited. Commonplace books are reorganized by theme and designed to be revisited.

A well-kept commonplace book becomes something unique in your intellectual life: a distilled reference work authored by you, made entirely from material you cared enough to transcribe, indexed by your concerns.

The 400-Year History (Short Version)

The form has roots in ancient Roman rhetoric — Cicero and Quintilian advised orators to keep collections of loci communes for speech-writing — but it matured in Renaissance Europe.

Erasmus, in his 1512 manual De Copia, explicitly instructed students to keep notebooks organized by theme, transcribing striking passages under each heading, so that when they needed to write or argue on a topic, they would have a ready supply of quotations and examples. De Copia went through 168 editions. Commonplace books became standard equipment in European education for three centuries.

John Milton kept a commonplace book. His survives. It is indexed by headings like "Divorce," "Tyranny," "Reformation," and "Property." Under each he transcribed passages — from Aquinas, from the Church Fathers, from Greek tragedy — that he would later mine for his prose works.

John Locke published a formal indexing method in 1706 (posthumously), in a short pamphlet called A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. Locke's system was a two-letter index: the first letter of the keyword plus the first vowel, producing a code (e.g., "Reason" → Re, "Liberty" → Li) that you entered in a compact index at the front of the book. His system was widely adopted and remained standard for over a century.

Thomas Jefferson kept two — a literary commonplace book and a legal commonplace book. Both survive and have been published. His legal commonplace, started when he was a law student, shaped his political thinking for life.

H. L. Mencken, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, and Walter Benjamin all kept commonplace books or their close equivalents. Benjamin's Arcades Project is essentially a 1,000-page commonplace book organized by themes of 19th-century Paris.

The practice declined in the 20th century as reference books, libraries, and later the internet made specific quotations easy to look up. What we lost in that transition was the curated dimension — the selection, the juxtaposition, the annotation. Looking up a Seneca quote on death takes thirty seconds online. Having already transcribed the Seneca quote, next to Montaigne on the same subject, next to your own marginal note from five years ago about your grandfather, is something only a commonplace book produces.

The form has quietly revived in the last decade, under the influence of Ryan Holiday (who wrote a widely-shared 2013 piece on his system), Robert Greene (who famously keeps thousands of note cards), and the digital-garden movement (Andy Matuschak, Maggie Appleton, and others).

The Benefits — Why Do This At All

1. You Actually Remember What You Read

The physical act of transcribing a passage produces retention several times stronger than highlighting. Writing something out forces you to process it, choose its boundaries, and engage with it again. Handwritten notes outperform typed notes on conceptual retention in most studies. But even typed transcription is far better than passive highlighting. The commonplace book forces transcription as a default.

2. Cross-Book Synthesis Becomes Easy

When you sit down to think about, say, "the nature of ambition," you have a page or a query that pulls together what Plutarch, Shakespeare, Stefan Zweig, and Zadie Smith have said on the topic — plus your own annotations and links. This kind of synthesis is nearly impossible with book-based notes, where each author's material stays siloed.

3. You Build A Personal Reference Work Over Decades

Every year you keep a commonplace book, it gets more valuable. By year five, it contains hundreds of passages you chose; by year ten, thousands. The accumulation is not linear — each new passage becomes more useful because it can interact with all the previous ones. A mature commonplace book is closer to an intellectual self-portrait than to a notebook.

4. It Is The Best Antidote to "I Don't Know What I Believe Anymore"

Strong readers eventually notice that their beliefs blur together. Every book they read makes the last book they read seem less certain. A commonplace book slows this down. By forcing you to decide, each week, which passages are worth keeping, it produces a record of your considered reactions — what you found true, what you found beautiful, what you wanted to come back to. Over time the record itself becomes a position.

5. It Makes Writing Much Easier

Anyone who writes regularly — essays, books, talks, even long emails — discovers that having a stocked commonplace book transforms the work. You are never staring at a blank page. You are always starting from a dozen relevant passages, organized by the topic you are working on, and you build the writing outward from there. This is how Ryan Holiday writes books quickly; it is how Robert Greene writes books at all.

The Decision: Paper Or Digital

There is no universal right answer. Both work. They produce different experiences.

Paper

Pros: Handwriting produces stronger encoding. The physical book becomes an object of personal meaning — many people report that their commonplace book becomes one of their most treasured possessions. Constraints (limited pages, no search) force you to be selective. No distractions: a paper notebook does not show you notifications.

Cons: Search is manual. Cross-referencing is tedious. Portability limits: you can only have one with you. Not easily backed up — a lost or damaged notebook is gone.

Best for: Readers who want a slower, more deliberate practice. Writers for whom the pace of handwriting is a feature. People who read mostly paper books.

Digital

Pros: Search is instant. Tagging and backlinks produce emergent structure you could not have planned. Backed up, portable, searchable across decades of content. Integrates with the major book highlighting apps, so import from Kindle or Apple Books is automatic.

Cons: Can devolve into a pile of unprocessed imports — ten thousand highlights, zero synthesis. Screens compete with notifications. The friction of the digital tool is lower, which means you may transcribe too much (copy-paste) and reflect too little.

Best for: Heavy readers, writers who cite frequently, people whose reading is already digital, anyone who travels.

Hybrid (Recommended for Most Readers)

Many long-term commonplace keepers end up with a hybrid system:

Paper for the initial capture — passages you handwrite from physical books, plus your annotations.
Digital for the index, search, and cross-referencing — the passages get transcribed into the digital system weekly.
A separate inbox (notes app, Readwise, or Chapterly) for highlights from ebooks that feed into the digital commonplace after review.

The hybrid approach takes the encoding benefit of handwriting and the search benefit of digital without locking you into either.

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How to Set Up a Commonplace Book

Step 1: Pick Your Medium

Paper: A dedicated notebook you will commit to. Moleskine, Leuchtturm 1917, and Rhodia are common choices because their pages number automatically. A numbered page matters: the index depends on it. Size: A5 is the sweet spot between portability and space.
Digital: Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, Apple Notes, or even a plain Markdown folder. Obsidian is the most common choice for commonplace-book keepers because its backlinks and graph view reward thematic linking. Roam and Logseq work similarly.
Hybrid: A paper notebook plus an Obsidian vault, with a weekly sync ritual.

Step 2: Define 10-20 Initial Themes

This is the hard part. Most people fail at commonplace books here, because they pick either too many themes (no cross-pollination) or too few (no structure).

Good starter themes are concrete enough to be specific and broad enough to collect hundreds of passages over a lifetime. Examples from real commonplace books:

Death / Mortality
Ambition
Friendship
Writing and Craft
Money and Status
Decision-Making
Love
Time
Attention
Courage
Memory
Nature
Work
Loss
Education
Power
The Self

Start with 10-15. You can always add more. Do not worry about perfect taxonomy; themes will shift as your reading shifts.

Step 3: Set Up The Index

For paper: reserve 4-6 pages at the front for an index. When you write a passage on page 47 under "Friendship," add "Friendship — 47" to the index. John Locke's system using two-letter codes works well if you expect hundreds of entries and want a compact index.

For digital: in Notion or Obsidian, each theme becomes a page (or a tag). Passages live on the theme page, or on source pages tagged with the theme — either works. Obsidian's backlinks make it easy to see "all passages tagged Death" from the Death note.

Step 4: Set The Weekly Transcription Ritual

The commonplace book lives or dies by consistency. Most people who start one abandon it within three months because they do not build the ritual.

A workable rhythm:

Every time you finish a book or reading session, note (in a separate "to-transcribe" inbox) the page numbers or highlight IDs of passages worth keeping.
One fixed time per week — Sunday morning, Friday afternoon — sit down with your inbox and transcribe. Budget 30-60 minutes.
During transcription, you add the passage under its theme, add any annotation of your own, and note the source precisely (author, title, page, year).

This is the only ritual you need. Protect it.

Step 5: Revisit Quarterly

Every three months, spend an hour reading back through your commonplace book. Just read it. Reconnect with passages you have not looked at in months. Notice unexpected patterns. Add links or annotations where you see them. Adjust your theme list if something has outgrown itself or a new theme has emerged.

This step is what separates commonplace books from dead archives. Without the quarterly re-read, the book becomes write-only. With it, the book becomes a living document.

What To Transcribe — And What Not To

Transcribe These

Passages that struck you strongly enough that you reread them. If you reread it once unbidden, transcribe it.
Arguments you want to be able to use later. Anything you could imagine citing in a conversation or an essay.
Definitions or distinctions you want to hold onto. A precise sentence that names something you felt but had no words for.
Surprising facts or figures. The kind you would repeat at dinner.
Beautifully written sentences. Prose worth studying as craft, independent of content.
Ideas that contradict your existing beliefs. These age especially well.

Don't Transcribe These

Passages that merely confirmed what you already believed and taught you nothing. Ten years from now you will not care.
Paragraphs that would be better summarized in a sentence. Don't transcribe the whole three-paragraph explanation; write your own one-sentence distillation plus the citation.
Information you can easily look up. A commonplace is for things that are hard to re-find, not for definitions you could Google.
Every underline from a book. The point of a commonplace is selection. A book with 40 underlines becomes 5 commonplace entries.

A good rule: if you would not be willing to copy it out longhand, it does not belong in a commonplace book. The handwriting test applies even to digital keepers as a filter of attention.

Templates You Can Copy

Paper Template (Leuchtturm 1917)

Page 1-6: Index. Two columns: Theme | Pages.
Page 7 onward: Entries. Each entry starts on its own line with the theme in the margin.
Entry format:

Death — Aurelius, Meditations 2.17. "The life of a man is a sojourn in a strange land. His fame after death is oblivion."

Note: compare Montaigne on death (p. 34). Stoic acceptance vs Montaigne's curiosity.

Obsidian Template

Create one note per theme. Create one note per book/source. In the source note, transcribe quotes and tag each with #death, #writing, etc. Or, simpler: in the source note, add wikilinks like [[Death]] next to relevant quotes. The theme page auto-populates via backlinks.

Theme page structure:

# Death

## Passages

- [[Aurelius-Meditations#Book 2]] — "The life of a man is a sojourn..."
  Note: stoic; compare to Montaigne's curiosity.

- [[Didion-Year-of-Magical-Thinking#Ch 1]] — "Life changes fast..."
  Note: the unannounced nature of grief.

## Cross-themes
[[Memory]] [[Time]] [[Loss]]

## My reflections
2026-03: I keep returning to Aurelius when I am stressed...

Notion Template

Common Failure Modes

Writing Down Too Much

Beginners often transcribe dozens of passages per book. The commonplace becomes a log, not a curation. Rule of thumb: no more than 5-8 entries per book for most reading; 1-2 per book for average reading; 20+ entries only for the rare book that changes your thinking. Be brutal.

Organizing Endlessly Instead Of Writing

People with digital commonplace books in particular can spend more time on the taxonomy than on transcription. Your theme list will never be perfect. The value is in the passages, not the structure. Use a messy structure with more passages rather than a beautiful structure with few.

Never Revisiting

Write-only commonplace books decay into archive. Schedule the quarterly re-read as a non-negotiable.

Turning It Into A Second Highlights Pile

If you are simply exporting Kindle highlights into a notes folder and calling it a commonplace, you have a highlights pile, not a commonplace book. The commonplace book requires selection, annotation, and thematic placement. If you skip any of those three, it is something else.

A Real Entry, Annotated

Here is a real entry from a commonplace book we have seen, with the structure annotated so you can see what a mature entry looks like:

Theme: Attention

Source: Simone Weil, "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies" (1942), p. 7 of Penguin edition.

"Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object... Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains."

My note (2026-03-14): Weil distinguishes attention from mere concentration — effort is the wrong metaphor; receptivity is the right one. Compare this to [[James Carse — Infinite Games]] on "listening for what has not yet been said." Both reject the push model of thinking.

Cross-themes: [[Writing]], [[Prayer]], [[Reading]]

Related passages: Iris Murdoch on "unselfing" (p. 23 of same notebook). Kahneman on effortful attention (p. 67).

This is what a commonplace book does that no highlight pile does. The quote. The source. The annotation. The cross-themes. The explicit bridges to other passages. It takes 10 minutes to produce an entry like this. The return on that 10 minutes is that, years later, when you are thinking about attention, you find yourself holding a composed position rather than a scattered memory.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you start a commonplace book if you have never kept one?

Pick a single medium (a numbered paper notebook or one digital app), define ten to fifteen broad themes such as Death, Ambition, and Writing, and reserve a few pages or a tag for an index. Then set one fixed weekly time to transcribe the passages that struck you most, placing each under its theme with the source and your own short note. Do not try to perfect the theme list before you begin — the structure should emerge from what you actually find worth keeping. The whole point of a commonplace book is selection, so transcribe far less than you highlighted, and lean on a deliberate note-taking method for what you read to decide what is worth keeping in the first place.

How long does it take to build one?

The first year feels sparse. By year two, you will have a few hundred entries and will start noticing cross-connections. By year five, the commonplace book is a significant intellectual asset. The compounding is real — do not evaluate the practice in the first six months.

What if I read mostly digitally?

Use your highlights as an inbox, not as the commonplace itself. Each week, pull 5-10 highlights from the last week's reading, retype them (do not copy-paste, or at least add your own annotation), and place them thematically. Apps like Readwise and Chapterly can feed highlights into the inbox automatically; the selection and transcription work is still yours.

Should I include my own ideas?

Yes. A commonplace book is not only a quote collection. Your original observations, drafted under thematic headings, interact with the quotes over time. Keep them clearly marked as yours (dated, initialed, or in a different color / section) so you do not later confuse them with citations.

Is this just a "second brain"?

A commonplace book predates the "second brain" movement by four centuries, and the best commonplace books are narrower and more intentional than most "second brains." A second brain tries to capture everything; a commonplace book captures only what you would be willing to copy out. The constraint is the feature.

What if I don't know what my themes should be?

Start with five. Read for three weeks. When you get a passage that doesn't fit, make a new theme. Don't overthink the initial list — your real themes will emerge from what you actually find worth transcribing, not from what you think you should care about.