In an era of effortless copy-and-paste, we hoard thousands of digital bookmarks that we never revisit. The very ease of capture strips the passage of its weight. When John Locke, Seneca, and Virginia Woolf kept their commonplace books, the friction of handwriting served as a natural filter: only a sentence worth the labor of transcription earned entry.
Three Rules for a Living Commonplace Book
1. **Number Every Page Immediately:** Before transcribing your first quotation, number the upper outer corners of your notebook from 1 to 192. 2. **Leave a Wide Left or Right Column for Context:** Record the passage in the main body of the page, and reserve a two-inch margin for the author, work, page number, and the date and place where you encountered it. 3. **Maintain a Back-of-Book Thematic Index:** Rather than trying to divide your notebook into predetermined sections that fill unevenly, write entries chronologically and index them by theme—*Solitude*, *Architecture*, *Time*, *Grief*, *Craft*—on the final four leaves.