About

I keep a commonplace book. People have kept them for centuries — a plain notebook where you copy out, by hand, the sentences from your reading that you want to keep, sometimes with a line of your own beside them. Mine was a paper one first, three of them now on a shelf, and this is where the copying-out spills over.

Everything here is a passage I actually stopped on: something I read twice, underlined, thought about on a walk. The little italic lines are my own — the notes in the margin. They are not commentary for anyone else. They are the reason the passage is worth keeping to me, written down before I forget it.

The book is deliberately small and deliberately slow. I add to it when something earns a place, which is not often — a good week is two entries, most weeks none. There is no schedule and there will never be a newsletter. If you find one thing here worth copying into your own book, that is the whole of what I hope for it.

I keep this under an initial rather than a name; the passages are the point, not the keeper. There is no comment section — the old books didn't have one either — but the colophon says how it is put together, if you are the sort of person who wonders.

— M.