The Joy of a Commonplace Book

Is your sketchbook too "clean"? Maybe it's time to revisit it as an idea-generator and memory-keeper, as a "commonplace book."

We’ve all seen them, those video or carousel posts showing off an immaculate sketchbook, where each page looks gallery-worthy. Trying to make each page a work of art puts a lot of pressure on you as a creator to make “finished” work rather than using the space as a scratch pad, a place to get ideas started and then tinker with them. Those messy pages are also a good place to record poems, song lyrics, quotes, conversations, and ephemera from your day that has left a little impression on you. “You have to be a magpie,” author Heather Parry said in a workshop, “collect everything from the world around you. You never know when you’ll use something.” For centuries we’ve been collecting these kinds of notes in books like sketchbooks or commonplace books. The commonplace book is a personal repository of knowledge, ideas, reflections, advertisements.

Leonardo Da Vinci was a prolific keeper of notes - he called them “zibaldones” or “heaps of things” and “salad of many herbs” in Italian.

If you’re thinking this sounds like a scrapbook, or diary, you’re not wrong - there is overlap and shared properties between the different variations of personally kept books. I (Nora), find this definition from Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray’s “Is It a Diary, Commonplace Book, Scrapbook, or Whatchamacallit? Six Years of Exploration in New England's Manuscript Archives,” helpful:

“While the folks who created these literary items recognized each one’s distinct form and purpose (the diary to record daily events, the commonplace books to transcribe extracts from printed matter, the household account book to track expenses, and the scrapbook to house clippings), in practice they often merged formats, so that a diary, for example could easily morph into a scrapbook or a scrapbook into a commonplace book.”

The Greeks and Romans jotted down ideas and advice (and probably arguments) in personal notebooks called hypomnemata. In the Medieval period, scholars recorded Biblical quotes and passages from classical authors in notebooks called florilegia ("gatherings of flowers"). During the Renaissance, folks started to love keeping personal notebooks when people started reading more (thanks to the printing press, books were more widely available)—how else might you keep abreast of all the information that was out there? ”Commonplace books” became a compilation of notes, from recipes, literary passages, and quotes. Michel de Montaigne’s essays began as a commonplace book. The philosopher John Locke even formalized a method of note-taking, complete with an indexing method. The author Charley Locke describes her contemporary “commonplacing” practice as though it’s a kind of diary that doesn’t embarrass her to revisit years later.

Check out Locke’s indexing method: “When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA. I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. If in the space marked E. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.” (1706)

Frida Kahlo’s diary served as a commonplace book, filled with vibrant sketches, poems, and deeply personal reflections on her life and work.

Frida Kahlo’s diary/commonplace book, wonderfully messy.

Joseph Cornell kept journals and dossiers of ephemera, clippings, and notes that inspired his collage-like shadow boxes.

This Cornell collection contains notes on "Clowns, Elephants and Ballerinas" project for Dance Index and the principle of "metaphysique d'ephemera."

Henry Darger created extensive notebooks that compiled images, text, and drafts for his sprawling visual-narrative works—including a six-volume weather report (!).

When I teach Zines and Handmade Books at the University of New Mexico, the students and I make our own commonplace books using a sewn chain stitch. (I love trying to ditch the syllabus-first approach to teaching and make something right away.) This book becomes their place to be messy, to collect quotes, ideas, and inspirations, and plan their book projects for the semester. These books start a little worn and wonky—it’s the first project, after all. So, they don’t start out too precious or too pretty to make notes and freewrites in—it’s the material students collect that make them precious, sixteen weeks later.

Years ago, someone donated a couple hundred cliff notes, which we’ve been turning into commonplace books. I just ran out this semester—not sure what I will use next time!

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Thanks for reading Autobiographix! This newsletter is a labor of love, where we get to share a mix of the nonfiction comics that we’ve found captivating, interviews with comics creators, and some of our own work. Nora is a licensed counselor who teaches comics on the side. Amaris teaches at the University of New Mexico and is an artist-in-medicine at the cancer center there. Her recent graphic memoir is Unfiltered: A Cancer Year Diary, a collection of diary comics about kidney cancer.

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