What Is A Common Place Book Club?
The Commonplace book club is a periodic event in the Noted Substack, created by writer/professor Jillian Hess. Her substack features note taking practices from well known and not so well known people, such as Martin Luther King, Kurt Cobain, Edward Hopper, and even from her subscribers. I’ve been a subscriber for about a year now. It’s interesting and inspirational to see how others create and use notes in their work and other pursuits.
The Commonplace book club is a subscriber driven event, where for each day of a month Jillian provides a short quote from her common placing journey, and other subscribers then submit something themselves, if they want to. In the year that I’ve been a member of her Substack, she’s conducted a common place book club several times.
What’s a Common Place book?
A commonplace book is simply a record of quotes, recipes, proverbs, song lyrics, bits of knowledge, observations, overheard conversations, ideas, or anything else that you might find useful to review in the future. It’s called a commonplace book because all of this information is stored, or recorded, in a Common Place.
Commonplace books can be analog or digital, general, or dedicated to specific topics. Read more about them in a prior post on this blog.
Jillian has written a book about note taking by the Victorians and Romantics, which is linked here. I haven’t read it yet.
Can I See Examples of Common Placing?
My Submissions to the January, 2025 Common Place Book Club. Enjoy!
Week 1
- January 1: “He lived happily ever after, to the end of his days”. (Bilbo Baggins writing his memoir in The Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien))
- January 2: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.” (Stephen Covey, perhaps based on an African proverb)
- January 3: “You never know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from” (Cormac McCarthy)
- January 4: “Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life.” (William Zinsser)
- January 5: “When you are creating, you realize where your knowledge gaps are.” (Charlotte Fraza on Youtube)
- January 6: “Learning how to learn is the most important tool you can have.” (Barbara Oakley). “At some point you have to teach yourself how to teach yourself.” (Mary Flower)
- January 7: “There should be a tax surcharge on songs that have just four chords, and a tax credit for modulations.” and “I’m a musical maximalist–but I’m forced to admit that three-chord songs are deeper than four-chord songs. The four-chord is static, just vamp till ready. The three-chord song is twisted, unstable, dynamic. Let’s thank Robert Johnson for that.” (both quotes by Ted Gioia)
Week 2
- January 8: “Perfection is the enemy of progress.” (Cara Stevens on Medium). She goes on to write “…especially when tackling the first draft…think of the first draft as building a foundation. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It just needs to be sturdy enough to support what comes next.”
- January 9: “No man, engaged in literary occupations, ought to be without the advantage of a Common Place book, which may serve as the register of his sentiments, resulting either from the exploring activity of a contemplative mind, or investigations of a scientific nature.” (The British Critic, February, 1794)
- January 10: “Some days you are the dog. Some days you are the hydrant.” (sign seen inside a florist shop in Newport, Oregon)
- January 11: “I can always tell when they use fake dinosaurs in movies.” (dadjokes on Instagram)
- January 12: “Onward” (A common tag line by magician-author-friend Jon Racherbaumer-RIP)
- January 13: “The universe is a big place, a big machine, and we are just cogs with worn teeth trying to get through it all to tomorrow,” (Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut))
- January 14: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” (attributed to the Tao te Ching). “You teach yourself what you most need to learn.” (Richard Bach)
Week 3
- January 15: “When you draw, you notice details that you might otherwise miss. You engage with your surroundings in a deeper and ore meaningful way.” and “The goal isn’t to create masterpieces. It is to capture memories in a meaningful way.” (Danny Gregory)
- January 16: “The only way to achieve the impossible is to believe that it is possible.” (Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland)
- January 17: “They discuss the rainfall, not enough to wet a stamp.” (Hilary Mantel in Giving Up The Ghost)
- January 18: “Keep you eye on the donut, not the hole.” (David Lynch)
- January 19; “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” (Soren Kierkegaard)
- January 20: “Today I will live in the moment unless it is unpleasant in which case I will eat a cookie.” (Cookie Monster on Twitter)
- January 21: “Stretch your brain” (Felix Hoenikker, a character in Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut))
Week 4
- January 22: “It doesn’t matter what you remember, but what you think you remember.” (Hilary Mantel in Giving Up The Ghost)
- January 23: “Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” (Jim Rohn)
- January 24: “Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.” (Jack London)
- January 25: “A mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you, than you see in yourself, and helps bring it out of you.” (I’ve seen this attributed to both Bob Proctor and Bob Goshen)
- January 26: “Self taught, are you?” Julian Castle asked Newt. “Isn’t everyone?”, Newt inquired. (Kurt Vonnegut in Cats Cradle)
- January 27: “Unescorted children will be given espresso and a free puppy.” (sign in a Portland, Oregon coffee shop)
- January 28: “But that doesn’t mean I have to like what happened. I like having you as my friend more than I like having you as my enemy.” (Alastair Reynolds in Pushing Ice)
Week 5
- January 29: People want you to think critically until you actually do it.” (Chris Meyer)
- January 30: “Notes aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process.” (Richard Feynman)
- January 31: “Most ‘experts’ seem to point to February as the time when complete amnesia sets in regarding resolutions.” (Yotam Ottolenghi in Eat (Sunday New York Times magazine) January 19, 2025)