On keeping a commonplace book for forty years

A commonplace book is a private anthology made at reading speed. It gathers quotations, scraps of news, recipes, descriptions of streets, arguments worth carrying forward, and remarks that refuse to leave the mind. Unlike an academic notebook, it does not demand a finished argument. Unlike a diary, it reaches beyond the writer’s own day. It is both a reading companion and a record of attention, carrying the texture of a life among books.

The practice is old. Historically, a commonplace book was a shared collection of useful passages: maxims, histories, proverbs, remedies and exemplary sentences. Its keeper supplied the connective labour, choosing what deserved another person’s attention. The modern version is usually private, but that difference is deceptive. Every personal collection contains an implied audience in the future reader, even when that reader is only the writer returning years later.

Keeping one for forty years adds another layer. The early pages hold ideas that seemed important then; later pages show which questions remained alive. Old handwriting, fading ink and sudden changes in subject reveal a developing self more accurately than a retrospective biography can. The notebook becomes an archaeological site in miniature, with each layer partly visible beneath the next.

The reward for four decades of this practice is not perfect recall but renewed encounter. Its pages allow an old sentence to meet a changed circumstance, and a forgotten case to return beside a fresh question. The object records more than what was read. It records how the reader was altered by reading. That is why the habit deserves a place beside the serious business of writing.

A Private Anthology Rather Than a Diary

The difference between a commonplace book and a diary is a difference of purpose. A diary answers the question of what happened on a particular day. A commonplace book asks what is worth remembering beyond that day. It may contain an event, but only as the occasion for a quotation, a legal principle, an image or an unresolved doubt. Time enters the notebook as a network of meanings rather than a straight line of entries.

The pages are intentionally mixed. A passage from a novel can sit beside a courtroom observation; a line about Irish landscape can follow a note on race, justice or memory. This disorder can look careless until the keeper begins to see patterns. Themes recur in different disguises. A legal question returns as a moral question, then as a personal one. The notebook allows those crossings without requiring an immediate conclusion.

That possibility explains why a commonplace book should remain more than a storehouse of quotations. Selection is judgement, and judgement changes with time. A passage copied for its eloquence may later be valued for its error. A remark dismissed as trivial may reveal the social world in which it was made. Keeping the text leaves room for the keeper’s former self to be questioned by the present one.

Gathering Fragments Worth Keeping

There is no single correct method, but a modest routine helps. A successful system resembles an unhurried reading journal rather than a filing cabinet. The keeper reads with a pencil nearby, leaves a few blank pages at the back of whatever book is at hand, and transfers only what continues to trouble them after the chapter closes. Speed matters less than return. A sentence copied immediately may satisfy the moment; one copied a week later reveals what has actually remained.

The kinds of entries that have earned their place in these collections include:

• A sentence copied from a novel because its cadence still resists paraphrase.
• A newspaper report that shows how an ordinary policy reaches a particular neighbourhood.
• A phrase overheard on a tram or in a busy market, preserved because its timing was exact.
• A question written beside an essay and left open until another book supplies part of an answer.

Each entry is dated, though not every fragment is explained at the time. Sometimes a later note supplies the missing context, and sometimes it does not. That incompleteness is valuable. A commonplace book should not become a museum of settled conclusions. Its loose threads leave visible the live edge of thought, where a reader’s attention can meet another reader’s argument in the margins.

Reading Through a Southern Hemisphere

In Melbourne, the notebook has an obvious companion: the tram. It opens on a crowded ride from Carlton to the central city, or on a slower run through the eastern suburbs, with the words of one writer competing against traffic, conversation and the smell of coffee. Movement can be an aid to attention. The page becomes a place to hold a thought that would otherwise be lost between stops.

Sydney offers another kind of weather test. Humid air, a sudden downpour and the hard glare off the harbour can make paper and ink behave differently from the drier interiors familiar from books shelved in cooler climates. Pages cockle, ink blooms or fades, and the keeper acquires a practical respect for archival materials. Such accidents become part of the biography of the collection.

A notebook intended to last must also travel. When a volume is sent through Australia Post, packed in a rigid carton with cushioning around the spine, the care taken in packing becomes part of its preservation. The post office offers no special protection for marginalia; that responsibility rests with the keeper. A plastic sleeve, a dry storage place and a patient habit of checking for damp will do more than any grand gesture.

History in the Margins

History enters these notebooks through the margins. Gideon’s Children grew from attention to Clarence Earl Gideon, whose case exposed a grave failure in the right to counsel. A notebook in which such questions are kept becomes more than a literary record: it traces the movement from an individual injustice to a public principle. Notes on institutions, evidence and human dignity sit beside reflections on the writer’s own stake in justice.

Travel supplies a different archive. An Irish Experience, Franklin’s memoir and travelogue, turns observation of place into an inquiry into memory, belonging and the stories nations tell about themselves. On a page about Ireland, a landscape detail may sit beside a legal memory or a fragment from another culture. Such juxtapositions matter. They reveal that identity is made from routes and inheritances, not from a sealed border.

Readers in Australia have a particular reason to treat a private notebook with care. Under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), fair dealing for research or study is recognised for certain uses, while attribution and moral rights remain relevant when material is later shared. Keeping notes is not the same as acquiring permission to republish them. A personal collection may be intimate and still carry legal obligations, especially if it is scanned, posted or turned into an anthology.

The Australian Market for Marginalia

Australian readers encounter used books in a distinctive local market of independent bookshops, university outlets, charity shops and online sellers. Secondhand shelves are often richer in marginalia than new stock: previous owners have pencilled arguments, marked passages and left the occasional pressed leaf. These traces can make an inexpensive copy more valuable as a document of reading, though notes made in pencil are usually easier to remove than ink.

The features most likely to be appreciated in a well-used copy include:

• Durable paper that accepts a soft pencil without bleeding through to the next page.
• Wide margins that can hold a response without squeezing the printed text into illegibility.
• A sound binding, because a book opened flat invites more annotations and survives more repeated handling.
• Provenance that can be explained, such as a former owner’s name, date or reading-group inscription.

None of these qualities matters more than honest condition. A clean copy can be the better choice for a working notebook, while a marked-up book may suit a collector who values evidence of use. The search is tactile: leaf through the book, look for erasures, tears and glued-in notes, and consider whether the previous reader’s marks deepen the text or obscure it. The most satisfying commonplace books tend to preserve both clarity and evidence of use.

Carrying the Habit Forward

At the fortieth year, the usefulness of a commonplace book cannot be measured by the number of quotations it contains. Its importance lies in the conversations it permits: between one book and the next, between observation and argument, between what the keeper believed then and what experience has taught since. A collection becomes a record of attention when it preserves those changes rather than disguising them.

Digital copies can support the paper volumes, but the notebook should not be treated as a disposable keyboard. Searchable text is excellent for finding a name or date; it is less revealing about sequence, hesitation and the pressure of a thought. A page photographed in good light, with its folio noted, can preserve a record without stripping it of texture. The physical volume remains the centre of the archive, gathering ephemeral slips, annotations and reflections into something durable.

Franklin died in 2016, but his work continues to speak to readers encountering law, literature and public memory for the first time. His website preserves biographical notes, selected writing, reviews and recorded interviews, alongside material on Ireland, civil rights and race. Together, these pieces offer a view of a writer whose interests moved easily between the personal and the public.

Explore Gideon’s Children, An Irish Experience and the wider archive at Howard G. Franklin’s website.