The Commonplace Section is available for free to all readers of this substack, a repository of my reading and thinking particularly connected to living a creative life. It’s the raw material that I use for creating monthly projects and the core offering, Gameplan, for paying subscribers.

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”…fundamentally the commonplace method is a system for collecting quotations and other bits of information for personal use” -

A Commonplace practice produces a personal collection, in the past this has been books, scrapbooks and albums.

The specific unit of information or scraps might be thought of as an intermediate packets a term coined by Tiago Forte that refers to building blocks of information for future work such as essays, books, presentations etc. (for our purposes we’ll just call them notes)

The common place has been used to collect quotes, newspaper clippings and is the predecessor of more visual forms of scrapbooking. I’m particularly drawn to one Anna Jameson’s method of commonplacing where she wraps quotes with her own thoughts. Here is an example courtesy of Jillian M. Hess in ‘How Romantics And Victorians Organized Information.

I READ in the life of Garrick that, “about 1741, a taste for Shakespeare had lately been revived by the encouragement of some distinguished persons of tastes of both sexes; but especially by the ladies who formed themselves into a society, called the ‘Shakespeare Club.” There exist a Shakespeare Society at this present time, but I do not know that any ladies are members of it, or allowed to be so.

— Jameson, A Commonplace book of Thoughts

One of the core features of a commonplace practice is the index, which gives the creator or collector of the notes the ability to access their notes when they need them.

It’s also a difficult thing to keep updated. In this digital version, I’m going to attempt to keep an alphabetical index of links.

In this Commonplace section I offer no practical advice and little commentary other than the notes themselves. Feel free to use them as raw material or the beginning of a rabbit hole. You can toggle this section on and off the here.

For a practical and instructive experience I create a new 5-Day project every month. The first one introduces The Ten Minute Visual Journal Method, and it’s FREE

“Thus, contents of commonplace books became increasingly specific and personal rather than generally applicable” -

This (Easter) Sunday afternoon, on the 4th April 2026 my office studio is transformed into a study.

And sandwiching a nap, I wrestle from my arm chair, to my daybed to my desk with Jillian M. Hess’s book. “HOW ROMANTICS AND VICTORIANS ORGANISED INFORMATION, Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums.

As I read the history of the practice, it occurs to me that our human need or desire to organise information could only ever lead to the invention of something like the Large Language Models, that serve as a kind of collective commonplace book. And making general knowledge universally available to anyone with a browser window and the ability to type or speak a prompt.

This access and excess of general knowledge, makes specific and personal knowledge all the more valuable.

In the Commonplace section of this substack, I am collecting or ‘commonplacing’ this specific and personal knowledge.

This is the ‘dead stock’ that while valuable has yet to be transformed into a ‘saleable commodity’. Here’s the trade, I offer this commonplace to you freely, and your attention compels me to make the entries at least comprehensible.

This post will serve as the index for this section.

I’m aware that most indexes fail, still I will give it my best go by tagging posts and indexing the tags. (Thanks to For the suggestion)

Index of Tags

Note Taking