Keeping a Commonplace Book

Just before Christmas, I read a book review written by Dwight Garner (click here for an interview of him at Poets and Writers magazine) for the New York Times, and rather than go to the library and look for the book he reviewed, I got online and looked Garner up, He struck me somehow as a kindred soul; his priorities about what makes a book good seemed to echo my own. In addition, I liked the way he wrote – both clear and clever – and I liked his sentences at the level of word choices, I liked his wit. What I found as I looked into his writing was that he has a book out titled Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany. This book, in previous centuries, would most likely have been called a “commonplace book,” and my New Year’s resolution has been to create one of my own. As with Garner, I’m not looking for Deep Thoughts. Not cascading advice for writers about other writers’ thoughts about writing. Definitely not Bartlett’s. Just sentences I love.

Wikipedia’s definition of a commonplace book is this: “Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes. Entries are most often organized under systematic subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries , which are chronological and introspective.“

I’ve never been interested in keeping a diary – my grandmother gave me one when I was about eleven, and I only managed to keep a record of what I ate for breakfast for several weeks before I gave up. There is only so much that can be said about oatmeal or eggs. Though I could play a mean game of tether-balI, I lacked the skill of introspection at that age.

This book is a collection, a miscellany culled from many, many more, of sentences Garner has loved. They’re not “passages” from books. None are very long. And they’re not organized by category. Instead, he says he put them together by “feel” – “I’ve tried to let the comments speak to one another and perhaps throw off unexpected sparks.” Often the sentences he chooses have a certain quirkiness or energy, a distinct sound to the words strung together, thoughts that might never have occurred to him but which delight or surprise him. He quotes Walt Whitman who said as his own preferences became clear to him that he liked words of “unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance.” (Fair warning, Garner’s book gets salty often enough to make even Whitman blush.)

Describing his commonplace book, Garner puts it this way: “It’s where I write down favorite sentences from novels, stories, poems, and songs, from plays and movies, from overheard conversations. Lines that made me sit up in my seat, lines that jolted my awake….Into it I’ve poured verbal delicacies, ‘the blast of a trumpet,’ as Emerson put it, and bits of scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader. Yea, for I am an underliner, a destroyer of books, and maybe you are, too.”

Garner has been collecting his lines for nearly forty years. His miscellany is over 200 pages long, with a nicely organized index. I’m late beginning. But I’m going to give it a try. I’ve added some photos of old commonplace books into this post to inspire you, simply because – well – they’re beautiful.

Here are just a few gems from Garner’s miscellany:

“You have to laugh trouble down to a size where you can talk about it.” (Dan Jenkins)

“It’s only words, unless they’re true.” (David Mamet in Speed the Plow)

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.” (Colette, attributed)

“You are mine, I say to the twice-dunked cruller, before I eat it.” (Rita Dove, Describe Yourself in Three Words or Less)

“Every woman should have a blowtorch.” (Julia Child, attributed)

Here’s wishing you all a very Happy New Year!

Quick postscript: Next on my list of good books to read is Garner’s latest, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating While Reading. Love the title. Love the cover.