venta

Today's word from The Calendar is quotationipotent.

- Powerful in quotation.

from T. Lewis Davies' Supplemental English Glossary, 1881

On my bookshelf, I have a plain, blue hard-backed exercise book. My initials are doodled on its cover in black marker and red biro, and a bent, coming-unstuck blue Dymo label (remember them?) announces that it is a Commonplace Book. Inside the front cover, an inscription in my Mum's best italic says that it was given to me as an Easter present shortly before (I think) I was eleven.

During my childhood, I was fascinated by two big red hard-back books my mum had. One was her recipe book, the other her Commonplace Book. Both were filled with accumulated yearsworths of hand-written pages, and I loved the idea that one day the smooth, clean book I'd been given would look just like them.

Very few people seem to be familiar with the idea of a Commonplace Book, despite the popularity of John Julius Norwich's publications. A published book of someone else's commonplaces, though, can never be the same. You lose the variety leant by the use of different pens, by the days when you wrote in a hurry. You lose the texture created by writing on a page made uneven by the glue on its other side. A Commonplace Book is made by a process of slow, almost organic, evolution; it could not be bought, or created in a short space of time. I recently read The Cure For Death By Lightning which opens with a marvelous description of the narrator's mother's Commonplace Book.

Mine is still very much in its embryonic stage. It's lost the neat look of a new book, and developed the slight fatness that comes with use and from trying to hold more layers of paper than it was designed for, but it has a long way to go before it develops that proper lifetime look. The first pages are covered with wobbly, self-conscious copies of Kipling poems, written with the fountain pen I'd only recently acquired. Pictures of cute cuddly toys, and a couple of cartoons are glued in, and then there's a silence for a few years.

It picks up speed again during the time I was at university. Quotes, song lyrics, cartoons, flyers I liked, things people said - anything I thought worth remembering has been copied or pasted in. It isn't a diary; there are no entries detailing what I did or thought, but the nature of the entries - say, a picture torn from the college news sheet - often indicates what I was up to at the time.

Sadly, I still don't remember to copy things in as often as I'd like. I regularly spot a line or two in a novel which I'd like to remember, but am somewhere else at the time and can never find the line again, or forget to look. Of course, it's not something I can resolve to do. I can't set out each evening thinking "What will today's quote be?". By its nature, the thing is serendipitous, and this is why I love it.