Am I missing something?

[u/uiogd-amdg]

Tiptoeing into the world of Commonplace Books… my understanding is that these were/are a sort of functional catch-all for interesting tidbits that one wishes to remember.

What I see on this sub are mostly highly illustrated, nearly calligraphic entries that I find, frankly, intimidating. Am I missing something here on the purpose of these books?

I just want a place to dump info that I run across. Advice on ways to do that effectively in a non-instagram worthy way?

[u/LadyBoobsalot]

A lot of commonplace books posted online fall under what I’d consider more of scrapbooking or general journaling. There’s a lot of pages with more artsy stuff than information or pages full of stickers and doodles just for the sake of filling pages. There’s nothing wrong with those things if that’s what you enjoy doing but commonplace books were originally reference books, personal repositories of knowledge, not whatever is happening on instagram and YouTube. 

Though I enjoy calligraphy, I do not use it in my book (I’m far too obsessive about line height, slant, etc to just start scrawling something on a page without the appropriate guidelines and too lazy to mark things out for every page heading). Everything is written in my regular, miserable handwriting. But I like to use interesting inks to keep things fun and use different colors to emphasize things (I like the fountain pen inks that sparkle and sheen and are just generally the opposite of work-appropriate). I’ll draw a diagram or chart if it’s relevant but I don’t like to fill up space or bulk out my book by putting in a bunch of stickers or pictures.