Review: Midori Commonplace Book

I’ve been commonplacing for quite a while and have used a variety of notebooks for this purpose, but I’ve recently tried out Midori’s dedicated Commonplace book. This is an A6 card cover notebook full of Midori’s incredible, fountain pen friendly paper, and it has several features that make it perfect for commonplacing and organising notes. 

These notebooks come in two colours, grey and beige, and I picked up two of them from The Stationer a couple of months ago, and have been loving them! 

But let’s start out with a quick explanation of commonplacing, if you’re unfamiliar, before we get into the features that make these notebooks so useful.

Commonplacing is the act of collecting information from various places into a notebook (or other paper based system) with the intention of reviewing it later. This information can include quotes, poems, lyrics, facts and information, lists, or anything really that interests you. 

Obviously it’s a lot easier to refer back to things you previously wrote down if it is well organised, and there’s several ways to do this. The most common one is by using a key and a page of contents. You can create this yourself in any notebook, which is what I’ve previously done, but the Midori Commonplace book has this all built in already. 

There is space for your key at the beginning of the book, and additionally you get a bookmark where you can add your key, which makes it a lot easier to reference without having to continually flip back to your front page. 

There’s also an index page where you can catalogue your entries. Unfortunately the line for you to write the topic is quite small, and there are only 61 spaces, so if you plan to write a lot of shorter entries, like me, this may not work out for you (I may create an index at the back instead). 

The pages themselves are gridded, with a slightly darker margin on the left, which is intended to help you colour code your entries, according to your key. I’ve been using small dot stickers to assign a topic to each of my entries. The pages are also numbered, which helps a lot when it comes to indexing your entries.

The paper itself is fantastic, as you’d expect from Midori, and highly fountain pen friendly. Although I did find the grid to be very small, so if you have big handwriting like me, you may have to write across two lines. 

I’ve included a couple of example photos below of how I’ve been using the notebooks:

Overall, I really like these notebooks, and can see myself continuing to use these for my commonplacing. These perhaps aren’t for everyone, as I can imagine a lot of people preferring a larger, bound book over a small, staple bound booklet. But I personally like my commonplace book being smaller, and the extra features make it worth it for me. They are also reasonably priced at just £4.95, which seems fair for the quality of the paper.

So have you tried the Midori Commonplace book? What notebook do you prefer for commonplacing?