For years I kept a commonplace book — a LaTeX document I typeset myself, printed, and carried around — into which went anything worth keeping: poems I wanted by heart, songs I wanted to sing, tunes I wanted to play, and recipes I kept getting wrong until I wrote down what went wrong.

These pages are the parts of it that travel well.

• Poems — the poems, from Frost and Yeats to Jabberwocky and Sam McGee.
• Vocal — sea shanties, pub songs, and guitar songs. Words only; the chords are left out.
• Pennywhistle — the tunes, as engraved sheet music.
• Recipes — the recipes, each with the running log of attempts that came with it.

The book also holds shape-note settings, contra dances, quotes, jokes, and bumper stickers, which are not (yet) here.