Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age by Ann Blair (review)

We are used to thinking of the “information overload” from which all of us suffer nowadays as a peculiarly contemporary phenomenon, much like “jet lag.” Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know demonstrates, on the contrary, that this ailment has been around for a very long time: starting in classical antiquity and gathering pace in the Middle Ages, it reached epidemic proportions from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the period on which her erudite and entertaining book focuses. While we are inclined to see Tim Berners-Lee and the Internet as both the source of and remedy for our ills, early modern scholars looked instead to Gutenberg and the printing press: the glut of printed matter produced a demand for large-scale printed reference works, in Latin, which collected between two covers everything one needed—or might need—to know, systematically organized and fully equipped with finding tools to facilitate retrieval. But just as the age of computers has failed to produce the “paperless” office, so too the age of print did not make quills and manuscripts obsolete: many ingenious methods were devised for taking, sorting, and storing handwritten notes. The most intriguing of these placed a premium on flexibility: a note cabinet with hooks, each labeled with a topic, on which slips of paper could be hung and rehung, as the notetaker’s ideas developed; and a forerunner of the Post-it note, which employed reusable glue to enable the easy transfer of cut-and-pasted material from one place to another in a thematically arranged notebook.