Premodern Information Overload

Information overload is nothing new. First there were all those clay tablets, then the manuscripts, then what philosopher/librarian Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) referred to as “that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing.” In Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, Ann M. Blair explores how the flood of information was managed in the old days. She focuses on the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe and, as well, on early modern reference books—dictionaries, florilegia (essentially, quotation collections), miscellanies, commonplace books, indexes, bibliographies, and the like—intended for “consultation reading.” These compilations offered convenient shortcuts to knowledge, but their use sometimes triggered complaints that, Blair notes, resemble complaints heard today about using Google and Wikipedia. Her scholarly study helps put many modern developments into perspective.

Indexed. 416P. $45 from Yale University Press (978-0-300-11251-1).