Gathering Information, 17th Century

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 825  Blog Bookstore

This image from Michael Lesy’s  wonderful Real Life, Louisville in the Twenties--a collection of interesting and naïve found photographs—has taken a life of its own.  It is probably a photo of a hosiery department (?) for a large clothing store taken during the great halcyon days of advanced hosiery as this is a very serious collection and display with what looks like waaay too many clerks to service god knows how many clients all buying hosiery at the same time.  Hosiery or not, whatever skinny thing it was in those flat boxes looks  as though whatever variety or size was needed by whatever verity or sized customer could be accessed in a minute or less, sending the customer on their way so that the next one buying unit could be serviced and dispensed, and so on into the night. 

But I prefer to think of the stuff in the boxes as letters, or words, or just plain old data:  sat for instance instead of this place being a clothing store it was a department store for writing, and this was the Poetry Section, selling words by the order, one word at a time.  Or perhaps the boxes held images.  Or entire ideas—just not entire, finished works. 

And why wouldn’t data and ideas have been stored and sold like this rather than hosiery or handkerchiefs?

This got me thinking a little about the storage and dispensing of information in antiquarian times, about how some of the writers of great and high-erudite works were actually able to accomplish their efforts. Deep into the early and future-vision-primitive history of online digital exploration, it is difficult to imagine producing works of sustained viability using combinations of only (private) libraries,  memory palaces¹, correspondence and notes.  Today the internet accounts for less than 1% of the time of advanced scholarship in all of  human history, but it has probably accounted for significant contributions to half of all the academic stuff that has ever been written--and we’re all probably terribly spoiled by the instant access to info in our datacentric existence.  

My own digital addiction in mind, I marvel at the accomplishments of people like Vincent Placcius (1642-1699), a vastly learned guy who sorted out 2,777 anonymous publications in 1500 pages, somehow, three hundred years ago.  He wrote a monumental bibliographical work 

 

 (Theatrum Anonymorum et Pseudonynorum²) with superb references, and did so with what we would today deem relatively nothing.  Placcius did have some sort chest-like devices with rods and pins and god knows what that functioned in a way I don’t understand as a note-keeping/comparing device.  I’ve included images of the device (below) in the hope that someone out there might recognize and explain it.  In any event, this superb piece of scholarship—the first of its kind—had to have taken a lifetime of reading and understanding and investigation to reveal.  The frontispiece to the book shows the author in  a library unmasking two anonymous authors, the masks of other conquests linked above him on a chord. 

Another example in the how-did-they-do-it category is Stanislaus Lubienitzky’s (1623-1675) Theatrum Cometicum…(1667), a powerhouse of data on all things cometary.  Lubienitzky recorded all manners of observations and reports of all comets ever recorded in extant chronicle or published work. Ever.  It is a vast and learned work of incredible determination.

NOTES:

1. See Frances Yates for the great standard on memory devices, The Art of Memory (1966).  And as long as we’re at it, her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1971) are also terrific works on a very high order. 

2.  Theatrum Anonymorum et Pseudonynorum2, Ex Symbolis & Collatione Virorum Per Europam Doctissimorum Ad Celeberrrimorum, Post Syntagma Dudum Editum, Summa Beati Auctoris Cura Reclusum...1708

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

"This got me thinking a little about the storage and dispensing of information in antiquarian times, about how some of the writers of great and high-erudite works were actually able to accomplish their efforts"

Yes. I've discussed this recently with David Platt of "Where London Stood" http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/71/Home , regarding the task of finding examples of ruined London scenarios in Victorian texts. Even if it's limited to only the past couple of centuries - and I know I've moaned along with others about faulty metadata - I'm still boggling at how Google Books enables anyone to do in minutes or hours lexicographical research that would have taken decades for someone pre-Internet.

[Ray Girvan]

"Placcius did have some sort chest-like devices with rods and pins and god knows what that functioned in a way I don’t understand as a note-keeping/comparing device"

There's a brief explanation here: Coping with Information Overload in Early Modern Europe http://web.princeton.edu/sites/english/csbm/papers/blairpaper.doc

It contained lots of hooks with topic labels; he wrote notes on little slips of paper which went on the appropriate hook.