Ann Blair sent me an illustration she showed during her fascinating talk on the history of the book:

Click on image to download large version

The cabinet was designed by Vincentius Placcius. It had 3,000 hooks for topics, each with places where you could hang scraps of paper with notes pertaining to those topics.

BTW, I came across a fascinating blog on note taking that says that Leibniz had perhaps a million notes on scraps of paper, and owned a Placcius cabinet. Leibniz certainly corresponded with Placcius.

[Tags: note_taking knowledge placcius leibniz ann_blair everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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