'Muggletonians and animals'

Good piece at the Telegraph about naturalist Charles Davies Sherborn and his 'little slips of paper'. (Link courtesy of Brent, who saw it here.)

A related bit, loosely speaking: Ann Blair at Rorotoko on her new book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. (Via Bookforum. Here Blair describes her own favorite chapter in the book:

For the most committed note-takers one German professor, Vincent Placcius, published in 1689 instructions for building a large closet in which to store one's notes taken on slips of paper: when opened out the closet could store up 3,000 topical labels, each with a hook onto which to stick the slips that corresponded to that topic.

If you missed it the first time I linked to it, take a look atthis lovely LRB piece by Keith Thomas on his own reliance on little slips of paper.

(I seem to write regularly here about indexing...)