Would love links to any descriptions of the systems used by Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) or Johann Jacob Moser (1701–1785)

I’m only halfway down the rabbit hole on some of these sources myself, a task made harder by my lack of facility with German. I am reasonably positive that the Gessner and Moser references are going to spring directly out of the commonplace book tradition, but include some of the innovation of having notes on slips of paper so that they’re more easily re-arranged.

I’m also sitting on a huge trove of unpublished research which provides a lot more evidence and a trail of context which is missing from the short provocative statement I’ve made. I’ve added a few snippets to the Wikipedia page on Zettelkasten which outlines pieces for the curious.

I suspect soon enough I’ll have a handful of journal articles and/or a book to cover some of the more modern history of notes and note taking that picks up where Earle Havens’ Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2001) leaves off.

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