The wear of cards can be an important part of your history with the information you handle.

Luhmann’s slips show some of this sort of wear as well, though his show it to extreme as he used thinner paper than the standard index card so some of his slips have incredibly worn/ripped/torn tops more than any grime. Many of my own books show that grime layer on the fore-edge in sections which I’ve read and re-read.

One of my favorite examples of this sort of wear through use occurs in early manuscripts (usually only religious ones) where readers literally kissed off portions of illuminations when venerating the images in their books. Later illuminators included osculation targets to help prevent these problems. (Cross reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370119878_Touching_Parchment_How_Medieval_Users_Rubbed_Handled_and_Kissed_Their_Manuscripts_Volume_1_Officials_and_Their_Books)

(syndication link: https://boffosocko.com/2024/02/04/55821315/#comment-430267)

Ungenerous to take Alter to task for context which he might not have the background to comment upon.

Does Alter call it a "platitude" from it's historical context, or with respect to the modern context of Donald J. Trump and a wide variety of Republican Party members who are anything but Christian?

This would seem to indicate that reading's primary importance was to fuel capitalism and production. It certainly says a lot about American culture, particularly in a book that wants to focus on syntopical reading.

Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.

The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.

I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/05/tools-for-serious-readers.html

Interesting (now discontinued) reading list product from Levenger that in previous generations may have been covered by a commonplace book but was quickly replaced by digital social products (bookmark applications or things like Goodreads.com or LibraryThing.com).

Presently I keep a lot of this sort of data digitally myself using either/both: Calibre or Zotero.

https://jhiblog.org/reading-lists/

Dutcher suggest that there are three "purposes in reading": information, thought, and style.

https://www.levenger.com/reading-1140/bookends-and-bookstands-23025/tree-of-knowledge-book-stand-17300.aspx

Interesting piece of material culture hearkening back to an older analog era, but compatible with new digital technology (note the cut out for a power cord with use of a tablet or other digital reading/display device.)

Interesting take from way back.

https://archaeologyofreading.org/

The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.

Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)

Note here the presumed freedom to pick and choose based on interest and judgement. Who's judgement really? Book banning and religious battles would call to question which people got to exercise their own judgement.

https://site.pennpress.org/material-texts-2021/9780812236422/textual-situations/

This looks interesting for a later time...

Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers by Andrew Taylor

Generations of scholars have meditated upon the literary devices and cultural meanings of The Song of Roland. But according to Andrew Taylor not enough attention has been given to the physical context of the manuscript itself. The original copy of The Song of Roland is actually bound with a Latin translation of the Timaeus.

Textual Situations looks at this bound volume along with two other similarly bound medieval volumes to explore the manuscripts and marginalia that have been cast into shadow by the fame of adjacent texts, some of the most read medieval works. In addition to the bound volume that contains The Song of Roland, Taylor examines the volume that binds the well-known poem "Sumer is icumen in" with the Lais of Marie de France, and a volume containing the legal Decretals of Gregory IX with marginal illustrations of wayfaring life decorating its borders.

Approaching the manuscript as artifact, Textual Situations suggests that medieval texts must be examined in terms of their material support—that is, literal interpretation must take into consideration the physical manuscript itself in addition to the social conventions that surround its compilation. Taylor reconstructs the circumstances of the creation of these medieval bound volumes, the settings in which they were read, inscribed, and shared, and the social and intellectual conventions surrounding them.

https://infohist.fas.harvard.edu/news/information-cultures-series-john-hopkins-university-press

This looks like a fascinating series and who could go wrong with Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton, and Earle Havens?

Also interesting to see what sorts of things they will find interesting at the cutting edge of all these disciplines.

Where exactly do we situate note taking? Certainly within the space of rhetoric, but also as Ann M. Blair suggests within the history of reading.

What else? manuscript studies, psychology, others?