Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age

(Yale University Press)

Information overload is not an experience unique to the computer age, argues the author, who writes that the invention of the printing press and the ensuing abundance of books provoked 16th- and 17th-century European scholars to register complaints similar to those heard today. A history professor at Harvard University, Blair examines the techniques that scholars and readers developed for gathering, sorting, and storing facts in early modern Europe.