Temporary Indexing
Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp · The MIT Press eBooks · 2011
The invention of the printing press led to a book flood, which inundated libraries and prompted efforts not only to sort through the masses of books, but also to furnish an exact and thematically purposeful orientation. Wanting to navigate through the book flood, the Swiss doctor, polymath, and mountaineer Konrad Gessner (1516–1565) published the Bibliotheca Universalis; the first two of three planned volumes in 1545 and 1548. This chapter describes Gessner’s paper machine, and pursues the tradition of this device in early modern times and the Baroque era, especially in the art of excerption.