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Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3d century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century.

around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: Printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books was distracting readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention.

To confront this new challenge, printers, scholars, and compilers began to develop novel ways to manage all these texts — tools that listed, sorted under subject headings, summarized, and selected from all those books that no one person could master. Note-taking was one solution, which the humanist pedagogues advocated alongside their teaching of ancient rhetoric. But not everyone followed their advice to take notes from everything they read throughout their lives, and for those who didn’t, new kinds of reference books offered a ready-made version — collections of best bits that could be consulted using sophisticated indexes and tables of contents.