The history of excerpting is like that of the book. It is only in the context of *new media that the old book appears as a distinct medium, the particular forms and functions of which can be rediscovered. Only since we have begun to work digitally and do everything by copy and paste have we become aware of excerpting. Old methods, deployed in the *analog period to gather readings, pieces of information, and dates, have become the object of new historical interests. What was dismissed for a long time as the concern of learned men has recently been rediscovered as a praxis spanning eras and cultures, as historians came under the influence of and gained experience with *digital media and practices. As a result, a premodern perspective, which Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon defined over 250 years ago, has now been reaffirmed: excerpting is the collecting of “the thoughts of others,” which are necessary for “our own meditation.” One who relies only on his “own meditation” cannot become “knowledgeable.” The sciences are based on “experience”; no person can “have all of the pertinent experience in front of him.” One must build on “the experience of others”; therefore, one must excerpt and compile collections of excerpts. The cultural historian Ulrich Johannes Schneider described the impact of such ideas on the production of literature with lapidary precision: “no writing without reading.”
Historians who attend to the history of excerpting like to cite a passage from the letters of Pliny the Younger (Epistles III, 5, 10) on the reading practice of his uncle, the author of what premodern Europe considered the definitive and trendsetting natural history. In summer, seeking recreation after eating, he lay in the sun and had a book read aloud to him, writing down everything that seemed important to him. Above all, the nephew reports, his uncle’s reading was always combined with excerpting, in accordance with the maxim: no book is so bad that it cannot be useful in part. *Early modern texts often cited this ancient model. In those days, excerpting was considered an art (ars); treatises were written about it. The great response that the ars excerpendi (art of excerpting) awoke in the European world of Latin learning can be explained by the humanists’ interest in the *canon of ancient texts. Excerpting was closely related at the time to learning and practicing Latin on the basis of ancient authors.
They marked and underlined “passages” (*loci) in exemplary texts; they glossed them (between the lines or line by line in the margins of the text); they commented and translated; they memorized and transcribed. These methods were by no means invented by humanist scholars. They were practiced, through the application of various kinds of technologies, in all times and in all cultures founded on writing. If we concentrate on the meaning and role that the appropriation and dissection of the ancient (Latin) textual corpus played for the formation of the religious, cultural, and intellectual spheres in Europe, the time span between late antiquity and the eighteenth century can be seen as one long tradition of excerpting. The Bible and ancient texts provided an orienting model and set standards for what could claim legitimacy as religion and as scholarly knowledge. That is why the intensive appropriation of these texts mattered so much, and the first step in that appropriation was excerpting. This was also true of other cultures (such as the Arabic or Chinese) in which similar prestige was accorded to authoritative texts of the past.
With the rise of the humanist movement, excerpting in Europe became an object of school instruction and of intensive reflection on the norms, methods, practices, and media that played a role in the practice. The humanists saw it as their task to reconstruct antiquity, which they regarded as a practical, moral, and philosophical model, from the surviving textual witnesses. In order to distinguish their work from logic-centered medieval Aristotelian *scholasticism, they developed new methods for their engagement with texts, drawing on the ancient rhetorical and dialectical topics. In his enormously successful work De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (On the twofold abundance of words and things, first published in 1512), Erasmus of Rotterdam says that one could be called “learned” (eruditus) only if he, at least once in his life, mastered “every kind of author” (omne genus autorum) through reading. To undertake this task, one must “equip himself beforehand with as many loci as possible” (prius sibi quam plurimos comparabit locos).
Printing introduced to humanists new opportunities for the interpretation of the ancient tradition. It set generally identical and standardized texts at one’s disposal. If the loci in the tradition of the ancient art of memory were places, each one an individually conceived space of memory, now they could be understood more easily and without further ado as identifiable “passages” in certain writings. In antiquity, loci designated, on the one hand, formal instruments for the discovery and order of arguments; on the other hand, they were fixed turns of phrase (loci communes) that should be committed to memory. With printing, they increasingly developed into instruments with whose help texts were searched. Likewise, loci served as important categories for the ordering of identified learned materials, which were stored less in memory than in “secondary” memory media. Excerpting as a humanist practice has two essential components: selecting from learned material with the help of loci and compiling it systematically by loci. Erasmus (in De duplici copia verborum ac rerum) and other humanists had printed exemplary models of this method with great success, though scholars also laid them out for private use in the form of bound manuscript volumes.
Today, excerpting and commonplacing are widely used as synonyms. Excerpting and its equivalents in other European languages go back to the Latin excerpere, which designates selecting in its many connotations (to select, to make or remove excerpts, to delete), while commonplacing refers to the locus communis or “common place.” This term more strongly accentuates the chosen products and their compilation, which can be explained etymologically: in the early modern period the term loci communes not only could signify selected topics, exempla, and sayings, but also was transferred to the *commonplace book itself, the storage medium for loci communes.
In principle, one could understand any element obtained from an arbitrary pattern as excerpts—be they passages out of writings, notes of different kinds and origins, or indeed notes that record experiences and observations—and the activity that produced them as excerpting. On the understanding of early modern scholars, excerpting designated the extraction of certain passages from texts in particular, though a good many also included the collecting and recording of what they had heard and their own thoughts as excerpting. For instance, Daniel Georg Morhof, professor of rhetoric at the University of Kiel, wrote in his Polyhistor (The polymath) (first published in 1688) that we should collect “what occurs to us when reading an author or in everyday reflection, also what we have observed or has been told to us by others.”
Excerpting is selecting. The question of selection became more urgent in the conditions created by printing. Scholars developed methods and instruments to orient themselves in the face of the increasing amount of available information. For example, the Zurich scholar Conrad Gessner compiled a Bibliotheca universalis (Universal library) (1545, followed by the Pandectae, 1548), which was meant to put its reader in a position to select information according to his needs and interests. Institutions of church and state took measures to assert their control over knowledge and prescribe selection through censorship. Selection is also an important theme in the De arte excerpendi *genre. Readers themselves must select from the wealth of texts and information, but one who wants to select autonomously must pass judgment. Thus, attention to the power of judgment (iudicium) comes into play. Excerpting is not simply collecting, so the rule goes, and it is often clarified with a remark from the Dutch scholar Justus Lipsius about his own excerpting: “I don’t collect, I select” (non colligo, sed seligo). One may not make himself dependent on others—thus reads the principle in the Aurifodina Artium et scientiarum omnium: Excerpendi Sollertia (The mine of all arts and science: The skill of excerpting), which the Bavarian *Jesuit Jeremias Drexel first had printed in 1638. The ability to judge, according to Drexel, grows with excerpting, for that teaches slow, thoughtful, attentive reading for comparison and judgment. Excerpting is necessary because it compels a conceptual involvement with texts and an independent appropriation of them. There are indeed many useful printed collections of excerpts, collections of loci communes, and *encyclopedias. However, notes selected by oneself were worth a lot more.
Jesuit scholars like Drexel first drew up instructions for excerpting. They saw this as a matter of providing religious and moral protection for readers left to rely on themselves. Jesuit excerpting manuals were designed to create self-sufficient patterns of thought. This notion gained more precise contours in treatises published in the second half of the seventeenth century, which included some published by Protestant scholars. As early as Drexel, the question of the filing of excerpts (loci communes) did not center on their classification; rather, effective organization stood front and center. For Morhof, it is crucial to have excerpts quickly available, for even in the sciences, there was combat, which required a quick reaction time. The order in which one brought his weapons into position was not so important; when it came to a contest, it was vital to have them in place. The effectiveness of using an excerpt collection is a crucial point; quick searchability of excerpts is more important than the topical system. The English philosopher John Locke concentrated entirely on the question of how collections of excerpts could be easily and effectively accessed with the help of an alphabetical index in his Méthode nouvelle de dresser des Recueils (New method of forming commonplace books, first published in 1686). Mere copying made way for an independent treatment in summary form. Excerpts should be short (excerpe breviter), recommends the Sciagraphia de studio excerpendi (Insight into the zeal for excerpting) from 1699. It ought to consume neither too much paper nor too much time; everything is to be captured in a nutshell (in nuce). The emphasis on practicability in excerpt maintenance is bound up with the use of notebooks in which excerpts were listed consecutively without organization (adversaria). Conversely, the bound manuscript volumes (codices), in which excerpts were organized by ready-made patterns of organization, became less important.
Since the eighteenth century, excerpting has been subject to less and less regulation. No more new treatises dedicated to the subject appeared. Moreover, excerpting ceased to form a discrete subject of academic instruction. Instruction in excerpting now became part of basic training in scholarly reading and writing. For instance, in How to Write a Thesis (first published in Italian in 1977), Umberto Eco suggested different types of index cards with whose help scholarly readings could be “cut up into notes.” Digitization created a new need for instruction, as the video Excerpting on YouTube documents, as well as a revived need for academic instruction in excerpting. In 2011 an expert on pedagogy, John Orlando, demanded: “bring commonplacing back to education.”
Scholars and scientists have left evidence of different kinds, much of which historical research has only recently begun to discover, that shows how excerpting really proceeded and how collections of excerpts were actually arranged. As early as the sixteenth century, scholars like Conrad Gessner or the Italian natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi worked with scissors in hand, cutting up their transcriptions (and pages from printed books). Like many other early modern scholars, Aldrovandi had assistance in excerpting from scribes (amanuenses) and also from his wife. He created an enormous form of storage, which he called Pandechion epistemonicon (A receptacle for all knowledge) for the preservation of his excerpts. It consisted of folio manuscript volumes—eighty-three of them in total by 1589—into which handwritten slips were pasted in alphabetical order. Therein, Aldrovandi explained, one could find the “whole forest of the disciplines” (selva universale delle scienze)—everything that poets, theologians, jurists, philosophers, and historians of nature or art had written and anything about which one might want to write; also everything that he had learned from countless documents (molti documenti) sent by scholars in many places.
The Magdeburg Centuries (1559–74), and the formation of a Protestant church history as a collection of historical arguments organized by loci, fitted out for the struggle against the papacy and Protestant rivals, took shape as a collaborative project for excerpting on an even larger scale. The network of royal patrons and scholars that launched them was international, stretching from Venice to London, from Prague to Paris, from Vienna to Königsberg. Source material was acquired from everywhere in Europe. The team of excerptors evaluated it according to strictly regulated, methodical standards (stated in a methodus) and assigned extracts to fixed keywords (loci). The vision of an excerpting project that engaged the whole scholarly world (respublica literaria or *Republic of Letters) underlies the Theatrum humanae vitae (Theater of human life, first published in 1565) by the Swiss professor of medicine Theodor Zwinger. He understood his work as a model of information storage (historiarum promptuarium) in which scholars stored excerpts of every kind and provenance, some of which were drawn from texts, others from recorded experiences, and retrieved them again when necessary. Projects for excerpting could even be organized together across generations to serve the advancement of the sciences. This was the driving vision behind the ideas and projects that motivated the excerpting by the naturalist virtuosi (or *polymathic gentlemen) in the circle of the seventeenth-century Royal Society.
Even in the seventeenth century, excerpts were still ordinarily preserved in bound manuscripts, recorded one after another or topically ordered (by loci); both storage media were most commonly accessed through an index. Excerpting guides discouraged the use of unbound, loose collections of slips. Excerpt books are temporary, intermediate forms of storage, as it were; they relieve the memory, which must nevertheless make sure that the assembled excerpts always come back together as a whole. Thus, the collection of excerpts needed ordering structures that could support the work of the memory and, accordingly, excerpt books were firmly bound. In practice, ever fewer people followed these rules. The mid-seventeenth-century Hamburg naturalist Joachim Jungius noted excerpts from texts, quotations, literary references, definitions, and also his own observations and thoughts on individual octavo sheets (schedae). They were furnished with keywords (tituli) that indicated their respective subjects. Sheets with identical headings were put into a quarto sheet folded in half with the relevant title noted on its outer side. Jungius called the resulting connected slips “bundles” (manipulus); when a number of such bundles came together in an envelope, he called them “stacks” (fasces). Only these bundles and stacks with their countless individual titles structured the excerpt collection; there was no preorganized (topical) system, no structured book space, and no internal order for the sheets in the bundles and stacks. In the end, the collection comprised 150,000 single sheets.
This merely cumulative collecting of individual excerpt slips without a systematic order and without presupposition followed a scholarly plan. Jungius understood excerpting as the foundation of an empirically established system of knowledge, like that of Francis Bacon, whom he admired. His excerpt collections, like those of the naturalist virtuosi of the Royal Society and the earlier excerpting of scholars like Aldrovandi, documented the formation of the modern culture of “pure *facts.” Its ideal is the production of short, isolated textual components without cohesion, of “factoids” and “small facts,” which can be combined arbitrarily and can be deployed as evidence for various theories and explanatory models.
The flexibility of excerpt storage systems has been a vital aspect of excerpting since the middle of the seventeenth century. The English teacher Thomas Harrison developed an elaborate cabinet system for the storage of individual excerpt slips in the 1640s. However, this laborious method, which in many respects followed the old, topical system, did not catch on. Instead, the simple slip box with movable topical tabs was used more extensively starting in the eighteenth century and proved a flexible, easily expandable method of managing excerpts. The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann described it in 1981 as a “communicative machine” that made it possible for texts to develop automatically, so to speak. Two German scholars, Johann Jakob Moser and Christoph Meiners, had recommended the slip box already in the eighteenth century with similar arguments. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it evolved into the predominant instrument for the management of excerpts, notes, information, and dates, for it was deployed by scholars of the *humanities and natural scientists, librarians, and journalists as well as authors, artists, private citizens, and office workers. Standardized index cards increasingly served as record supports instead of sheets of paper. The librarian Melvil Dewey’s company, Library Bureau, successfully sold standardized index cards and slip boxes to banks, insurance companies, and other businesses. In 1896, Library Bureau entered into a partnership with Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company, out of which the company IBM developed. Later, index cards became punch cards, which were adapted for mechanical data processing. Still, not everyone in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used slip boxes for excerpting. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used excerpt notebooks and other filing systems. So did Karl Marx, whose extensive excerpting output is recorded in thirty-one thick volumes of his collected works (Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe or MEGA). Especially in the case of literati, artists, and humanistic scholars, filing systems for excerpts and notes were and are different “machines of the imagination,” which have to conform to the individual needs of their users and to hold not only excerpted snippets of text, experiences, and thoughts but also materials from other media suited to cutting, such as newspapers and photographs.
The art historian Aby Warburg stuck the photographs he collected for his Bilderatlas (Atlas of images) to a black cloth with pins, around which he wrapped woolen thread so that the relationships between the visual motifs became visible. He noted, “I have begun to cut out the whole pantheon.” The sociologist of film Siegfried Kracauer wrote notes for books, talks, and observations on flimsy loose slips that he always carried with him in shirt, pants, and jacket pockets. He provided citations with quotation marks and page numbers for the excerpts for his book Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time (1937), yet such references are missing from the printed text. The loss of references has befallen many other excerpting artists (for example, Nietzsche). The French author Jules Verne (1828–1905) inscribed twenty-five thousand keyword cards over the course of his life. These chiefly recorded the experiences of his travels and enabled him to publish at least two books per year. The Romanian author Tristan Tzara read aloud from snippets cut out of newspapers, arbitrarily pulled out of his pocket, in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire. He became one of the cofounders of Dadaism with his “slip poems” (Zettelgedichten). The British painter Francis Bacon (1909–92) arranged his studio as an accessible slip box. This consisted not of subjects but of zones, layers, and lumps on the floor, which were assembled from various materials like torn-out pages, photographs, X-rays, records, his own paintings, and articles of clothing.
Writers and scholars used the art of excerpting to produce printed books, as well as articles in printed periodicals. This method did not change until the rise of digital methods for excepting. But excerpts arranged in slip boxes also provided the material basis for the numerous large-scale handbook, lexicon, and dictionary projects of this period. One example is the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Treasury of the Latin language), the most comprehensive dictionary of ancient Latin. Excerpting for it began in Goettingen and Munich in 1894, the first printed fascicle appeared in 1900, and the project is still far from complete. It is now a collaborative international undertaking, but it is still based on a slip archive: currently around ten million slips with excerpts, which are constantly supplemented and revised. The archive thus always contains more and more precise information than the printed volumes.
In contrast to the printed book, the advantages of an expandable and revisable informational system broken down into parts were already clear to an information broker of the highest order, Samuel Hartlib, in his multiple excerpting and publication projects. His Baconian activities helped inspire the Royal Society founded in 1662, the year of his death. Should one dissect all books into small components and compile a general index for them all, it would no longer be necessary to read the books of individual authors. In 1910, the Belgian lawyers and bibliographers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine envisaged a “city of knowledge,” built up on an extended Dewey’s classification system to house all the world’s information and thus liberate bibliographic information from its carrier, the book. From 1919 to 1934, they received funding from the Belgian government and created in Brussels the “Palais Mondial” (from 1924: “Mundaneum”). In its final year, 1934, the Mundaneum had collected more than fifteen million index cards. The cultural critic Walter Benjamin—himself a great practitioner of the art of excerpting on slips—explained in Einbahnstraße (One-way street, published in 1928) that the book had become an anachronistic medium: “Today, as the current scholarly mode of production teaches, the book is already an obsolete mediator between two different card file systems. Because all of the essentials are found in the slip box of the researcher who has authored it, and the scholar, who carries on his study in it, assimilates it into his own card file system.” In the very same year, the German engineer and mathematician Walter Porstmann advocated the “dispersal of printed works and books into filing sheets” in his Handbook of Filing Techniques.
With the advent of digitization, paper excerpt collections and wooden chests for information management have disappeared from offices and libraries. Their disposal can be seen as a media destruction of historic proportions. In a 1994 issue of the New Yorker, the author Nicholson Baker already composed a somber firsthand report on the obliteration of public library card catalogs, as well as their contents, under the title “Discards.” Has the vision—which leads back deep into early modernity—of a collectively organized and universally accessible pool of information come true now that information circulates on the *internet, now that texts and data are digitized and retrieved, and we all cut and paste online? Office administration today is defined by software companies; there is a bewildering plethora of software tools that allow intellectuals, journalists, and scholars to digitally excerpt, take notes, divide them into pieces, and put them in order. Perhaps automated excerpting processes open up unforeseen opportunities for the acquisition, storage, and analysis of information. Yet, for individuals, this may mean the loss of creative self-determination, for they no longer exercise their own power of judgment in excerpting and simply follow automated patterns.
Helmut Zedelmaier
Translated by Ashley Gonik
See also art of memory; cards; censorship; data; digitization; indexing; learning; notebooks; reference books; scribes; secretaries; teaching