Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know offers one of the most sophisticated historical genealogies of information overload, dismantling the conceit that informational excess is unique to the digital present. Her central argument is that early modern Europe confronted a structurally analogous crisis of abundance and responded by developing robust techniques for managing textual surfeit long before the advent of computation. Blair identifies the period between 1500 and 1700 as a decisive moment in the history of information management, when scholars, printers, and compilers faced an unprecedented expansion of books generated by print, humanist recovery of classical texts, and intensified habits of excerpting. Rather than treating overload as merely quantitative, she frames it as a cultural and technical problem produced by the conjunction of excessive materials and finite human capacities—memory, time, and attention. Her most incisive contribution is the formulation of the “four S’s” of text management—storing, sorting, selecting, and summarising—as the operative logic underpinning early modern scholarly practice. These procedures structured commonplace books, note slips, florilegia, indexes, and encyclopaedic compilations, allowing scholars to disaggregate texts into portable units for later retrieval and recombination. Blair’s case studies, especially of Conrad Gesner and Theodor Zwinger, demonstrate that reference books were not passive repositories but active cognitive technologies: externalised memory systems designed to process surplus knowledge. The broader implication is historiographically significant. Modern search engines, databases, and digital archives do not inaugurate information management ex nihilo; they extend and automate epistemic habits forged centuries earlier in manuscript and print. Blair’s achievement lies in showing that what appears modern in our informational condition is less its logic than its scale, and that the contemporary crisis of overload remains legible through the long durée of scholarly techniques devised to domesticate abundance. Harvard citation: Blair, A. (2010) Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.
