Notebooks

Abstract

The eighteenth-century German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg developed a utopian style of note-taking that anticipated the fantasy of democratically organized information promulgated by social media in the twenty-first century. In his “waste-books” (a term drawn from accounting) Lichtenberg made a virtue of the unfinished, promoting the use of the notebook as a tool directed to purposes other than publication: first, as an accumulation of informational wealth (“pennyworths); second, as an incubator for future possibilities over which he exercised no control (“seeds”); and, third, as a space where the micro trades places with the macro (“keyholes”). Lichtenberg elected to live in manuscript, relinquishing his witty retorts, aphoristic reflections, or ideas for whole books entirely to posterity. He kept marginal notations as a way of honing an individual style that was simultaneously divorced from social exchange with the living.