It turns out that there is a very long genealogy of saying that there is too much work/scholarship, or too many books, published. I was having an email conversation with Jan Erik Frantsvåg, who is an absolute legend in the scholarly communications world, because of his work on the Tromsø Munin Conferences every year, and he asked about this question. On this subject, I really recommend reading Blair, Ann, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010), which traces the story well (and from which all of this post is derived; I am not professing any novelty, here).

An image of a person looking at an open book

The oldest surviving lament about this that I could find is in the Bible: Ecclesiastes 12:12. In this text, it states that “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh/body.”

In Ancient Greece, Callimachus made a related, but slightly different, argument: mega biblion, mega kakon (“a big book is a big evil”) (Blair, p. 17). This is kind of a different argument, stating that long books are the problem, not just many books. However, it still belongs to the category of overload that I am tracing here.

The first really sharp critique of this though comes from Seneca in De Tranquillitate Animi (On the Tranquility of the Mind / on Peace of Mind) (Ancient Rome, c.60). In this text, Seneca writes: “What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can scarcely read through in a whole lifetime? The learner is, not instructed, but burdened by the mass of them, and it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many.” Ouch. (See Blair, p. 240 n42; see also Nelles (1994), 134, according to Blair (I have not checked this reference).)

Blair also shows that Giovanni Nevizzano pointed out c. 1520 that the sheer number of books made it hard to find the ones one actually needed. Meanwhile, Conrad Gesner, in the 1540s, complained of the “harmful and confusing abundance of books” and of “the silliness of useless writings.” (Blair, p. 56).

Then there’s the classic. In 1680, Leibniz remarks upon “that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing” (Blair, pp. 58-59).

There has always been too much to read. Too much published. Too much to navigate and order and search and find.

References

  • Blair, Ann, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010)
  • Nelles, Paul Neave, ‘The Public Library and Late Humanist Scholarship in Early Modern Europe: Antiquarianism and Encyclopaedism’ (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1995)
Image: An image of someone reading a book (Vision Magazin on Unsplash)