#scholar's machine

As a result of unilateral liberation from the bound book, freely interconnected slips of paper expand the intersections and so increase the connectivity of possible relationships. Thus, the material of the scholar’s machine awaits skilled interrogation in the shape of addressable aggregations of paper slips kept in appropriate boxes. The first bureaucratic order of 1495 under Maximilian I already recommends the use of partitioned cabinets as storage places for files.* In Placcius’s anonymous treatise of 1637 and Harsdörffer’s Erquickstunden of 1653, these professional pieces of furniture appear miniaturized, adapted to serve as containers for paper collections. A refined blueprint for such an excerpt collection, proudly  Paper Machines presented by a prolific writer of the eighteenth century, is discussed as an example in the following episode.

Markus Krajewski, Papier Machines : About Cards & Catalogs, 1548 - 1929, The MIT Press, London, 2011, p. 52-53.