A One Paragraph Summary of Ahrens' How to Take Smart notes from 1775-76
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's note taking description is very close to modern excerpting and zettelkasten practices.
Merchants and traders have a waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch in German I believe) in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell, messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, where everything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts with each man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitated by scholars.
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