Thetechniques and tools we’re going to discuss in this sectionon note-making are focused mostly on texts, but they canbe applied to ideas that come to you from discussion,listening to lectures, experiment, or life experience.

Humanist concerns about printing motivated one early appearance of the theme, in Erasmus’s famous digressive commentary on the adage festina lente (make haste slowly), first published in 1525: “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books? Even if, taken out one at a time, they offered something worth knowing, the very mass of them would be a serious impedi-ment to learning from satiety if nothing else, which can do far more damage where good things are concerned or simply from the fact that men’s minds are easily glutted and hungry for something new, and so these distractions call them away from the reading of ancient authors.” Erasmus complained here about a flood of new books because these were of lesser value than ancient texts and dis-tracted readers from true learning. Erasmus blamed the flood of bad new books on printing.

Macksey is also responsible for one of his first short films. “When I was at Hopkins, there was no film program. We talked to Dick [about making a short film] and he said ‘let’s do it,’ and we ended up doing a movie in which he has a small part.”