From an organizational standpoint, the beauty of sermons is that each revolves around a specific theme. Accordingly, King could devote a single folder to each topic. He accumulated 166 folders, each with a title like “Loving your Enemies” (folder 1), “Why the Christian must Oppose Segregation” (folder 87), “Mental Slavery” (folder 113), and “The Misuse of Prayer” (folder 166). These folders contain King’s outlines; source material, like clippings from books; and drafts.

With his carefully kept Commentationes, Rütiner was building a conversational arsenal – a treasury of stories, jokes and privileged information that would show him to be in the know.

We were naturally at first rather puzzled to account for thisbox. Were its contents an accidental collection of left-overs?Was it a receptacle for random deposits of casual scraps ofwriting? Should the large works which were some of its sourcesbe published and it be left on one side?

Apart from a higher probability to retrieve particular note sheets, that advantage lies in thecircumstance that notes having a similar keyword will, as the box grows, find themselves atthe same location because of the alphabetical structure. That means not only an automaticcollection of content, but also a comparative review of those related note sheets, which inturn leads to new thoughts basd on the relation between the note sheets with identicalkeywords

Everyone hashis or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at OfficeDepot for transferring files.I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as thepiece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in mystudio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of artthat may have inspired me.

oachim Jungius (1584–1657),professor of mathematics, medicine, logic, and natural philosophy at variousGerman universities, amassed one of the largest collections of notes of his day,estimated at 150,000 pages, of which 45,000 are extant.51

Among natural historians, Ulisse Al-drovandi (1522–1605) left more than 400 volumes of manuscripts that attest tohis efforts at collecting and sorting a vast abundance of information. Historiansand antiquarians, like the French nobleman Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), also amassed abundant notes.50

the scholastic theologian Godfrey of Fontaines (be-fore 1250–after 1305) left a collection of excerpts and summaries from his readingthat could readily be considered a collection of notes