A BRIEF HISTORY OF INFORMATION OVERLOADA BRIEF HISTORY OF INFORMATION OVERLOAD

Printers “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libellous, mad,

impious and subversive.”

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)

Seneca the Younger (4BC – 65AD)

“The abundance of books is a distraction.”

Ecclesiastes 22:22 (C 300-400BC)

“Of the making of books there is no end.”

Book-wheel

Diverse et artificiose machine

Agostino Ramelli (Paris, 1588)

Book-wheel

遠 西 奇 器 圖 說 錄 最 (‘Strange machines from the far West’)

Wang Zheng (1571-1644)Johann Terrenz Schreck (1576 – 1630)

(Beijing, 1627)

“Among the Western scholars’ books that fill their rooms, the books aiding the mind must be abundant. Yet you have not translated them, and only translated this book of machines.”

(Trans. Kim Yung Sik, 2010)