The Bookwheel, invented in 1588 by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, was a heavy, 600-pound wooden rotating bookcase that let scholars easily use up to eight open books at once. It had a clever gear system to keep the books upright as the wheel turned by hand, saving time for readers who didn’t have to fetch books from shelves. Featured in Ramelli’s book of machines, it was a creative Renaissance tool for studying, though it’s uncertain how many were actually made.
Scholars quickly set about organizing the new mental environment by clipping their favorite passages from books and assembling them into huge tomes—florilegia, bouquets of text—so that readers could sample the best parts.
"Authorship"-in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity-was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble
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