Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

I was reading about the Emacs org-roam mode, and came across the Zettelkasten method of notetaking. I hadn’t seen this term before, but the idea of taking notes with cross-referenced index cards sounded familiar. Where did I read about it? Ah yes… in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, the main character Casaubon (an ex-academic who makes a living as a “detective of knowledge”) uses boxes of index cards to keep track of ideas. I wouldn’t be surprised that Eco himself did this religiously. He apparently recommended it to PhD students.

I like this little episode in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. In Chapter 53, one of the main characters Casaubon, a scholar of European history, unexpectedly ran into Inspector De Angelis in a library. He was surprised that the policeman checked out the same book that he was looking for. Why are you reading such an esoteric book? The policeman answered: “… when I’m off duty, I like to browse in libraries. It keeps me from turning into a robot, a mechanical cop”.

The plot of Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum involves two publishers: Garamond and Manutius. Both names refer to figures in the history of printing: Claude Garamond designed the Garamond font in the 16th century, while Aldus Manutius was a famous 15th century printer who invented italic type, a few punctuation marks, and the pocketbook format. This might be a joke because both names are relatable to Apple. The Garamond font was used in Apple’s logo, and Aldus Co. was the original developer of PageMaker (a killer app for the Macintosh) before it was acquired by Adobe.

This is the famous world map by the 15th century monk Fra Mauro. I saw it in Museo Galileo in Florence. Unfortunately it was a replica. The real thing is in Venice. I found it very difficult to recognize landmarks on the map because the orientation is very different from our modern convention. North is down. South is up. Here’s a puzzle: What’s this? Anglia is England. Scotia is Scotland. What is Hibernia? My teenage obsession with Umber Eco finally pays off. It’s Ireland. In The Name of the Rose, there is a giant library with rooms organized as a word maze.