Laudator Temporis Acti

G.G. Coulton (1858-1947), Fourscore Years: An Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), pp. 305-306:

From very early South Lynn days, I had followed a rigorous index system with my numerous references and extracts. These latter amount by now to some 250 small volumes, the contents of which are indexed in one general ledger under very numerous rubrics, and in two exclusively monastic ledgers in greater detail. Thus I have been able, nearly always, to lay my hand after a brief search upon every piece of evidence which has ever struck me as of real importance. A few ghosts flit about in my memory, of striking passages which I neglected to fix and pin down at once, and which I dare not quote now from recollection only; but, on the whole, I owe immensely to this system, which seems to me better than the ordinary card index. For in some cases I possess page after page, consecutively, transcribed by myself or my wife or one of my copyists, always at hand within a few minutes of the immediate need.

Arthur Stanley Pease, quoted in J.P. Elder et al., "Arthur Stanley Pease 1881-1964," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 69 (1965) ix:

I will confess that I am by nature a collector, that I began with marbles and horse-chestnuts, advanced to postage stamps, continued with botany and books, and at all times have gathered facts and occasionally ideas.

These two latter items, in lack of sufficient cranial space for dead storage, I enter methodically on 3 x 5 slips of paper. When enough of a kind are amassed, they are outspread, classified, digested, written down, dehydrated, and lo! an article, or more rarely a book, to be perused by some lone watcher in Czechoslovakia or beside the Bay of Biscay.