Ann M. Blair

“Experienced readers could engage in consultation reading even without an index or a table of contents, given the predictable order in which topics were generally treated in various genres. For example, al-Juzajani, the biographer of the great medical scholar Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037), reported on the reading habits of this autodidact: 'One of the remarkable things about the Master was that for the twenty-five years that I was his companion and servant, I did not once see him, when he came across a new book, examine it from beginning to end. Rather he would go directly to its difficult passages and intricate problems and look at what its author had to say about them.”
― Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age