Considering how much attention people lavish on the technologies of writing--scroll, codex, print, screen--it's striking how little they pay to the technologies for digesting and regurgitating it. One way or another, there's no sector of the modern world that is not saturated with note-taking--the bureaucracy, the liberal professions, the sciences, the modern firm, and especially the academy, whose residents, transient and permanent, have more right than anyone else to claim that taking notes is what they do. Taken, made, jotted, foot, or head: Notes are necessary interventions between the things people read and the things they write. (Contains 6 endnotes.)