The significance of authors' reading notes may lie not only in their mechanical function as information storage devices providing raw materials for writing, but also in their ability to concentrate and to mobilize the latent emotional and creative resources of their keepers. This document examines records of reading found in the published notebooks of eight major British and United States writers of the sixteenth through twentieth centuries. Through comparison of their note-taking practices, the following topics are explored: how each author came to make reading notes, the form in which notes were made, and the writers' habits of consulting and using their notes (with special reference to distinctly literary uses). The eight writers whose notebooks are examined in depth are Francis Bacon, John Milton, Samuel Coleridge, Ralph W. Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, and Thomas Wolfe. The trends that emerge from these eight case studies are discussed, and an extensive bibliography of published notebooks is included. (CC)