This afternoon I went to the Bucks County Historical Society to do some genealogy research for a writing project I’m working on. When I called the BCHS yesterday to find out their hours I was excited to find out that it’s housed not just in Doylestown, which I knew, but right inside the Mercer Museum.

The Mercer Museum, if you’ve never been to it, is awesome. It’s a feat of Victorian geekery. At the turn of the 20th century crackpot collector Henry Mercer had the idea to compile as many handmade (not machine-made) objects as he could since, as he saw it, these things were on their way out. He assembled his huge collection inside a cement castle (!), with all the various objects of old-school interest divided into separate little warrens that wind around the perimeter of the building and up to the top. There’s tin smithing, whaling, the healing arts; on the top-most level is a gallows. Yikes. The library that houses the Bucks County historical materials is inside this castle, and I spent a couple of hours there this afternoon, fingering through card catalogs first, then through drawers of boxes of microfiche, and then giving myself motion sickness as I watched film of old newspapers fly past my face.

I didn’t find out much more than I already knew about the people I’m researching, even though the BCHS collection is really large and meticulously cataloged. I just wasn’t in quite the right place. I found myself wishing, while I was there, that their set of materials was linked up with the set of materials at the historical society that’s closer to my home, the one I’ve already used a bit, in such a way that I could search it from Doylestown. Having grown up at around the same time that the Internet grew up I guess I unthinkingly assumed that a search like this would be possible — a search of all the world’s obituaries, or deeds or marriage records or whatever, organized maybe by state or by year — but it wasn’t. No big deal; I have other leads to information on these people, and I should be able to find out more in time.

On the train ride home I took yesterday’s New York Times out of my bag and read an article about an ambitious but little-known information cataloging effort invented in the early 20th century that in some ways prefigured the Internet. According to this article, in 1895 a Belgian named Paul Otlet and Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine set out to create a bibliography of all the world’s information, with the different pieces of data joined by “symbolic links,” otherwise known as hyperlinks. Hm.

I sat on the train as it trundled past lush summer growth and the occasional stone building and tried to envision this. Otlet and La Fontaine were able to create a paper database of more than 12 million entries, all written up on index cards and consisting of information on books, photographs, and the kinds of “ephemera” that libraries tended (and still tend) to exclude, like pamphlets. Then they set up a staff who provided a research service which people all over the world used by submitting their inquiries via mail or telegraph.

The article described how Otlet then took his Mundaneum, as he called it, a big step forward in his imagination. He wished he could reduce the number of people needed to do this research by rigging up a machine that moved the papers around, but this was awkward, so he began to dream up the idea of storing data electronically before electronic data storage had been invented. He wrote about it in his 1934 book Monde, this vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that could store all the world’s information. Smart guy. His project fell on hard times, though — the Nazis came and destroyed much of what he’d done — and he never got to take it to that level.

Sitting there on the train my mind was lit up with visions past and present of information, ways of organizing it, our desire to have access to it, and our desire for that access to function the way our brains do, flitting from one connection to the next. And having just attended the Rosenbach’s Bloomsday reading to hear the really wonderful actress Drucie McDaniel do her Molly Bloom soliloquy, which always, always makes me cry, my mind gave me a picture from Ulysses, the image of Bloom’s idea to put “two smart girls” in a transparent show cart, writing and typing while a crowd gathered and watched, the sexy mechanism of thinking on display.

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