On Monday, I spent the first part of the morning hunting down 30+ Ramus books in our pre-1800 rare book stacks. We'd gotten a query about a Ramus book in the collection that Fr. Ong had identified as being annotated by Ramus himself. Unfortunately, the majority of our 7000 pre-1800 books are not yet cataloged. Most of them are in a database, though. I say most because I did some shelf reading to look for one that was misshelved and found 2 not in the database. The good news is that the library is planning on hiring someone to catalog all those rare books sometime in the near future, and I was pulling all the Ramus books for cataloging to process now.

I also finished the Lecture inventory, and found more pieces that have never been published. One had the note: "Never published. Can be used if and after "A Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction" is published. I'm looking into how some of this unpublished material can be published. I also saw a fascinating lecture based upon the review of Yates' The Art of Memory. There were two earlier lectures, one dating back to 1958 or so, that had fed into it. I want to go back and take a closer look at the following lectures

• "Oral Performance, Writing, and Audiences" (9/27/67)


• Yates' review


• "Aphorisms Regarding the Media and the Senses" (1968)


• Rhetoric, Commonplaces, and Shakespeare" (11/5/63)

Working through these lectures has been very cool. You can see ideas and themes developing over time.