Searching
People sometimes assure us that there's no need to organize notes, that search will always find what you want.
Not long ago, I read the 12th-century travel book of Benjamin of Tudela. This fellow was a Jew from a small town in Catalonia who, for reasons undisclosed, set out to travel the Mediterranean world. He went to Constantinople, and Baghdad, and Alexandria, and everywhere in between. He always asks, “How many Jews are here? Who are the most accomplished? What do they argue about?” (This was why I ended up traveling with Benjamin: I wanted a footnote to demonstrate that Jews like to argue.)
Four manuscripts of this travel book, which was written in Hebrew, survived the Middle Ages. One of them was printed in 1543; there was demand, perhaps because the Expulsion from Spain had occurred only about 50 years before. Three of the manuscripts were titled with variations of “Travels of Benjamin of Tudela”, but one of them, known as the Roman Manuscript, is titled “Ben Knows.”
The title “Ben Knows” is a truly awful search target. There are lots of Bens, and “know” is a very common verb. For all its early modern popularity among sephardic scholars of the diaspora, Ben Knows would be hard to search for if you hadn’t saved it a good place.