This exhibition was curated by Kevin Ray, Head of Special Collections of the Olin Library. In his introductory essay, Ray writes, "The writer's notebook is the precursor, the ancestor of writing, even moreso of reading. Before the note, before the thing to be noted, it was there, and it remains, the locus becoming, by its presence and its persistence, capable of not simply holding or transmitting what is within it, but of producing and recreating it. The notebook as a visual space of chiefly, though not exclusively, texts, allows for several things to be happening within the same space and, more uncertainly, the same readerly time, yet they are of very different, even wildly divergent times...The notebook becomes then a place of juxtapositions, and with this ability to juxtapose, to hold together without necessary or obvious link, the notebook, as a form or genre, comes into its own, and comes into the intellectual life of published, of printed work." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.