We discuss the first and second chapters of Adrian Johns’ recent book. Some of the topics include the late-19th-century panic over the exhausting effects of “unnatural” reading and neurasthenia, other technologies (of both acquiring knowledge and making notes) and their advantages and disadvantages, saccades and thought, the strange misuse of the incorrect theory or recapitulation, and the general weirdness of how close reading science was to eugenics and social Darwinism.