Thanks for AOSA book I didn't know about it very cool. 
It's interesting, I got obsessed a couple months back with The Book of Ingenious Devices, and the fact that later those brothers made the earliest known programmable machine, an automatic flute player. Not long after, by coincidence(?), I got obsessed with cataloging, library science, archiving, etc. Don't have a grand thesis or conclusion here, but I'm trying to spend more time and energy compiling, thinking like a librarian, and I wonder if what you pointed out is part of the reason why :)