The Workplace of Enlightenment: Colin Campbell and the Repurposing of Paper

This article studies labour-saving technologies among eighteenth-century pupils, students, and academics by looking at the organisation of paper. The mathematician Colin Campbell of Achnaba (1644–1726), a minister of the Church of Scotland, repurposed the letters which were sent to him, turning them into notebooks by cutting up the paper and reusing the blank spaces for mathematical notes. Following the sources of Campbell's ‘letters-as-notebooks’, I suggest that the study of reuse should not only trace materials in households but also include their wider circulation in networks beyond the home. Campbell's workplace thus illuminates his mediating role as minister in the confessional culture of the early Scottish Enlightenment.