Simon Reader's Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style, as I discuss below, pushes us to rethink how we understand notes in the nineteenth century and in our own. I will begin with the contemporary implications of Reader's argument by pairing it with Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study. Both books foreground aspects of the research and writing life that have always supported the publish-or-perish research agenda and yet have seemed instrumental or ephemeral.