Arguably, the true forefather of the web is not the footnote of yore, but the vision of the Belgian bibliographer Paul Otlet, whose fantastic project of a Universal Book was to manifest the connections each document has with all others, and to open this referential structure to further annotation and restructuring by each user. Since 1895, Otlet had envisioned a master bibliography of the world’s libraries, but found one fatal flaw all systems shared: they stopped at book titles. Otlet wanted his system to penetrate that boundary, to link up the substance, sources and conclusions of all books. Long before Vannevar Bush or Ted Nelson laid claim to radicalizing knowledge management with memex or hypertext, Otlet developed a scholar’s workstation that was, in essence, a database using millions of index cards. He imagined the réseau would eventually be accessible by telephone lines, retrieving facsimiles projected onto a flat screen. Today as in Otlet’s vision, hypertext foregrounds one feature: it tends to present itself as the sum of its links. However, the defining trait of hyperlinks is not just a web of self-annotation – they set in motion the three-dimensionality of letters that script had in its original form as runes, as knot notation.