Apparently it was an age old method to memorize 50,000 of information
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Are you looking for SEM3?
The book is mentioned in the thread below, and also try searching the forum for “sem3”.
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I created ‘SEM3’ instantly after reading about Harry Lorayne’s Memory Graph technique in his book “The Memory Book”
You see, Lorayne described a way to memorize locations. As an example he used a 10 by 10 grid he did note though, “Although the idea may be extended to any lengths, …”.
In his system, The Memory Graph, one creates an image for each of the 100 locations in the 10X10 grid: “The way to make all the locations tangible is to patternize them: A word will represent each location; each word will begin with the vital letter, and the very next consonant sound (any sounds that follow are disregarded) will be the sound that represents the vital number. In this pattern, the word Ate can represent only A1…”
As he used the major system to assign the number to the immediately following consonant sound, one can learn an image for each location very easily. He gave examples such as A6=Ash, A10 = Ace, etc.
Of course I immediately realized that each grid location could hold 100 locations by attaching each of the 100 images of the Major System to the image for that specific location. No doubt this immediately occurred to the thousands of people who read this book. So now I would have a “filing system” of 100X100 or 10, 000 pegs.
Of course now that the ball was rolling, why stop there! Indeed, I could incorporate my images for the alphabet too. Simply combine the location image with my image for A for the alphabet (say Aardvark, and so on) and each of the 100 Major System Images and I would immediately have 260,000 pegs.
If I added a short (lets say 10 items) linked list, story method, or journey to each of these I would be able to memorize 2.6 million items! Now with Viking determination I realized I could, as Harry had said, extend this new system to any lengths, but perhaps just to a 26X26 grid since I already know the English alphabet, I could now have 1,757,600 locations! And with my short lists I could memorize a whopping 17,576,000 items, rules, etc. All neatly filed away.
And I could achieve all of this from 3 relatively easy to learn systems from Harry’s book WOW!!
Of course, I also as quickly dismissed this new “system”, since I was sure that almost everyone who read Harry’s “The Memory Book”, would have also realized these simple extensions. And besides, it seemed really boring.
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Much of this kind of thinking is premised in Bruno, with the climax (perhaps) in Thirty Statues.
The extent to which Bruno was thinking of Aristotle’s comment that the alphabet is nuclear is unknown to me, but certain references he makes to Plato in Song of Circe make me think he was.
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