The Art of Memory Made Plain
Almost nothing is known about Herdson, only a story that he advertised himself as a professor at Cambridge and a famous scholar could not recall ever meeting him. His book aims at ordinary people and mostly religious uses.
what it teaches
His repository is four square rooms with five tables each, plus a central table: 21 tables and 105 imagined friends, whose hands hold images for numbers.
For business, a shopkeeper pictures an acquaintance wearing the cloth, holding the yards in one hand and the price in the other.
For sermons: pay attention, notice the parts, put each part in a place, and think over the images.
For stories, split them into people: Genesis becomes Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. For Bible books, give each a friend with a similar name, with chapter in the right hand and verse in the left.
To fix an image, load it with the most delightful things for all five senses (paradise) or the most horrible (hell).