Think of yourself as a successful literary agent, with a big Ferris wheel of a Rolodex on your desk. You and your Rolodex go back fifteen years. It holds hundreds of names and numbers, many of which you have updated by hand when a writer or an editor has moved or got married or had a child or hired a new underling. Fond though you are of your Rolodex, it is hardly portable, and you are doing a lot of business on the other coast now. So you decide to get one of those electronic calendar-spreadsheet-address books — something along the lines of a Psion Series 3a, say. After careful planning, you freeze the Rolodex, and then you assign one of your interns the exacting task of keying into the Psion all the up-to-date information that your Rolodex contains. It takes the intern a solid week — there are four hundred and sixteen names. You spot-check the project as it progresses. The intern has made a few screwups here and there, reversed some numbers, made some typos in foreign addresses, but in general it’s surprisingly clean work.
When this retrospective conversion is complete, however, a question arises. What do you do with the big frozen Rolodex? Burn it, pulp it, shoot it? It does take up a lot of desk space. Do you have a big party, and invite all the people in your Rolodex to join you on the roof of your building to drink champagne and tie their address cards to helium balloons and release them over West Fifty-seventh? No, because you are a literary agent, after all, not a publicist. And you quickly see that it would be an error to throw away your Rolodex cards right now, since you are going to want to refer to them from time to time in the months ahead, when there is a question of an electronic address’s correctness. At one point, looking up someone’s name in your Psion, you find that it isn’t there: an undetected typo made by your assistant has displaced the record somewhere, hiding it from you. You find the address easily on the Rolodex. Not only that: the démodé Rolodex, you discover, groups things in a way that is at times more useful to you than Psion’s rote technique. Rather than alphabetized solely by name, for instance, the old paper-based system offers you all your friends at Simon & Schuster together in one clump, a form of what librarians call “collocation.”
Also, in a more reflective moment it occurs to you that there is considerable information on the Rolodex cards that didn’t make its way into your new toy: old, crossed-out addresses, old phone numbers, old spouses, old editorial assistants who are now publishing titans in their own right. The very degree of wornness of certain cards that you once flipped to daily but now perhaps do not — since that author is drunk and forgotten or that magazine editor has been fired and now makes high-end apple chutneys in Binghamton — constitutes significant information about what parts of the Rolodex were of importance to you over the years. Your new Psion can’t begin to tell you that: its addresses are ageless, as fresh and yellowy-gray as the current in a diode. Your Rolodex is a piece of literary history, in a way. It is also the record of some of the most cherished connections you have formed with the world. Would it be stretching things too much, you suddenly wonder, to call your Rolodex a form of autobiography — a manuscript that you have been writing these fifteen years, tinkering with, revising? Perhaps it is the only manuscript you will ever write. Throw it out? No, you will donate your Rolodex to your alma mater’s library, valuing it at several thousand dollars in order to get a tax write-off, and the librarians there will recognize its importance to future scholars of late-twentieth-century publishing practices and will lovingly catalog it online, assigning it a Library of Congress call number and an appropriate list of subject headings.
Now imagine something just a little larger than your Rolodex. Think of an unbound manuscript, the only one like it, composed of a great many leaves of three-by-five-inch cardboard — a million of them, in fact — each leaf covered recto and sometimes verso with detailed descriptions of certain objects that the world has deemed worthy of organized preservation. The authors of this manuscript have worked on it every day for a hundred and twenty years. It is, then, the accreted autobiography of an institution whose job it is to store and retrieve books and book-like materials. Many of its authors were smart and careful people — perfectionists, wide readers, though by predilection keeping themselves as anonymous in their authorship as medieval cathedral builders. Some of them had specialized knowledge and idiosyncratic enthusiasms, which they worked into the pages of their creation by employing thousands upon thousands of “See” and “See also” pointers to other pages. Together, over the years, they achieved what one of their early masters, Charles Ammi Cutter, called a “syndetic” structure — that is, a system of referential links — of remarkable coherency and resolution.
The authors made one serious mistake, however. Although they had taken great pains to be sure that within their massive work every book and manuscript stored in their building was represented by a three-by-five page, and often by several pages, describing it, they had forgotten to devote any page, anywhere, to the very book that they had themselves been writing all those years. Their card catalog was nowhere mentioned in their card catalog. Dutifully, they had assigned call numbers to large-type Tom Clancy novels, to magnetic tapes of statistical data, to diskettes full of archaic software, to old Montgomery Ward catalogs, to spools of professional-wrestling magazines on microfilm, to blueprints, wills, contracts, and the archives of electronic bulletin boards, to pop-up books and annual reports and diaries and forgeries and treaties and realia of every description, but they left their own beloved manuscript unclassified and undescribed, and thus it never attained the status of a holding, which it so obviously deserved, and was instead tacitly understood to be merely a “finding aid,” a piece of furniture, wholly vulnerable to passing predators, subject to janitorial, rather than curatorial, jurisdiction — even though this catalog was, in truth, the one holding that people who entered the building would be likely to have in common, to know how to use from childhood, even to love. A new administrator came by one morning and noticed that there was some old furniture taking up space that could be devoted to bound volumes of Technicalities, The Electronic Library, and the Journal of Library Automation. The card catalog, for want of having been cataloged itself, was thrown into a dumpster.