Now some history. In 1791, in Paris, the Revolutionary government, having confiscated a number of private and monastic libraries throughout France, became curious to know what interesting books it suddenly possessed. The Imprimerie Nationale issued an Instruction pour procéder à la confection du catalogue to those charged with watching over new state property in outlying departments. Inventorists were told to number every book in a library, and then to write down, on ordinary playing cards, each book’s number, its author, its title, a brief physical description, and the name of the library where it could be found. (Aces and deuces, it was suggested, might be pulled from the deck and set aside for books with wordy titles.) These cards were to be alphabetized by author, strung together, and sent on to Paris.
In 1848, Anthony Panizzi, Keeper of Printed Books for the British Museum, had a similar notion:
By an alphabetical catalogue it is understood that the titles be entered in it under some “headings” alphabetically arranged. Now, inasmuch as in a large library no one can know beforehand the juxtaposition of these headings, and it would be impossible to arrange them in the requisite order, if they cannot be easily shifted, each title is therefore written on separate “slips” of paper … which are frequently changed from one place to another as required. It is self-evident that if these “slips” … be not uniform, both in size or substance, their arrangement will cause mechanical difficulties which take time and trouble to overcome.
Slips of paper and decks of playing cards eventually gave way to drawers of annotated cardboard; these were employed, through the 1860s, not as ends in themselves, to be browsed by patrons interested in finding books, but as a convenient means for the staff to keep track of what it had, or to prepare for the publication of a formal catalog. For the ornate, expensively produced catalog in book form was the traditional way a library presented itself to the public — the way it entered, as it were, the library of libraries. And, as it happens, a more than perfunctory catalog of a library’s holdings is an exceedingly difficult book to edit and publish. Charles Coffin Jewett, the librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, in his Smithsonian Report on the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries (1853), wrote:
The preparation of a catalogue may seem a light task, to the inexperienced, and to those who are unacquainted with the requirements of the learned world, respecting such works. In truth, however, there is no species of literary labor so arduous and perplexing. The peculiarities of titles are, like the idiosyncrasies of authors, innumerable.
In 1850, the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society was asked to produce a new catalog for the society. “Men have become insane,” the agitated librarian responded,
in their efforts to reduce these labors to a system; and several instances are recorded where life has been sacrificed in consequence of the mental and physical exertion required for the completion of a catalogue in accordance with the author’s view of the proper method of executing such a task.
One Sunday, feeling only semi-sane myself, I called up Jim Ranz, retired dean of the Libraries of the University of Kansas, from whose immortal monograph The Printed Book Catalogue in American Libraries: 1723–1900 (1964) this last quotation is taken, and I asked him to comment on the passing of card catalogs. Mr. Ranz was not terribly concerned about their fate. “Retention of a card catalog would have to be a pretty low priority in most libraries,” he said. What he really wanted to talk about was Charles Ammi Cutter (1837–1903), the author of what is in Mr. Ranz’s opinion the finest library catalog ever made. Cutter’s masterpiece is the five-volume catalog of the Boston Athenaeum, published between 1874 and 1882. “I’m not sure he wasn’t the greatest cataloger that lived,” Mr. Ranz told me. The work is 3,402 pages long, and is elaborately and commonsensically cross-referenced; it cost the Athenaeum almost a hundred thousand dollars to produce. It is still of interest and utility to historians — as is the card catalog for the Athenaeum, which Cutter also developed. So far, the library has held on to its original cards.
Surely, I insisted to Harvard’s Dale Flecker, the Boston Athenaeum’s card catalog, at the very least, ought to be preserved. “Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Flecker replied. His indifference makes sense, in a way, since he couldn’t very well advocate the preservation of the Athenaeum’s catalog and at the same time defensibly jettison the older and equally rich public catalog at Harvard. The young Charles Cutter had given his energy to Harvard’s cards, too; while working for Ezra Abbot, who was Harvard’s assistant librarian from 1856 to 1872, he had refined his theories about how people actually perform subject searches and what they require from a library’s finding list. In 1861, Ezra Abbot instituted one of the first card catalogs that were “freely and conveniently accessible,” in his words, “to all who use the Library.” By the turn of the century, the traditional bound catalog had become a technical impossibility for large libraries, and card catalogs, predominantly handwritten (despite the existence by then of early typewriters), were everywhere.
In January 1901 the Library of Congress began printing its catalog cards in quantity and selling them in sets to any library that wanted them. These cards — elegant in their own way, accurate, highly readable, and cheap — took off. Even Cutter himself (with good grace, since his advocacy implied the eventual death of his own artful system of subject classification) recommended the purchase of Library of Congress cards, writing in 1904 that “any new library would be very foolish not to make its catalogue mainly of them.” And libraries obeyed. A 1969 study of 1,926 randomly selected cards, all plucked from drawers of the shelf list at Rice University’s Fondren Library, found the following kinds:
15
handwritten
1,275
unmodified Library of Congress
68
modified Library of Congress
472
typewritten
96
miscellaneous, describing maps, musical scores, serials, etc.
(This same pre-computer-age study, published by MIT, determined that the average number of cards in a drawer was 826, that the typical book represented by a card was 276.6 pages long, and that the growth rate of Rice’s library holdings closely tracked that of the United States gross national product.)
The Library of Congress’s handiwork dominated card catalogdom through the early seventies. In 1968, it was distributing about a thousand cards a minute, for around five cents a card. Meanwhile, Fred Kilgour, a chemist turned librarian, sensing that the Library of Congress was failing to exploit the full possibilities of its newly developed machine-readable cataloging techniques, formed OCLC and became, among many other things, the catalog-card printer for the world. (OCLC sprang up in Ohio, according to Kilgour, because “in Ohio, and in the eastern Midwest, people in general are more willing to accept calculated risk with reference to innovation.”) Since 1970, OCLC has printed 1.8 billion catalog cards on its high-volume line printers: they’re the ones with the distinctive, slightly jaunty typewriteresque typeface. Though they cost slightly more than Library of Congress cards, OCLC would automatically sort your duplicates any way you wanted — all together in one alphabet, say, or separately alphabetized for the subject catalog, the author-title catalog, and the shelf list. (A shelf list is a card catalog arranged in call-number order; catalogers use it to help them shelve like books with like.) Since the labor involved in filing cards is an enormous part of the cost of maintaining a card catalog, OCLC’s adaptable presorting was a real advantage, and for years OCLC was esteemed as a card-printing service even by universities that (like Princeton) sniffed at the quality of its growing database.