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The Library of Congress just released a book on the history of the card catalog, and while I can physically feel you clicking away from this article even as I type, I am here to tell you that The Card Catalog is actually weirdly fascinating.
The Card Catalog makes a persuasive case that cataloging knowledge is fundamental to the acquisition and spread of knowledge, and that a working library catalog is, in some ways, a basic necessity of civilization. And since cataloging is a calling that attracts neurotic and obsessive personalities, the history of the library catalog charts a weird, twisty path, with a lot of back-tracking followed by enormous leaps forward.
Here are five of the most interesting things I learned about library cataloging from The Card Catalog.
The first known library catalog dates back to 2000 B.C.
It was found in the Sumerian city of Nippur, and it’s a little 2 1/2 by 1 1/2-inch clay tablet that lists 62 literary works, including The Epic of Gilgamesh. Scholars think writing developed around 3500 B.C., so the library tablet suggests that cataloging came about 1,500 years later — not all that long, in the grand scheme of things.
The British destroyed much of the Library of Congress’s first collection during the War of 1812
The assistant Librarian of Congress at the time, J.T. Frost, tried desperately to save the books as the British prepared to march on Washington, but almost everything had been requisitioned by the army. Frost found a single cart and a single clerk and salvaged what he could, and the British army used the rest of the books as kindling when they burned the White House and the Capitol.
As a PR move, it was disastrous. The British newspapers were filled with editorials denouncing the Library’s burning and declaring it comparable to the ancient destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria. (Although, as The Card Catalog points out, the Library of Alexandria most likely didn’t die because it was burned, but because of bureaucratic neglect.) “Had I known it in time,” British General Ross said, “the books most certainly should have been saved.”
The Library of Congress’s original cataloging system came from Thomas Jefferson, and it was immensely esoteric
After the British destroyed much of the Library’s original collection, Jefferson sold it his personal library. (He was heavily in debt and needed the money, and he owned the largest private library in the country.) He sent the Library 6,487 books and his own personal catalog, with his own personal classification system: 44 subject categories, and then the books ordered within each section in a manner The Card Catalog describes as “analytical and also playful at times.” In Geography, for instance, books were ordered both reverse chronologically (beginning with Lewis and Clark and ending with the Spanish exploration of the Americas, new to old) and geographically (beginning with Northern parts of the globe and ending with Southern parts).
Jefferson apparently found this kind of cataloging joke highly amusing, but George Watterson, Librarian of Congress at the time, decided it wasn’t really a functional system for a working library with lots of users. He kept the subject categories but re-listed the books alphabetically within each subject.
Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System tried to change his name to Dui
In 1876, Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal System, which radically reshaped library cataloging: It was the most efficient system in history, and it allowed libraries across the country to use a standardized cataloging system. But Dewey was also by all accounts extremely difficult to work with, and I can’t help but think that’s because he’s the kind of insufferable efficiency nerd who decides that since Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey is such a mouthful, he might as well shorten his name to Melvil Dui. (Melvil stuck, but Dui didn’t.)
Today, card catalogs are becoming art
The invention of the computer ultimately rendered card catalogs obsolete just in time — they were so bulky that librarians feared an inevitable storage crisis — but library obsessives often wax nostalgic over the tactility of physical catalogs and the browsing that they inspired. Today, some of them are turning old, abandoned card catalogs into art projects. (Meanwhile, they’ve also become a staple of interior design that subscribes to a certain vintage hipster aesthetic.)
The Card Catalog talked to artist Thomas Johnston about the currently unfinished collaborative project he began after he acquired the card catalog from one of Harvard’s libraries. “As artifacts,” he says, “they [the cards] continue to be exciting to look through, to realize the creative activity, research, and information that each card represents, and further, how each card has played a role in advancing knowledge.”
