What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

"The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures"

By Library of Congress

Chronicle. 224 pp. $35

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This book about card catalogs, written and published in cooperation with the Library of Congress, is beautifully produced, intelligently written and lavishly illustrated. It also sent me into a weeklong depression. If you are a book lover of a certain age, it might do the same to you.

"The Card Catalog" is many things: a lucid overview of the history of bibliographic practices, a paean to the Library of Congress, a memento of the cherished card catalogs of yore and an illustrated collection of bookish trivia. The text provides a concise history of literary compendia from the Pinakes of the fabled Library of Alexandria to the advent of computerized book inventory databases, which began to appear as early as 1976. The illustrations are amazing: luscious reproductions of dozens of cards, lists, covers, title pages and other images guaranteed to bring a wistful gleam to the book nerd's eye.

For someone who grew up in and around libraries, it is also a poignant reminder of a vanished world.

Now, waxing nostalgic about card catalogs or being an advocate for the importance of libraries is a mug's game. You can practically feel people glancing up from their iPhones to smile tolerantly at your eccentricity. My response to this, after an initial burst of profanity, is to explain (again) why libraries are essential to narrowing the inequality gap, and why the internet is not an adequate substitute for books or libraries.

"The Card Catalog" is a heady antidote to the technophilia threatening our culture. The book is especially illuminating on the powerful, if overlooked, properties of the humble catalog card, some 79 million of which were printed annually at the system's peak in 1969. Each one is a perfect melding of design and utility, a marvel of informational compression and precision. In his introduction, Peter Devereaux rightly calls the catalog "one of the most versatile and durable technologies in history," one that lasted almost a century, until 1980, when the Library switched completely to a computerized system.

Although some contemporary readers might consider this book outrageously quaint, the card catalog's conceptual structure was the underpinning of the internet; the idea of something being "tagged" by category owes its existence as an organizing principle to the subject headings delineated by the Library of Congress. A national card catalog system was the original "search engine" - one that needed no electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was truly democratic.

The slow obsolescence of this marvelous informational structure lends a palpable sense of loss to the book's narrative. Devereaux quotes historian Barbara Tuchman as referring to the card catalog as "a companion all my working life." As it happens, Tuchman voiced this soulful plaint in a 1985 talk at the New York Public Library, in which she went on to express considerable skepticism about the vaunted capabilities of digital search. "The easier the process is made," Tuchman warned, "and the less active individual thought is employed by the researcher, the less his brain will be exercised. My hunch," she continued, "is that the searcher ... will get more than he wants to know and much that he cannot use."

Technology aside, the book also summons the specter of a bygone American faith in the ability of institutions of government to work for a common good. The idea of the Library of Congress implementing a nationally standardized system to classify and track the nation's collective publication history is now as surely a part of the past as steam engines or top hats. Looked at this way, the card catalog stands with other great 20th-century works of civic architecture as testament to the potential of what a society - and a government - can achieve, an especially discouraging reminder in our current era of reduced expectations.

For some readers, the sense of personal nostalgia engendered by this book is piercing. When I think of the books that shaped me - the haphazardly chosen volumes that formed the bedrock of my post-collegiate education - I think of the works of Kael and Angell, of James and Didion and Updike and Roth and Exley, in their Boston Public Library plastic casings, piled high on a rickety desk in some shabby hovel of my young adulthood. I owe my existence as a reader, as a thinker, as a writer, as a person to libraries. This book reminds me of that, even as it reminds me of how much has been lost.