Yet more fun from Mental Multivitamin. Make your own catalog card here.

I LOVE the old card-catalog cards; it makes me a little sad that they're (mostly) all gone. I have a few cards that I've salvaged over the years (the library here was putting them out as scratch paper for a while).

There's something I find very evocative about them. Especially the ones that have little notes or corrections written on them - there's that human touch. I suppose it's also evocative because some of my earliest library memories revolve around walking up to the old catalog - in those days, much taller than I was - and pulling out the drawer for the children's section, and learning how to find the books I wanted.

Computers (sometimes) are more efficient, but they're not as romantic. And there's less chance of stumbling upon something, serendipitously, by opening a drawer to the "wrong" place or by noticing the card that is before or after the card for the book you're looking for. (I feel the same way in "real" bookstores vs. Amazon. In a "real" bookstore you can browse the shelves and maybe find something you want to read that you'd have never found before; at Amazon, you have to (or I have to at least) have an idea in mind of what you want; it's not so easy to browse. And there's something to be said about slowly strolling through the bookcases (or stacks, for that matter, if you're in a library) and looking at all the POSSIBILITIES. All the books you COULD read. Somehow it's not the same when they only exist for you at the moment as a string of 1s and 0s.)