Posted by Lori Ayre on October 1, 2005

I just learned about the origins of card catalogs. Did you know they came to be because after the French Revolution, the new French government had a bunch of books they needed to sell or burn or put somewhere so they decide to inventory them.

In order to figure out what they had, they decided to use the playing cards they had confiscated along with the books to record the author and title and a few other important pieces of information (mostly indicating their market value). Then what happened?  I mean after he dropped the Arabic card catalog. The decision was to sort the cards by author and if there was no author, by the first important word in the title. They would keep the cards and the books in the same order for easy access. To ensure the cards didn't get messed up, they took a needle and strung thread through the lower, right hand corner of each card.

And the card catalog was born.

Which brings me to this funny which, as you can see, I've had for years....