In Praise of the Card Index

Image - Wikimedia Commons

When I was quite young and still in Junior school, I was introduced to the joys of Spring Hill Library, reached by Birmingham City Transport's B82 bus for I think the child's fare of 1½d. This was a journey I was hence to make unaccompanied most Saturdays, for years to come and something I looked forward to during the school week.

To understand why this should be so important to a small boy from Birmingham, you have to know something about the context of that boy.

Although I was lucky enough to live in a house with books and parents who encouraged us to read, the scope of that small library was limited and books expensive: the library opened up a world of reading vast by comparison. In the early years of these Saturday trips to borrow my five volumes, I just scoured the shelves and picked up whatever stood out for me. It was some time later that I was taught how to use the card indexes to find specific books or authors; a process that fascinated me then and still does to this day.

There is nothing to compare with thumbing through those lovely dog-eared old cards held in serried rows of polished oak drawers fitted with worn-smooth brass handles and title-card holders.

Like second-hand bookshops, the redolence of that smell of paper, wood and polish evokes strong memories of a bygone era. Wikipedia, Google and Amazon in particular and the internet in general make finding almost any book ridiculously straightforward, but I miss the physicality of a real search, the unravelling of a mystery or the journey through the stacks of a library that starts with the card index.