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#2577 - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
"Index cards, with their scratch-outs, imperfect erasures and caret insertions, jog our memory as only the tactile can."
I think nondual type people tend to live, or would like to live, lives that are simple, direct, and effective. And so we bring you a Nondual Highlights issue on one of the most simple, direct, and effective inventions ever: the index card.
The following material is from Levenger: tools for serious readers. Check out their high quality products: http://snipurl.com/w34i.
Just about everyone’s heard of—and has
probably used—3 x 5 cards, but where did they come from?
Surprisingly, their origin dates back a thousand years. Also
known as index cards, their evolution is rooted in the concept of
cataloging, or indexing, key words in a book.
The monks of medieval times employed a hands-on system for
marking a manuscript’s key words: they would use a symbol
that indicated a finger pointing to the term—that digit
being the forefinger, or index finger. Index traces its
roots to Latin and the concept of informer, or pointer. Its Greek
forbear means to show.
Eventually these pointy fingers found their way to the back of
the book in the form of an index of terms.
But how were books themselves being catalogued? In fits and
starts, it seems, with the Alexandria Library using an
alphabetical system in the third century B.C. E., but the
European libraries using a peculiar rhyming system 11 centuries
later.
Things got better organized in the nineteenth century, and in
1820 the first card catalog appeared in a library in London.
The American hero of the library index card was Melvil Dewey. He
introduced his decimal classification system in the 1870s, in the
library at Amherst College in western Massachusetts. The card he
devised for his catalog drawers was approximately 3" x
5". The typewriter had been invented a few years earlier,
and ultimately the card and the keys met and married.
The Library of Congress started printing its catalog index cards
in 1901. For the next eight decades or so, the library index card
and its attendant cabinets would serve as the Google of their
day. Nicholson Baker, in his elegiac essay on card catalogs that
appeared in The New Yorker in 1994, reported that the New
York Public Library harbored 10 million cards.
With all these cards in libraries, perhaps it was only a matter
of time before they segued into general use. Thrifty librarians
primed the pump by setting out discarded cards for patrons to use
for notes. Seeing the cards’ usefulness, stationers began
offering blank cards for sale. Business and professional people,
writers and students adopted the cards as standard tools for
researching, filing and organizing information.
And then, of course, computers struck. Card cabinets in libraries
were dismantled and the cards discarded. There simply wasn’t
enough room anymore to capture all our knowledge on a 3" x
5" descendant of papyrus. The once ubiquitous little cards,
whose origins are so closely linked to cataloging knowledge,
teetered on the brink of extinction.
But not quite.
The index card is still a handy palimpsest, the screen on which
one can quickly capture first ideas, reminder notes, titles of
books friends recommend, your grandmother’s recipe for
pumpkin pie. Index cards, with their scratch-outs, imperfect
erasures and caret insertions, jog our memory as only the tactile
can.
By contrast, electronic systems live a perilously finite
existence. Better operating systems, application software and
search engines will come along and the current hero will be
banished, forgotten, trashed.
Get your digit out, the English are fond of saying—meaning,
get cracking. Get your digit out—and your pen—and jot a
note on an index card. It still has a place in the digital world.
How to thrive with the power of 3 x 5
They have been around for a century,
they’re as low-tech as they come, but 3 x 5 cards can fill
an exalted role among twenty-first-century thinkers. Within the
realm of capturing ideas and acting on them, they fill a niche
that notebooks and electronics can’t. What could be...
simpler to use
easier to shuffle around
handier to keep and pull from a pocket
more disposable—or lasting—than a simple index card?
The power of 24/7
At Levenger, we first saw 3 x 5 cards as a larger and more
functional business card. Stand them vertically so that
they’re 5 x 3, and you can write a note right on your
business card.
Gradually, we’ve realized that their power goes beyond this.
Three-by-fives are the stuff of 24/7 ideas, better than
back-of-the-envelope yet engendering that same freewheeling kind
of thinking that often leads to the Great Idea.
And they’re not only for taking notes on the run.
They’re for anywhere and any way you capture, develop and
organize ideas. That’s why, in addition to our Pocket
Briefcases for travel, you’ll now find your 3 x 5’s
close to home.
3 x 5 tips from Steve:
“A key tip: try to limit what you write
on cards to a single topic or subject, such as a grocery list on
one card, a hardware list on another. For work, keep cards for
different people or areas of responsibility.”
“I use a very fine-point pen to get lots of information
on one card and I write neatly—most of the time.”
“I almost never write on the backs, and this saves me
from always having to turn cards around to see if there is
writing on the back. Occasionally, when I’m taking a bunch
of notes on one topic, like during a speech, then I’ll write
on the backs. But I number each card side, 1, 2, 3, which is my
cue to look at the backs.”
Steve also uses them to make daily lists of to-dos that he
adds to and crosses off as he goes through the day.
