The peep-hole of the past

Comfort for any bookworms with fond and sad memories of card catalogs:

The Health Sciences Library at Columbia University recently “pared down its card catalog” — adorable: this means they’ve still maintained one? — and made this sideshow of some of the more unusual cards. This is the medical school library, so most have to do with microbes and “nurses on horseback.” Besides the one above, my favorite is for a 30-page study from 1815 entitled “A foetus found in the abdomen of a young man, at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire.”

Just as fascinating and heartwarming are all the quirks of format and typeface — the weird brackets, the inscrutable codes and their inscrutable placements, the additions by typewriter and pencil. This was knowledge at its most compact in the pre-computer age.

Thanks to D. for the tip.