In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the heroine, Fanny Price, when in Portsmouth, seeks out the local library and becomes “a renter, a chuser (sic) of books”. I cannot remember any time of my life when I did not regularly visit the local library, and I fully understand Fanny’s joy and the sense of expansion it brings to know you can enter a library and borrow any of its books. However, in Jane Austen’s day, there was no such object as a library card. In her time, paper ledgers kept track of which person had borrowed which book. This was cumbersome, as there had to be a separate page for each borrower, and what they borrowed and returned. British libraries were then private – one became a subscribing member for a fee.
In France, during the French Revolution, there was a paper shortage so the Government wrote book titles on the backs of playing cards – this created the first ‘card catalogue’.
In the 1840s a free library movement began, open to everyone. Slowly it became a more permanent practice to use some form of card system to keep track of what was being borrowed. However, writing our names and dates took time and long queues often formed in libraries as relevant pages were found and details filled in.
In 1900, at Newark Public Library, the director John Cotton Dana invented a two-card system – one card stayed in the borrowed book, while the other stayed at the library. These early cards had space to write ‘date borrowed’, ‘date due’ and ‘date returned’, so they did fill up and needed to be replaced. In 1932, also in the USA, the Gaylord Company created an electrically operated book-charging machine that used paper cards with embossed metal plates on them. This machine then stamped the borrower’s number onto a book card.
Over the following decades, other machine-operated or automated systems evolved. I must admit to feeling nostalgic about the old card system – a borrowed book would have its lending history written inside it, with crossings-out and a date history that told you much about the popularity of that book. Look at this example – a book with the thrilling title Electrical Instruments in Hazardous Locations. It was borrowed six times in twenty years, mostly (if not wholly) by men!
By the 1970s computers were taking over, and old paper and metal cards were replaced with barcodes. Plastic cards could then be scanned to be linked with the book being borrowed. Today, it is all more efficient, can be done by the borrower and saves on paper, but a part of me will always miss the old way of borrowing from a library, that most wonderful of institutions.
Are you feeling nostalgic for library borrowing cards? How often did you visit your local library? Please leave a comment.
Selected links for relevant websites, books, movies, videos, and more. Some of these links lead to protected content on this website, learn more about that here.