While digging about in indexing and filing systems, I ran across this chart created by the Oxford Filing Supply Company for a special Filing Supplies section of the May 1934 issue of Office Appliances magazine (Volume 59, Issue 5). It delineates the broad characteristics of most of the major commercially available filing systems of the era.

Of course, by itself, it may not make much sense, so for those interested in older indexing and filing systems, take a peek at Remington Rand’s textbook Progressive Indexing and Filing (1950) which provides lots of images, examples, and full descriptions by many of the bigger manufacturers.

Perhaps these, which are all fairly similar, may help someone in designing their indexing system for a zettelkasten or commonplace book practices.

The rest of the articles in the magazine also have some fascinating history.

Read Principles of Indexing and Filing by Laura H. Cadwallader and S. Ada Rice (The H. M. Rowe Company)

An early 21st century textbook on filing and indexing practices geared toward office workers. First edition, 1932.

The first section is on the rules of alphabetization and indexing to standardize the space of ordering cards for both people’s names and company names.

The second section covers some history on basic filing techniques and then goes into alphabetic, geographic, numeric, and subject indexing methods. The final sections cover the L.B Automatic (Library Bureau), the triple check method, and various other special filing methods as well as maintaining and transferring files for long term storage. Illustrations of these various methods help to visualize how they worked in practice.

This text isn’t as interesting or as comprehensive as the works of J. Kaiser from earlier in the century.

Read on 2025-11-16.

How do you keep track of your typewriter collection?

• Do you keep a simple typewritten list?
• Do you use a spreadsheet?
• The Typewriter Database?
• A period-appropriate card index? 
• Tags on your machines on the shelves?
• Via your blog or web page?
• All of the above?
• Keep track?!? I enjoy tripping over them all over the house.
• Other?

What data do you keep on them? 

How big was your collection before you decided you needed to do something?

Card Indexes in Wedding Crashers

While watching Wedding Crashers (2005, New Line), I noticed that John Beckwith (portrayed by Owen Wilson) and Jeremy Grey (Vince Vaughn) both have multiple card indexes in their offices in the movie. One can't help but wondering if their work leverages one of the variety of card index filing systems? Were they commonplacers? Zettelkasten users? Were they maintaining them as basic databases? Monster rolodexes? There are definitely a lot of them around. It's obvious that Jeremy actively […]

https://boffosocko.com/2025/04/30/card-indexes-in-wedding-crashers/

I remember chuckling when I saw Tom Hanks’ tags on his typewriters. Now that I’m over 15 of my own which are constantly out and about the house, I realize the benefit of matching tags on machines and their cases. I don’t have an issue with identification and matching (yet), but if nothing else, less interested family members can properly store them out of the way if they need to without causing issues. Interested visitors can also get a quick précis of machines they run across.

Thank goodness I’ve got a card catalog big enough to log and cross-file a couple hundred models. I’m thinking of categorizing by manufacturer, by decade, and including typeface samples, which I’ve already been doing as I add them to the typewriter database.

Replied to a post by Pratik (microblog.pratikmhatre.com)

One more use for ChatGPT - enter all ingredients, including the type of alcohol you currently have, and ask it to suggest cocktails.Reply by email Also on Micro.blog Reply on Mastodon

🗃️ 🍸🥃 I have a section in my card index for that functionality: 

#artificialIntelligence #cardIndexAsDatabase #ChatGPT #cocktails

https://boffosocko.com/2023/12/30/55820595/

@GMJuditPolgar, I’m doing some research for a book on note taking traditions, commonplace books, and zettelkasten/card indexes. In watching an interview of you with Christiane Amanpour from 2020 I noticed a photo of you next to a card index while playing chess. Do you have 15-20 minute for a short interview to talk about it and how you compiled and used it?

 

#cardIndexAsDatabase #chess #openQuestions #Zettelkasten

https://boffosocko.com/2023/12/23/55820416/

Quoted a post by Letterform Archive (@[email protected]) (typo.social)

This box of 600+ specimen cards holds a complete snapshot of the last metal type foundries in Germany. Produced 1958–1971, the Schriftenkartei (Typeface Index) represents the final effort to catalog all the country’s typefaces in production at the time. The cards are useful for researchers and designers as they share a common format and show complete glyph sets. Thanks to Michael Wörgötter, a set of these cards is now in our collection, and his high-res scans are online. https://letterformarchive.org/news/schriftenkartei-german-font-index/

This Schriftenkartei represents a fascinating example of a card index (#zettelkasten) as a database. This one obviously had a very narrow range of topics.

#typography + #zettelkasten = winning!

#cardIndexAsDatabase #foundries #Schriftenkartei #typography #Zettelkasten

https://boffosocko.com/2023/11/04/55819598/

Zettelkasten for Dogs.

Seen in the wild: An actively functioning card index (zettelkasten) used to manage a local dog grooming business.

#card-index-as-database #card-index-for-business #dog-grooming #dog-zone

https://boffosocko.com/2023/04/21/zettelkasten-for-dogs/