Thank you for this terrifying tale. It led me straight to the following, which you may appreciate (italics mine):

IN The Mechanical Processes of the Historian ("Helps for Students of History," No. 50, S.P.C.K., 6d.) Mr. Charles Johnson has deliberately limited himself to the prosaic and practical, and has written on those lines a useful little book from which the beginner in historical composition may well derive valuable guidance. It has even a touch of humour in it, as when he remarks, "Saints, Popes, Kings, Jews and Welshmen may be regarded as having no surnames"; and the worst error we have detected is on the first page, where Mr. Johnson attributes the sad fate of M. Fulgence Tapir to his neglecting the mechanical side of historiography. Surely the fault of that savant was not neglect, but over-confidence in the virtue of the fiche, and the true moral is that there is no necessary salvation in the fiche and the card-index. This is a doctrine so practically important that we could have wished more than two pages of the book had been devoted to note-taking and other aspects of the "Plan and Arrangement of Collections." Contrariwise, less space might have been given to indexing, and it is doubtful whether the short list of books at the end, though sound, is quite elaborate enough to fulfil its purpose.

T. F. T.

Source: History. New Series. Vol. 8, No. 41(October, 1923), pp. 231-237. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24399551