It dawns on me that I’ve never mentioned one of the great affordances of many of the older card index cabinets is that they’re designed to be able to completely remove one or more drawers at a time and use at your desk. On an almost daily basis, I pull out at least one drawer from my cabinet and place it on my desk and it allows me to actively work with collections of over 7,000 cards at a time. This means that while the cabinet itself may seem like deep or “cold” storage, it’s really ongoing active storage that I can quickly and easily interact with depending on the range of projects I may be dealing with on a given day. Working on a different project for a bit? Put one drawer away and pull another…
Several of my cabinets have not only pull handles on the front of the drawers, but also have cut-out handles in the rear to be able to easily pull them out and move them around. This feature was also the reason many cabinets also had card rods. The cards could be physically held into the drawers to prevent the user from accidentally tipping the drawer and loosing all the cards into a random pile on the floor. Robert Pirsig describes a sad affair similar to this in his book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (Bantam Books, 1991).
Of course at the end of the day I can quickly slot the drawer right back into the cabinet for that clean desk look. And because today is the one year anniversary of the Eaton Fire, I’ll mention that it’s also pretty easy to pull a few of your favorite drawers out of the filing cabinet for fleeing your home office, evacuating your town, and being able to work for four months remotely. (Just remember to seat belt those drawers into the back seat if you don’t have card rods!)
@chrisaldrich that’s a great active use for a filing cabinet drawers that you. Also, weren’t those two and four drawer wooden card index cabinets designed to sit on a desktop for active use?
@writingslowly Yes, they certainly were, and I’m using a few of those in that manner as well. By mid-century most office workers would likely have had one or two in their office for use in daily work while the rest of their broader filing needs, especially in larger businesses and organizations, would have been handled centrally. As an example, as early as December 1910, W. K. Kellogg, the President of the Toasted Corn Flake Company, is quoted touting the invaluable nature of Shaw-Walker’s filing system at a time when his company was using 640 drawers of filing. #.