FireKing International manufactures a 1-hour fire protection filing cabinet with index card inserts, that has options for various locks, is rated for 30 foot drops, and is sealed against potential water damage. They offer both four and six drawer options with the larger clocking in at a massive 863 pounds. With each of the 18 sections on the 6 drawer model capable of 25 15/16″ of storage, this beast should hold about 64,800 index cards.
The rough news is that this king of cabinets, while providing great protection and security for your zettelkasten, runs a fairly steep $6,218.00. Despite the initial sticker shock, keep in mind though, that it should provide a lifetime of secure and worry-free storage for just under 10 cents per card.
Unless you’re into the older vintage wooden boxes which aren’t very good for protection against fire or water damage, there aren’t too many modern card index filing cabinet manufacturers out there, and this may be the most solid of the group. I’ll add it shortly to the ever-growing list at The Ultimate Guide to Zettelkasten Index Card Storage.
Someone was having a sale, so I might have just spent $18.65 for a massive haul of 4,500 4 x 6″ index cards. 🗃️ Happy New Year indeed!🥂🎆🥳
Could one go as far as to say that the ten commandments (numbered notes) presumably etched onto stone tablets (slips) and placed into the ark of the covenant (a box) and which coherently formed the basis of knowledge and living a good life for the twelve tribes was a zettelkasten?
Why not?
On the seventh day of the siege of Jericho, the Ark of the Covenant is carried around the city, horns are blown and the walls collapse (Josh 6:20-25).
Extract from Latin Psalter from England – BSB Hss Clm 835, fol. 21r. Oxford, 1st quarter of the 13th century
Source: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Card Index Expenses 2023
Index card storage (boxes): $404.59
Index cards (3,650 cards) $87.56
Tabbed dividers/accessories $73.05
Total: $565.20
In the documentary Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only (Netflix, 2023) while preparing for a portion of their tour, Kevin Hart admires a portion of Chris Rock’s stand up comedy method and calls it “a science”. Chris Rock writes headlines for his jokes on slips of paper and then arranges them on either tables or small bulletin boards to outline his set list for presenting jokes for his performances.
If there are interesting contemporaneous news items which appear, he’ll include a newspaper or other material to represent the related joke for inclusion into his set. This makes a fascinating means of outlining his material and seems to fall within the realm of my search for zettelkasten output processes. Even if Rock doesn’t use index cards to write or store his jokes like comedians in the past have, he’s using a slip-based method for outlining and arranging them as part of his output process.
Kevin Hart: Chris, I’m so… I’m so, uh blown away by what I’m discovering that is your process.
Chris Rock: My process.
Kevin Hart: This all your shit?
Chris Rock: Well, this here would be, uh, bullet points for tonight. Every card represents a joke or a reference that I choose. I don’t wanna forget. You know what I mean? Like, you can remember all your jokes, but some nights, I’m like, ‘ehhh, I’m not gonna close with this one. I’m gonna close with that one’.
Kevin Hart: You have it down to a science where you can bullet point the time.
Chris Rock: You can. And by the way, sometimes, something happens in the news.
Kevin Hart: You got jokes on the bench.
Chris Rock: I have jokes on the bench.
Kevin Hart: I’m going to tell you I’m not only impressed by that, but I’m disappointed in myself. Because, uh, whatever I got, got to to fly.
Continuing on with my bullet journal-like Memindex practice using 4 x 6 inch index cards for 2024. Happy to continue answering questions about it for the curious.
@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?
I’m slowly coming to realize that handwriting or typecasting to my website means that I am left with a permanent, physical copy of my post which I can archive into a physical card file. I can file them by date to create a version of a diary, and/or I can file them by taxonomy so that I might reuse the ideas at a later date zettelkasten-style.
After IndieWebCamp San Diego this weekend, I’m thinking more about making it easier to post to my website using handwritten text. Index cards are particularly useful for short notes and status updates for this.
Christmas has come early this year! This is so much better than a lump of coal. Thanks Santa. 🎅🏼🗃️
Happy birthday Niklas Luhmann. Today he would have been 96 years old. 🎂🗃️
I feel validated that I’m not the only one in love with their wooden card catalog:
The script for my Niklas Luhmann movie is coming along nicely. After watching some of Ned Ballamy‘s work, I’m thinking that he’d be the natural lead… #zettelkasten
Amidst my seemingly ever-growing collection of index card boxes and trays, I’ve been contemplating getting something that would store cards in a vertical orientation rather than the traditional horizontal. As I’ve been watching the market over the past couple of years, nothing had really come up that suited the bill until this past summer.
That’s when I saw a small handful of what are known as library charging trays pop up.
What is a library charging tray?
These library charging trays were traditionally used in libraries in the mid to late-twentieth century at the circulation desk. A librarian would remove the book card from the pocket adhered to one of the inside covers of the book. This card would identify the book’s author and title and generally have a list of borrower’s names along with either the due date or the return date, or sometimes both. Once filled out, the card would be placed vertically in the charging tray behind a tab indicating its due date. The librarian would then place a due date card into the empty pocket with a stamped due date on it. Alternately some of these pockets may have been printed with grids into which a due date would be stamped.
The library would then have in their charging tray an ordered list of checked out books which they could later use to follow up on if they became overdue.
Upon return of the book from the patron, the librarian would then be able to match up the title and stamped due date in the pocket with that from the card in the charging tray and refile the book card into the pocket of the appropriate book before returning it to the shelves for the next patron.
Models and Materials
Most charging trays I’ve seen range from 1 row of cards and have gone up to 5 rows. Most common are 2 and 3 row models.
I’ve yet to see older trays made out of oak. Most seem to be from the 1960s onward and are often constructed of maple. Gaylord Brothers and Remington-Rand seem to have been the primary manufacturers of these, but it’s possible that other companies may have made them as well.
One tray has two rows for cards while the other has three. The double tray is definitely manufactured by Gaylord Bros, Inc. and still has the original manufacturer’s sticker on the bottom. The other is unmarked and is most likely a Gaylord too as Remington-Rand typically put a small metal badge on most of their products. This one not only doesn’t have that traditional badging, but also doesn’t have any telltale nail holes where it may have originally been. The double tray has 12 1/2″ of internal space for cards in each row and the triple has 10 3/4″ in each row which would give them enough space to hold approximately 3,500 and 4,500 index cards respectively.
The double tray seems almost new despite some minor wear. (We all know how rough those librarians can be.) The triple tray shows more signs of wear including some old labeling with handwriting that provides a fun level of patina.
New uses for library charging trays
Naturally one could immediately consider using these trays to hold index cards for their note taking and filing practices. This is particularly useful for those who might appreciate a physical zettelkasten form factor for using vertically oriented 3 x 5″ index cards. (I’ve never seen a charging tray made for 4 x 6″ index cards and would suspect they never existed.)
Beyond this, those who are into the idea of maintaining a hipster PDA or who have 3 x 5″ index cards for general productivity purposes would certainly appreciate these boxes for their filing and archiving needs. If you’re unfamiliar with these sorts of practices see my article about The Memindex Method. A charging tray would certainly make an excellent home for a modern day Memindex practice. Pair it with an index card wallet and you’re off to the races as if you were living back in 1903.
What other functions could these trays be upcycled for? I’m curious to hear others’ ideas here.
Finding Charging Trays
Used/Vintage Charging Trays
With the digitization of most library circulation processes the noble charging tray has generally gone out of fashion. At the height of their use, most libraries didn’t really need many of them, so they were never as ubiquitous in the broader market the way other card index boxes and cabinets were. As a result it’s rarer to see them on the secondary/used market in comparison to their brethren. When you do find them, it’s more likely that you’ll see them incorrectly listed as card index drawers. I suspect it would be incredibly rare that a second hand seller would know what they actually were, but even if they did, the key words in their name mean dramatically different things now which swamp the search engine optimization algorithms with things which patently are not these boxes.
This means long search times and patience to attempt to track them down. I’ve seen several listed as “rare” which they are to some degree, but not as rare as most sellers think they are in terms of pricing. They primarily seem rare because no one knows what to call them and as a result pricing can be all over the map. I’ve seen some two and three drawer versions listed for $300 and up. For a more reasonable reference I got both of mine for a total of $60 and a very modest shipping charge. I’ve seen one or two others sell for $20 to $30 each. A couple of trays I saw in Spring 2023 which listed for several hundred are still gathering dust on vintage store shelves.
New Charging Trays
If you don’t have the patience to get something vintage, you might try purchasing new charging trays from Brodart. According to my research, they’re the only player left making and selling them outside of one online retailer in India offering a 5 tray model for for 2″x3″ and 3″x5″ cards for about US$50.
Sadly, Brodart has had some ongoing issues with their online web store this fall, so one would need to download a copy of their catalog and order via email, phone, or fax. In my physical copy of their most recent catalog they appear in the Processing and Circulation section on page 137. They offer both single and double trays in either a light or a darker finish. Prices for them range from US$76.76 to 149.06. The smaller trays will fit 600 cards with the larger trays fitting 1,000 cards each. Given their size, they might make for rather elegant desktop boxes. On that same catalog page Brodart also conveniently offers green pressboard card guides (dividers) which are either plain or labeled with the months of the year in a vertical 5″ tall by 3″ wide configuration. Separately they have some manila dividers with 1/3 cut alphabet tabs (A-Z) for helping you to sort and separate your cards.
For those who might prefer to use these in a zettelkasten practice, Brodart also makes borrower’s cards and book cards in a range of light to medium-weight card stock (similar to index cards) which are pre-printed with a range of metadata fields common to these types of cards (author, title, date loaned, borrower’s name, date returned, date due, room number, etc. Most of these cards are listed on catalog pages 128 and 129. Some of these would be particularly useful for making bibliography cards which would use some of these preprinted data fields. The date and patron portions could then be used to note page numbers and either quotes from the text/one’s own ideas respectively. All these cards are conveniently lined for writing your notes. Naturally one could just as easily use their own 3 x 5″ index cards of choice in a vertical orientation.
I’m tending to lean more toward telling students to rely more directly on something like Cornell notes while they’re in classes learning the basics of an area. Too many students considering starting a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten think that they ought to write down everything, atomize it, and link it which would take an inordinate amount of time to those new to the process. This is particularly troublesome because most courses (especially introductory ones) are designed such that much of the material should be fully internalized by the time the course is over. When you take a math class you might learn what 2+2 is and make a note about it, but by the time the course is over, that idea should now be so basic that keeping it in your system should be a bit laughable. Spending time to excerpt it from a lecture, make it atomic, and interlink it is a lot of make-work that isn’t likely to be useful either for the learning the thing to begin with, much less remember it in the long run to potentially use it again.
Once one has mastered most of a course, they might profitably skim through their notes at the end to summarize outcomes they saw and find most useful and interesting. Those things along with the summaries of their Cornell notes might then be useful zettels to keep in the long run. A zettelkasten practice like that of Niklas Luhmann is more useful when one already has a strong lay of the land and they’re attempting to do the work of expanding on the boundaries of new areas of knowledge.
If you are a student contemplating creating a zettelkasten, then the bulk of your notes probably ought to be short snippets kept with your bibliography notes and should not be individual zettels. By this I mean specifically that you might have a bibliographic note (reference note or literature note) for each individual lecture with some fleeting notes about it kept with that card. Then if necessary, you’ll probably only have one or two zettels or permanent notes out of each lecture. If you’re attempting to create 30 permanent notes a day and interlink them all, then you’re going to find yourself overworked and overwhelmed within just a few days.
