Note taking | Chris Aldrich

A clever affordance of card index filing cabinet drawers

Someone recently mentioned to me that the small, portable 1,000 index card capacity cardboard box with lid that they use as a zettelkasten felt more like it was for deep storage rather than daily use. Perhaps it’s a result of the fact that this is how most people have been using these cheaper cardboard boxes for the last 30+ years? They said they’d prefer to have a drawer or a box with an attached lid.

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!)

Typed index card with text: "I've got lots to say. I'm saving it all up." ---Beca Mitchell (portrayed by Anna Kendrick) Pitch Perfect 2 (Universal, 2015) Given as an excuse in a recording studio This is the reason that creatives should keep notebooks, commonplace books, or zettelkasten---so they have material to use immediately when under pressure, or simply to stimulate their creativity. 2026-01-02

Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten Method One Pager (1968)

The internet is now rife with what I call “zettelkasten method one pagers” that describe what many people rightly (or very often wrongly) think that Niklas Luhmann’s zettelkasten method entails.

While doing some research about Luhmann’s numbering system’s antecedents, I recently came across a “one pager” (typescript) written by Luhmann himself in the form of some lecture notes from 1968 that folks may appreciate.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1968-01-13. “Ms. 2906: Technik des Zettelkastens.” Münster, Germany. Lecture Notes. Niklas Luhmann Archiv, https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/manuskripte/manuskript/MS_2906_0001.

Seemingly everyone with a blog that ran across the idea of Zettelkasten in the last decade or so wrote up their own description of what it is. If you know of other blog posts about zettelkasten, let me know for my collection.

Of special note to those who are still under the misapprehension that Luhmann “invented the zettelkasten”, in the closing section of his 1968 notes he writes “In conclusion: from personal experience, others work differently” by which one understands that he’s aware of others who use similar systems and admits that they’re all idiosyncratic to their individual users. I would suspect that he gave this lecture while at Sozialforschungsstelle an der Universität Münster (Social Research Centre of the University of Münster) to students about how to arrange and do their own sociology research work.

Wishing all my friends and fellow note takers a happy holidays!

Acquired Brodart Colored Blank Punched Catalog Cards (shopbrodart.com)

Medium-weight colored blank punched catalog cards
blue, green, buff, ivory, white, salmon

Stocking stuffers anyone? Santa brought 6,000 index cards down the proverbial chimney today. Should have enough now to index all the books in the house?

Acquired Lochby Field Folio A6 (Lochby)

Keep your A6 notebooks, pens, and essentials organized on the go with the Field Folio A6. Durable, vegan waxed canvas, slim design, and flexible pockets—perfect for travel, journaling, or everyday carry.

Lochby Field Folio A6 sits closed on a brown wooden table with it's Lochby kraft identification tag sitting on top of it. The exterior of the folio features brown waxed canvas.

I recently asked the kind folks at Lochby “if the Folio A6 will comfortably fit 25-50 standard 4 x 6″ index cards which are slightly larger than an A6 notebook? If not, is it something you might consider for some of us ‘Hipster PDA’ tribe members in the future?”

Erring on the side of caution their customer service replied, “Unfortunately, since the Field Folio A6 zips up, there’s no way to fit this many index cards in it without the potential for damaging them when zipping it up. But I’ll take note of your suggestion and pass it on to our product development team so we can consider it as well as gauge interest.”

Because I often use A6 sized notebooks, I couldn’t resist adding to my Lochby collection, so I went ahead and ordered it anyway.

It arrived in the post yesterday. Today I’m happy to report that it actually will accommodate 4 x 6″ index cards reasonably well. I can comfortably fit about 30 cards into the right side pocket and still have room to tuck a Hobonichi A6 notebook into the folio and still zip it shut handily.

Because I usually have a few pre-glued decks of index card “notebooks” sitting around, I tried one of these and can happily report that the back cover/board fits into the right pocket easily (just as you’d tuck the back cover of a notebook into it) and works well with the Lochby A6 folio! (The center elastic bands are slightly smaller and fairly tight, and could work with these glued decks too, but will tend to cut the glue at the ends, so one should take care here or carefully only glue the center 5 inches of the deck for this use case.) I suspect that if one had a plastic wallet-photo type holder, it might work well in this, particularly if you’re carrying around some of your daily use cards in addition to blank cards for future use.

I now have definitive written proof of a numeric indexing system (delineated in a popular textbook for secretaries, and published by a company which did significant business in Germany) from the mid-1920s with increasingly more detail into the 1940s and a fifth edition published in 1950. It’s exactly like, but notably predates, Niklas Luhmann’s alphanumeric system which he started in 1952. I’ll write up some of the details shortly with specific references, but thought I’d tease it here a bit first.

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.

Zettel of the Year Awards

In preparing for some of my end-of-the-year review from my card index, I thought it would be interesting to choose the “Best Note of the Year”. Then it thought it might be worth choosing a “Best Insight”, “Most Surprising Note”, and a “Best Folgezettel” as well.

And if you’re going to give out an award, it should involve a trophy of some sort, right?!? So naturally I went out and picked up a “4 x 6 inch index card” made out of India Black Granite that I plan on engraving with the Note of the Year. At 3/8ths of an inch thick, it is by a large stretch the thickest index card I have in my zettelkasten.

As it may be an interesting end-of-year review practice, I thought I would open up the “competition” to others who’d like to participate. Are there other categories one should enter cards for consideration?

What is your “Best Note of the Year”?

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.

Watching people online chat, ask questions, and generally get excited about their planners for 2026, I thought I would spend a few minutes to set up my Memindex-inspired planner version using 4 x 6″ index cards and tabbed dividers. It’s amazing how useful a $2.50 block of 500 index cards can be for planning out your coming year.

Interestingly, I’ve recently come across versions of this same sort of tickler file recommended in mid-20th century textbooks for filing and indexing in business contexts:

Cadwallader, Laura Hanes, and Sarah Ada Rice. 1932. Principles of Indexing and Filing. Baltimore; Chicago: H.M. Rowe Company. page 134: https://archive.org/details/principlesofinde0000laur/page/134/mode/2up

Kahn, Gilbert, Theo Yerian, and Jeffrey R. Stewart, Jr. 1962. Progressive Filing and Records Management. 1st ed. New York: Gregg Publishing Division, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc. page 190: https://archive.org/details/progressivefilin0000gilb/page/190/mode/2up

The careful observer will notice that both of the photos in texts by different authors nearly 30 years apart are the same! I would suspect that they’re from a manufacturer’s catalog (Remington Rand) earlier in the century. It’s even more interesting that one can still quickly create such a set up with commercially available analog office supplies now.

Thinking about the current storage capacity of my card index collection, I made a back-of-the-index-card calculation:

172,000 index cards * 150 words / card [average maximum, using front only] * 1,200 bytes / 150 words [rough average with Unicode encoding] * 1 kb / 1024 bytes * 1MB/1024 kb = approximately 200 MB of text storage

Having it well organized and indexed… Priceless.

Replied to Gutting Book Basics by

Thomas Vander Wal (vanderwal.net)

I continually think I have written about gutting books in the past, but have only mentioned it and alluded to it. When I bring it up I often get asked about and want to point to my explanation, as there are few resources elsewhere (there is one that surfaced in 2009 from Naomi Standen guiding her students How to gut a book).

For those looking to delve in deeper to gutting books, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren go into greater depth in How to Read a Book (Touchstone, 1972, 2011) in which they discuss various levels of reading books with which many students are less familiar. They break reading down into various modes including inspectional reading, analytic reading, and syntopic reading which are the sorts of reading one should be able to accomplish by late high school or certainly by the college level. Unfortunately not too many people are reading this way anymore, if they ever did.

Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, reprint/translation 2015 [1977]) goes into greater depth on taking one’s guttings and turning them into new material.

A copy of The Notebook sits on a desk in front of a Royal KMG typewriter, a drawer from a card catalog full of index cards, some blank index cards, a fountain pen and a Negroni cocktail off to one side.

The next book for the Dan Allosso Book Club is Roland Allen‘s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (United Kingdom: Profile Books, 2023).

For those interested in intellectual history, here’s a chance to join a long standing book club full of inveterate note takers/zettelkasten-ers, educators, and lifelong learners. Those interested in the topic are encouraged to join us.

To join, reach out to Dan Allosso for access to the book club’s shared Obsidian Vault and/or ping me for the Zoom link for the discussions to be held on Saturday mornings at 8:00 – 10:00 AM Pacific over the coming month.