Category: Note taking

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? 

A library card catalog with a red Christmas stocking hanging on it with a box full of index cards next to it.

Four drawers of a library card catalog full of index cards in blue, green, buff, and ivory.

Five card catalog drawers lined up and full of ivory, buff, green, blue, and salmon index cards

A library card catalog covered in stacks of Brodart index cards.

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.

Lochby Field Folio A6 surrounded by several pens and pencils. Inside the right pocket of the folio is a yellow covered Hobonichi A6 notebook

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. 

Lochby Field Folio A6 with a bunch of 4 x 6" index cards tucked into the right side interior pocket .The interior of the folio features yellow highlight material as well as two yellow ribbon bookmarks. The left side has pocket space for several pens and pencils. Sitting crosswise across the top of the folio is a burgundy Mitsubishi 9850 HB pencil

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. 

Lochby Field Folio A6 with a deck of gridded 4 x 6" index cards on the right hand side.

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.

Angle down on a small, light brown wooden card index. The box has several manilla 1/5 cut 3x5" card dividers inside along with some white index cards. Outside of the box on the table in front of it are a typewritten index card and a black metal Rotring 800 0.5mm mechanical pencil. Off to one side is a white ceramic bowl full of lemons.

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.

Twenty Four Correspondence Filing Systems

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.

A thick black granite 4x6" slab nestled into a card index drawer with hundreds of other index cards

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”?

A black granite "index card" sits on a desk in front of a two drawer Shaw-Walker card index.

 

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.

A Steelcase file index drawer open showing a four inch chunk of cards separated by tabbed cards featuring the names of the 12 months of the year and one divider in the back labeled 2026. On the front card is a calendar for the month of December 2025. In the blurry foreground is a label for the drawer of cards that reads "Memindex".

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:

Portion of a book page featuring an image of a card catalog tray full of index cards. In the front is a tab for November followed by 1/5 cut tabs numbered 1-31 followed by tabs for the months December - October.

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

 

Portion of a book page featuring an image of a card catalog tray full of index cards. In the front is a tab for November followed by 1/5 cut tabs numbered 1-31 followed by tabs for the months December - October. At the top is the heading "A Tickler for Follow-up File" with numbered details pointing at portions of the card index.

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.

A bright room with a green steel table on top of which sits a 1950 gray Royal KMG typewriter, a two drawer Shaw-Walker oak card index and some papers and mathematics textbooks. Behind the table is a barrister's bookcase full of books, and two card index filing cabinets.

Replied to Gutting Book Basics by Thomas Vander WalThomas 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.

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 uses his as in the opening scenes, his card index is on the credenza behind him and later in the movie it has moved.

If you’re just starting out on your indexing journey, you can purchase the same boxes that Wilson and Vaughn are using: the Globe-Weis/Pendaflex Fiberboard Index card storage box in “Black Agate”. If you need something bigger or different than one of these, try out the Ultimate Guide to Zettelkasten Card Index Storage.

Vince Vaughn as Jeremy Gray sits at his office desk with his fingers tented together as he makes a point. On the credenza behind him is a card index, a bubblegum machine, and a small office bar.
Vince Vaughn obviously explaining the most important points of knowledge management in the office: a zettelkasten (or card index), bubblegum, and plenty of bourbon.
Owen Wilson addresses Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers in Vaughn's office. On the bookshelf behind Wilson are two different sized card indexes
On a side desk in his office Jeremy Gray has a 3×5″ and a 4×6″ card index near all of his most important reference volumes.
Vince Vaughn (as Jeremy Gray) walks into John Beckwith's office (portrayed by Owen Wilson). On the bookshelves behind them are a multiple card index files in 3x5", 4x6" and 5x8" form factors.
Along with shelves full of reference books, John Beckwith has a huge collection of card index boxes of various sizes including 3 3×5″ boxes, 3 4×6″ boxes, and even one 5×8″ box.

A Zettelkasten for Wedding Crashers

Of course, the real aficionado of Wedding Crashers will suspect that at least one of Jeremy’s card indexes is full of weddings they’ve crashed, related research, and maybe women he’s encountered. Maybe names and legends of the people they’re pretending to be (“We lost a lot of good men out there.” “Guess who’s a broken man?”) Naturally there would also be a huge section with the numbered rules of wedding crashing as handed down by pioneer Chazz Rheinhold.

Typed index card that reads: Wedding Crashers Rule #32: Don't commit to a relative unless you're absolutely positive that they have a pulse.

“I’m always trying to get back to the 20s a little bit.”
—John Dickerson, in Field Notes interview (2016) 

Perhaps lamenting too much technology, Dickerson says he’s got two screens on the computer in his office as well as an iPad and a phone. But he’s also got “a notebook [that] does only one thing”. He’s also got an old black lacquer Underwood standard typewriter (No. 4, 5, or 6?) on his office desk. Typewriters only do one thing too.

Wonder if he still uses it?