Well-Read Life™

Dancing with Darwin:The vanishing index card is a useful species still

Someone once said that every great idea can fit on a 3 x 5 card. (Or someone should have said it.) I’ve seen the journal page Darwin used to write his breakthrough on evolution; it could have fit on a 3 x 5 card. And how much space did Einstein need to write e=mc²? In this posting, we take you behind the design and to the heart of the quirky history of this small but mighty tool. Mim Harrison, the editor of Levenger Press, views these cards as the paper precursor to Twitter. Here’s her look back at the beginnings of a 3 x 5 world.

—Steve

Just about everyone’s heard of—and has probably used—3 x 5 cards, but where did they come from? Surprisingly, their origin dates back a thousand years. Also known as index cards, their evolution is rooted in the concept of cataloging, or indexing, key words in a book.

The monks of medieval times employed a hands-on system for marking a manuscript’s key words: they would use a symbol that indicated a finger pointing to the term—that digit being the forefinger, or index finger. Index traces its roots to Latin and the concept of informer, or pointer. Its Greek forbear means to show.

Eventually these pointy fingers found their way to the back of the book in the form of an index of terms.

But how were books themselves being catalogued? In fits and starts, it seems, with the Alexandria Library using an alphabetical system in the third century B.C. E., but the European libraries using a peculiar rhyming system 11 centuries later. Things got better organized in the nineteenth century, and in 1820 the first card catalog appeared in a library in London.

The American hero of the library index card was Melvil Dewey. He introduced his decimal classification system in the 1870s, in the library at Amherst College in western Massachusetts. The card he devised for his catalog drawers was approximately 3 x 5. The typewriter had been invented a few years earlier, and ultimately the card and the keys met and married.

The Library of Congress started printing its catalog index cards in 1901. For the next eight decades or so, the library index card and its attendant cabinets would serve as the Google of their day. Nicholson Baker, in his elegiac essay on card catalogs that appeared in The New Yorker in 1994, reported that the New York Public Library harbored 10 million cards.

With all these cards in libraries, perhaps it was only a matter of time before they segued into general use. Thrifty librarians primed the pump by setting out discarded cards for patrons to use for notes. Seeing the cards’ usefulness, stationers began offering blank cards for sale. Business and professional people, writers and students adopted the cards as standard tools for researching, filing and organizing information.

And then, of course, computers struck. Card cabinets in libraries were dismantled and the cards discarded. There simply wasn’t enough room anymore to capture all our knowledge on a 3" x 5" descendant of papyrus. The once ubiquitous little cards, whose origins are so closely linked to cataloging knowledge, teetered on the brink of extinction.

The index card is still a handy palimpsest, the screen on which one can quickly capture first ideas, reminder notes, titles of books friends recommend, your grandmother’s recipe for pumpkin pie. Index cards, with their scratch-outs, imperfect erasures and caret insertions, jog our memory as only the tactile can.

By contrast, electronic systems live a perilously finite existence. Better operating systems, application software and search engines will come along and the current hero will be banished, forgotten, trashed.

Get your digit out, the English are fond of saying—meaning, get cracking. Get your digit out—and your pen—and jot a note on an index card. It still has a place in the digital world.

—Mim

For a look at my 3 x 5 world, visit me on flickr.

And now, dear reader, I want to know how you balance the digital and your digits. Tell me in the space of a 3 x 5 card how your electronic notes and 3 x 5 paper notes productively coexist. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments.)

—Steve

The best how-to book turns 50

A friend of mine has begun a new career writing for an online financial newsletter. He came to me for advice, knowing that I’ve been a commercial writer, and I passed on the recommendation my journalism instructor gave to my class in 1977.

My instructor was a fulltime newspaperman who taught journalism in an extension course at the University of California, San Diego, where I had just graduated. He held aloft a copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White and said, “Buy it, read it, memorize it.”

Then he set the slim book back down on the table and went on with his talk, of which I remember nothing else.

Uncharacteristically, I actually did read the little book. And became so entranced that I did, indeed, practically memorize what is affectionately known among writers and editors as “Strunk & White.” As it turned out, I would be teaching the little book myself just two years later, as a graduate teaching assistant at the very place where the book was born: Cornell University.

And so I pass the good word to you, dear reader, if you like to write: “Buy it, read it, memorize it.” The advice is as useful today, as this nearly ideal how-to book celebrates its 50th birthday, as it was a generation ago.

Writing, as most everyone who does it will agree, is hard work. Last month I had the honor of sitting on a panel at David Allen’s Getting Things Done Summit with one of this country’s most accomplished journalists, James Fallows. He told the audience that writing was still hard for him, yet he did it every day, as his many articles and bestselling books can attest.

How a practically perfect writer wrote

E.B. White himself, who may have come closest to being the perfect writer, had a devil of a time traveling from his initial draft to his final—even with a work as (deceptively) simple as Charlotte’s Web.

Cornell archivist Elaine Engst explains what it was like to examine all the drafts of Charlotte’s Web: “…the first draft is completely different from the finished book. What’s wonderful about looking at his drafts is that you see that even for somebody who was pretty close to a perfect writer, how much work went into his books: a ton of it.”

Yet eclipsing White’s gifts to young readers is his enduring gift to writers of all ages. His spare additions to his old English professor’s classroom guide, abiding by the now-famous precept “omit needless words,” produced something as close to the perfect how-to book ever published.

(Brief pause here for a commercial break: Have you read Levenger’s very own E. B. White work? We unearthed some of his early essays from The New Yorker and published them as a freestanding book for the first time. We were awed both by what he said and how he said it. Check out Notes on Our Times if you haven’t already. It’s uncannily timely for today.)

The alluring possibility that other nearly perfect how-to books exist, and searching for them, is one of the most enjoyable quests we have in leading our well-read lives. And so, dear reader, I ask you: do you know of other nearly perfect how-to books? Please share with the rest of the class.

Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Man and Book Change the World:The (Continuing) Story of Greg Mortenson

When Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson addressed the thousand people attending the 20th annual Love of Literacy Luncheon in West Palm Beach last Friday, he had some bad news, some good news and (to me at least) some surprising news about literacy in Afghanistan. 

The bad news: The Taliban has bombed hundreds of schools, targeting especially those attended by girls.

The good news: In the year 2000, only about 800,000 children between the ages of 5 and 15 were in school in Afghanistan, and almost all of them were boys. Eight years later, in 2008, the figure was 7.2 million children in school, and 2 million of them were girls.

Why is the number of girls in school so important? Because, explained Mortenson, drawing on an African proverb, when you educate a boy, you educate an individual; when you educate a girl, you educate a community. The girls not only stay around to educate siblings and eventually their own children, but they often educate their mothers.

And it is a mother, says Mortenson,  who must grant permission for a son to go on Jihad.

The surprising news: Mortenson said in the schools his organization has helped build, they have retained an Afghanistan tradition where elders do story time two or three times a week. Apparently 90% of Afghan children listen to their elders pass on the traditions of their culture. This compares with only 10% of American children who do so.

Are we missing something here?

It takes a family…

American parents know how important it is to read to their children, and they often do so up to the time their children begin to read for themselves. But educators here say parents often stop too soon. Further, one of the downsides of the very mobile American society is that grandparents are often far from their grandchildren. Both miss out on story time using books or just the elders’ memories.

But continuing to read to children who can already read has continuing benefits.

When I reported on Mortenson before, I emphasized that his East Asia Institute ensures the community’s involvement in its school by insisting that the local communities provide free land, unskilled construction labor and ongoing support. This partnership model is similar to the successful Room-to-Read efforts and the model proven to work in this country by Andrew Carnegie a hundred years ago.

Mortenson takes heart in a recent survey that says 40% of American college students want to make a difference in the world—a figure higher now than in recent years. “The only way we can solve poverty is to touch, taste, smell and be with poverty ourselves,” he says. But there are so very many ways to make a difference—by being teachers, going into medicine, or working in many businesses.

A toast to the Tea

Mortenson had just come from a meeting at the Pentagon with General Petraeus. The general told him he had learned much from Three Cups of Tea and has made it mandatory reading for U.S. soldiers going to Afghanistan. This time it’s not only a military surge we’re engaging in, but a surge for education and infrastructure as well.

Three Cups of Tea has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 100 weeks or so. Read it and  you’ll see why. In one stroke, it shows how a person, and a book, can change our world.

How about you, dear reader—what book would you say has changed our world? Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).