Library hand was a handwriting style used by librarians to complete card catalog entries. It was standardized and taught in library schools, but became obsolete with the rise of mechanical typewriters. Today, it is only found in ancient card catalogs and is of interest to collectors and historians.
Library hand is a now largely obsolete handwriting style that librarians learned to complete card catalog entries. The library hand was rounded, open, and easily read. It reached its maximum level of use in the late 19th century but fell into decline in the early 20th century. Today this form of calligraphy exists only in a few ancient card catalogues.
Early library information systems consisted of card catalogs. These took the form of cabinets consisting of a series of long thin drawers, each of which contained small cards containing bibliographic information. The first use of this type of system was in France in the late 18th century. In the absence of mechanical typewriters, librarians filled out index cards by hand; printing was not convenient or fast enough. This usage gave rise to the term “index card”, which remains in use today even though the cards are rarely used in indexes.
The catalog cards were the product of many different librarians working for long periods. To make it easier for library patrons to find cards, some form of standardization was needed. Library schools began teaching a standardized form of writing, traditionally attributed to library scientist Melvil Dewey and inventor Thomas Edison, which became known as the “library hand.” While it was impossible to completely eradicate individual variation among librarians, card catalogs became increasingly uniform. The 1903 New York State Library School Handbook contained a comprehensive description of the hand in the library, right down to the correct pens, ink, and posture to use.
By this time, however, the library hand was already beginning to fall out of favour. Mechanical typewriters could standardize text in a way that no handwriting scheme could. As the availability of typewriters increased in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the hand of the library became less and less necessary. By the mid-19th century, nearly all card catalogs were typed, and the library hand was effectively extinct. Beginning in the late 20th century, the card catalogs themselves began to be replaced by computerized registers.
Library hand was an attempt to solve the challenge of standardizing records in the pre-typewriter era. Today, manuscript catalog cards and the standardized hand that accompanied them are a relic of a bygone era, of interest only to collectors or those interested in the history of librarianship. However, it is the simple elegance of the calligraphy that draws collectors and historians to this short-lived form of calligraphy.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
