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Library books used to have a little pocket stuck to the back cover, with a lined card inside. If you wanted to borrow a book, you would take out the card, put y
by dec0dedab0de 11y ago
Library books used to have a little pocket stuck to the back cover, with a lined card inside. If you wanted to borrow a book, you would take out the card, put your name on the next line, and give it to the librarian. When you gave the book back, the card was put back into the pocket.
The system was to keep track of who had borrowed a book, so that they could be tracked down if it was not returned.
I remember it being really fun in grade school, to realize I had checked out the same book as an older friend.
- gcb0 11y agoI'm from a more metropolitan area i guess. we used library card numbers on those instead of names
- woodman 11y ago> I'm from a more metropolitan area i guess. I would be surprised if you are from somewhere more metropolitan than Kobe Japan [0]. It is much more likely that you are just young. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keihanshin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keihanshin
- DawkinsGawd 11y agoPopulation density is considerably less than that of NYC. Scaling NYC up to 13,000 km² would put the population 90 million
- woodman 11y agoThe population density is also much less if we scaled the population of my apartment up to 13,000 km², but that isn't how metropolitan areas are traditionally measured. The NYC metro area includes three states, lots of sprawl - so it is much less dense.
- Symbiote 11y agoI remember the local village library books only had dates on the borrowing slips. My library card was a 5x5cm card sleeve. If I borrowed something, the return date was stamped in the book, and on the book's removable 5x15cm slip. That slip was put inside my card, and probably ordered by due date in the librarian's index file. This was early 1990s in Britain.
- lfowles 11y agoOr to check out books that you didn't remember checking out before!
- bitJericho 11y agoAs a kid I enjoyed finding books that hadn't been checked out in decades or old books that had only one or two checkouts in its lifetime.
- zardo 11y agoI always enjoyed seeing the names of people who had read a book before me at the university library, and seeing how long it had sat on the shelf between readers. It was like joining a secret club that spanned generations.
- pmoriarty 11y ago"In early 1943, Ulam asked von Neumann to find him a war job. In October, he received an invitation to join an unidentified project near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The letter was signed by Hans Bethe, who had been appointed as leader of the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory by Robert Oppenheimer, its scientific director. Knowing nothing of the area, he borrowed a New Mexico guide book. On the checkout card, he found the names of his Wisconsin colleagues, Joan Hinton, David Frisch, and Joseph McKibben, all of whom had mysteriously disappeared. This was Ulam's introduction to the Manhattan Project, which was America's wartime effort to create the atomic bomb." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Ulam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Ulam
- slyall 11y agoPicture of a Library card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Library_card.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Library_card.jpg The Browne Issue System appears to be what most small libraries used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browne_Issue_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browne_Issue_System
- electricblue 11y agoThe studio ghibli movie, Whisper of the Heart has a plot point that revolves around this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_of_the_Heart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_of_the_Heart