Library Hand / 2026 Jul 10
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Today, browsing the Cosmos aggregator I read a nice, thought-provoking
bit of writing from Andrew Turnquist:

gemini://gemini.turnquist.name/gemlog/2026071004_%28Im%29practical_animism.gmi

I recommend looking at Cosmos today for this post. The related
gemlogs collected underneath are equally interesting reading.

gemini://cosmos.skyjake.fi/

This made me check out the root of Andrew's gemscapsule and then I read
this:

gemini://gemini.turnquist.name/gemlog/2026051812_Reliable_Old_Tech_and.gmi

I hadn't thought about library card catalogs in a very long time, and
reading this just brought back so many childhood memories of rifling
through catalogs looking for books about ants and other social
insects, or whatever region of the animal kingdom I was currently
interested in at the time.

That post sent me down a rabbit hole and I ended up searching for
"Library Hand" using the Marginalia search engine. The first hit was
this:

https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/library-hand-dewey-and-edison

This article linked to the /real/ mother of all goldmines:

https://scalar.usc.edu/works/handwriting/index

The penned catalog cards here literally trace the human effort
involved. Like so many ghosts in wooden boxes.

The Memex, the conceptual ancestor of all automated information
retrieval systems erased the human touch. The digital index has been
bleached of life.

https://scalar.usc.edu/works/handwriting/media/Columbia%20University_Lee%20Sophia_disjoined_1.jpg