How a Vintage Library Card Reconnected Me with an Old Friend
An amazing tale of coincidence, happenstance, and incredibly good luck.
If you check out a book from your local library nowadays, the exchange is probably tracked via two bar codes — one on the book itself and one on your library card. But I imagine most Inconspicuous Consumption readers are old enough to remember the days when a library book typically came with a little pocket affixed to the rear endpaper or the inside back cover, and inside that pocket was a “due date” card indicating who had borrowed the book and when it had to be returned (like the one shown above). I would always look at the card of any book I borrowed, checking to see who else had read it before I had.
Old cards like these, harvested from discarded library books, are now popular items on eBay, where people like to buy them for craft projects, junk journaling, and so on. I sometimes enjoy browsing these eBay listings, mainly because I find the handwriting on the cards to be so evocative. Handwritten artifacts are inherently intimate (that list of 45-rpm records that I recently wrote about is a good example), but the thing about the library book cards is that they include writing from so many different people in such a small space. When you add in the little rubber-stamped dates, the result is something akin to a log or journal, creating the story of all the hands that the book passed through over the years.
It was during one such eBay browsing session that I recently came upon a listing for a batch of 10 “due date” cards, all taken from books about music. Here’s the photo that the seller included with the listing:
As I looked at the photo, I was disappointed to see that the rubber-stamped dates on the cards were primarily from the 1980s and ’90s — not very old (at least by my standards). I was about to close my browser tab and move on to the next listing when one of the handwritten names jumped out at me. It was on the card at lower-right, for Leonard Bernstein’s book The Infinite Variety of Music, and it was the last name on that card: “Douglas Wolk.”