Card catalogs had their own elegant standardized handwriting

Andrea James 8:09 am Fri Feb 17, 2017

Behold Library Hand, a font designed specifically for librarians without typewriters who created cards for card catalogs. What's cool is the variation within the guidelines:

Via Ella Morton :

Since the aim was legibility, not haste, library hand wasn't so speedy to execute—but the pace depended on the scribe. Dewey conducted a test in which four cataloguers wrote the Lord's Prayer in both "catalog hand" and their standard note-taking hand. One cataloguer took three-and-a-half minutes in note-taking hand and almost 12 minutes in catalog hand. But another took three-and-a-half minutes in note-taking hand and four-and-a-half minutes in catalog hand. And the time saved among librarians who had previously mistaken 3s for 5s was priceless.

It came in disjoined (print) and joined (cursive).

• Library Hand, the Fastidiously Neat Penmanship Style Made for Card Catalogs (Atlas Obscura)

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