The Atlantic – Sara Polsky: “..Serious library-card collectors approach the pursuit more systematically than I do. A high-school freshman in California, for example, maintains a collection of more than 3,000 cards. A librarian in Nebraska scans valid library cards from all over the world and posts the images online. The retired librarian Larry Nix maintains a web page of older library cards, or “library tickets,” dating back to 1846, which demonstrate more variety in size, color, and wording than the library cards of today. Library cards have always had the same purpose—to keep track of borrowers’ loans—but originally they were invented for a different type of library. The first cards, Nix told me, were probably issued at membership libraries, 18th-century organizations where members contributed fees (and sometimes books from their own collections) in exchange for the right to check out materials. The Library Company of Philadelphia, which Benjamin Franklin co-founded in 1731, was the first membership library in the U.S., though many existed before that in England. Because they were formed by people with common interests, these libraries often coalesced around themes. Once members were allowed to walk off the premises with books, library cards—also known as tickets—made it more likely that those books would come back…

In the pre-computer era, library cards were just one part of a complex system that kept track of book loans and returns. Depending on the size of the library, cards were paired with ledgers, slips, second cards, or indicators (a primarily British system using color-coded blocks in holes to represent books) that remained in the building. Librarians used these systems to record checkouts by date, title, or borrower; in professional journals, they noted minute evolutions in the system, such as the switch from recording loans by checkout date to recording them by due date..”