Search Me ?!?

I told my daughter the other day that I wanted to find and buy an old library card catalog. She looked at me as if I was speaking in some alien tongue. It took a minute for me to realize that she had absolutely no idea what a real library catalog used to be.

When she logs on to her computer and clicks on the word "catalog" at the library website, she enters fields and "poof" the available books are immediately displayed. There is no hunt involved, no thrill of discovery, no frustration that the book you finally located is already checked out.

I remember card catalogs fondly as giant receptacles of possibilities. As a small child, I spent a lot of time at a local library. I was an early reader and the children's librarian would keep certain books behind her desk just so that I could check them out. I always thought that the catalogs were huge and couldn't wait to be tall enough to actually use one.

In school, those catalogs were a lifeline when researching and writing papers. I can still smell the faint odor that each drawer would emit when pulled from the base. And those cards! Those sweet little yellowed-with-age and fingerprint covered beauties. Once that you learned their language there was no stopping you from gathering all of the finest resources available.

I am not sure what clicked in my mind that made me think of those obsolete wonders, but now I want one. In fact, I must have one to end this craving. They are popular items now, used as decorative pieces and highly sought after as repurposed storage.

The hunt is on. If only there was a card catalog listing all of the places that I could find one for sale...