ABSTRACT
Working with paper slips that could be shuffled, updated, and sorted according to different criteria, Linnaeus certainly helped change the understanding of the natural world, away from linear filiation models and toward networks of characteristics that could be mapped. In many places, the search for a normed paper slip size was conveniently settled: playing cards were in use for indexing at least since the French Revolution. Despite a respectable lineage, the card catalog mostly remained an anonymous, furtive factor in text generation, acknowledged merely as a memory crutch. The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation. A famously more conspiratorial example in the art world of the use of index cards involves Mark Lombardi.
