Public Books: In Praise of Search Tools

Deirdre Lynch reviews Craig Robertson, The Filing Cabinet, in Public Books.

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with informationOver the centuries, bookmakers, printers, furniture-makers, and, recently, database designers and software engineers have devised finding aids, search tools, and sorting and storage systems that cater to that desire. To explore the technologies they have invented can teach us much about the ideas of information, efficiency, and speedy searching that define modern reading practices, as new books by Dennis Duncan and Craig Robertson demonstrate.

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