Library tickets were an occasional source of anxiety for their holders, who worried over their loss in language that feels familiar. Edward Sears, a member of the New York Mercantile Library, wrote to a librarian in 1861, “As mentioned to you some time since, I have lost my library ticket. As [I] sometimes have occasion to call at the reading room, I do not like to transgress ‘the regulations.’ I would like to have another if you please … Though I am very apt to lose anything of the kind.”

Public libraries, funded by municipal rather than member dollars, began appearing in the northeastern U.S. in the early to mid-19th century. Cards were essential at these libraries, too. The card was the “arbiter of all disputes” when it came to missing books, wrote the St. Louis librarian Frederick M. Crunden, “and since we have had this respected referee there have been but few contested cases.”

Borrower requirements varied by library, and so did the types of library cards issued. At the St. Louis public library, adults received white cards and minors blue ones, and cardholders had to identify themselves as residents, taxpayers, students, or local employees. The cards for minors came with a warning that “only books suitable for young people will be issued on this card.” Adults were allowed second cards, but were not allowed to use them to take out novels. Teachers and members of the clergy could have three cards, with the third for professional use.

Late returns and card losses carried penalties. A St. Louis library user who lost a card circa 1900 had to “pay fivepence and wait a week for another,” Crunden explained. The dual penalty was meant to send cardholders searching harder for their lost cards, but the fine and the waiting period targeted different library users: “Most men will not much mind the fivepence,” Crunden theorized, “but if they find they also have to wait a week, they bethink them that perhaps they can find the card, and they go home and do so. Women and children, on the other hand, are generally willing to wait the week; but when it comes to the fivepence, they conclude it will be cheaper to make further search for the card.” (Crunden’s gender essentialism came with a heavy dose of moralizing. “Rules,” he wrote, “should be so framed and so applied as to make careless people pay the cost of their carelessness.”)

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.