Some Neatoramanauts may be old enough to know what this is. It's a checkout card for a library book, used in the days when library circulation was handled by bear skins and stone knives instead of computers.
In 1948, the Man Who Would Be King checked The Courageous Heart, a biography of Andrew Jackson, out of the library at Humes High School. It's for sale at Heritage Auctions.
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I miss check out cards. One of my elementary school teachers even did it for the classroom library too.
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Check out cards are still a good way of organizing a small library with little money. I set up a church library that way several years ago.
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I'm old. We still used names on our check-out cards. This was in a small town in the 70's though.
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They still had check out cards when I was young, but instead of names, they used a card number. I would see a book and check if my number was on its card to see if I'd already read the book! But you have to know your own number to do that, so it protected people's privacy a bit more. I can imagine that having to sign every book you've read might lead to gossip in some towns, or even legal trouble in certain political eras.
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