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The Filing Cabinet

The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of the 20th-century. Like most
infrastructure, it was usually overlooked.

CRAIG ROBERTSON MAY 2021

Left: Library Bureau pamphlet. [Courtesy of

the Herkimer County Historical Society, New
York] Right: Remington Rand pamphlet.
[Courtesy of the Herkimer County Historical
Society, New York]

The subject of this essay emerged by chance. I was researching the history of the U.S.
passport, and had spent weeks at the National Archives, struggling through thousands of
reels of unindexed microfilm records of 19th-century diplomatic correspondence; then I
arrived at the records for 1906. That year, the State Department adopted a numerical filing
system. Suddenly, every American diplomatic office began using the same number for
passport correspondence, with decimal numbers subdividing issues and cases. Rather than
scrolling through microfilm images of bound pages organized chronologically, I could go
straight to passport-relevant information that had been gathered in one place.

I soon discovered that I had Elihu Root to thank for making my research easier. A lawyer
whose clients included Andrew Carnegie, Root became secretary of state in 1905. But not
long after he arrived, the prominent corporate lawyer described himself as “a man trying to
1
conduct the business of a large metropolitan law-firm in the office of a village squire.” The
department’s record-keeping practices contributed to his frustration. As was then common
in American offices, clerks used press books or copybooks to store incoming and outgoing
correspondence in chronologically ordered bound volumes with limited indexing. For Root,
the breaking point came when a request for a handful of letters resulted in several bulky
volumes appearing on his desk. His response was swift: he demanded that a vertical filing
system be adopted; soon the department was using a numerical subject-based filing system
2
housed in filing cabinets.

The shift from bound volumes to filing systems is a milestone in the history of classification;
the contemporaneous shift to vertical filing cabinets is a milestone in the history of storage.
It is easy to dismiss the object: a rectilinear stack of four drawers, usually made of metal.
With suitable understatement, one design historian has noted that “manufacturers did not
3
address the subject of style with regard to filing units.” The lack of style figures into the
filing cabinet’s seeming banality. It is not considered inventive or original; it is simply there,
especially in 20th-century office spaces; and this ubiquity, along with the absence of style,
perhaps paradoxically contributes to the easy acceptance of its presence, which rarely
causes comment. In countless movies and television shows, one or more filing cabinets line
the walls of newsrooms and advertising agencies or the offices of doctors, attorneys, private
eyes, police inspectors. Their appearance defines a space as an office but rarely draws
attention to the work it does in that office. Occasionally, the neatness or disorder of a filing
cabinet gives us an insight into the mental state and work habits of the office’s occupant.
Sometimes, the filing cabinet plays a small but vital role in dystopian critiques of
bureaucracy.

But if it appears to be banal and pervasive, it cannot be so easily ignored. The filing cabinet
does not just store paper; it stores information; and because the modern world depends
upon and is indeed defined by information, the filing cabinet must be recognized as critical
to the expansion of modernity. In recent years scholars and critics have paid increasing
attention to the filing systems used to store and retrieve information critical to government
and capitalism, particularly information about people — case dossiers, identification
4
photographs, credit reports, et al. But the focus on filing systems ignores the places where
5
files are stored. Could capitalism, surveillance, and governance have developed in the 20th
century without filing cabinets? Of course, but only if there had been another way to store
and circulate paper efficiently. The filing cabinet was critical to the infrastructure of 20th-
century nation states and financial systems; and, like most infrastructure, it is often
6
overlooked or forgotten, and the labor associated with it minimized or ignored.

The vertical filing cabinet was invented in the United States in the 1890s, and quickly
became a fixture throughout North America and around the world. It spread globally
because it provided a way to store large amounts of paper so that individual sheets could be
retrieved easily. The technique of using drawers for storing a sheet of paper on its long edge
was significant because loose papers cannot stand upright on their own. Put another way,
the filing cabinet technology enabled loose paper to stand on edge so that more sheets could
be stored in less space but still be accessed with minimal difficulty. It allowed loose papers
to do the work of paperwork.

From a brochure for Yawman and Erbe’s 800

Series. [Courtesy of the Smithsonian
Libraries, Washington, D.C.]

Illustration from the 1919 catalogue of the

Library Bureau. [Collection of Craig
Robertson]
How does a filing cabinet do this work? According to patents, the early manufacturers drew
on techniques and practices from cabinetry and metalwork in new and useful ways. In a
typical patent, a filing cabinet is a collection of steel plates, rollers, slides, walls, ball
bearings, rods, flanges, corner posts, channels, grooves, locks, tops, bottoms, sides, arms,
legs, and tongues. All these parts were variously combined to create a cabinet that would
allow a drawer to open and close even when it was full of paper that might weigh upwards of
75 pounds. The thousands of sheets of paper that manufacturers claimed could fit in a file
drawer were organized using guide cards and manila folders, both accented with tabs. Not
only did these features help paper stand vertically on edge; more important, they also made
visible the organization of the papers. Early user manuals quickly identified the key
principle of vertical filing: “the filing of papers on edge, behind guides, bringing together all
7
papers, to, from, or about one correspondent or subject.” Papers stored this way were easy
to locate and to access and, as such, essential to the functioning of a modern, healthy office.
As the authors of a secretarial textbook from the mid 1920s put it: “The flat file permits the
use of but one hand, while with the vertical file both hands are used, thus increasing speed.
8
That is, papers filed vertically are accessible, compact, and sanitary.”

The filing cabinet had at least two inventors — and likely several others who remain lost to
the historical record. The current accepted version attributes the invention to the Library
Bureau, the Boston-based company founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the
9
eponymous decimal system of library classification. Although the Library Bureau would
proudly claim the invention, critical developments happened elsewhere. It was the
secretary of a charity organization based in Buffalo, New York, a man identified as Dr.
Nathaniel Rosenau, who provided the initial impetus for construction of a vertical filing
cabinet. Inspired by the use of cabinets to store index cards on their edges, Rosenau sought a
bigger container for papers.

10
In 1892, he took his idea to the Library Bureau’s Chicago office, which built a prototype.
But no matter the inventor, the turn of the 20th century saw the filing cabinet develop as a
part of the rapid growth of an office equipment industry in which dozens of companies
manufactured practically identical products with little respect for the hundreds of patents
11
issued for products and parts. To underscore their uniqueness and modernity, this
industry explicitly labeled its products “equipment,” “appliances,” and “machines” — not
12
furniture. And it made these products indispensable to offices, and thus helped to
constitute the office as a “modern” workspace. The office with a vertical filing cabinet was
decidedly not a 19th-century office.

But if the 20th-century workspace was modern, its innovations did not extend to gender
roles; from its early arrival in offices, the filing cabinet reflected and reinforced the
gendered division between manual work and mental work, or women’s work and men’s
work. In the 20th-century office, female file clerks were expected to handle papers, but not
to understand their contents; in contrast, it was male managers and executives who read the
files, performing jobs that purportedly required thought.
 From the catalog of the Wabash Filing
Cabinet Co., 1917. [Trade Catalog Collection,
Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington,
Delaware]

Shaw-Walker, “Built Like a Skyscraper”

advertising campaign, 1927. [Trade Catalog
Collection, Hagley Museum and Library,
Wilmington, Delaware]

An advertising campaign from Shaw-Walker, one of the early manufacturers of filing

13
cabinets, highlights this pervasive distinction. The campaign, called “Built Like a
Skyscraper,” depicted a series of physical encounters between male and female bodies and
the company’s filing cabinets in order to emphasize various aspects of the “essentials of
office equipment”: strength, rigidity, easy operation, noiselessness, economy of floor space,
maximum capacity, and good design. In one advertisement, we see an illustration of a man
in a suit jumping into an open filing cabinet drawer; in the background there is a sketch of
the Woolworth Building in New York, then the tallest skyscraper in the world. This image
shows the steel frame atop the building: a filing cabinet constructed “like a skyscraper”
would thus be strong enough to support the weight of drawers packed with paper.

In addition to jumping into open drawers, men were depicted lifting their bodies off the
ground and hanging from open drawers (what the catalog called “handstands”) — images
that signified the “rigidity” of the drawers. In contrast, the campaign used a female body to
show how easy it was to open and close a full file drawer: a drawing (“based on an actual
photograph”) showed a girl opening a fully loaded file drawer by pulling on a silk thread. The
decision to use a young girl rather than an adult female is notable: it clarified that anyone
could operate a filing cabinet. And if anyone could file — if filing required only the strength
of a girl — then only women should file; in turn men would be free to do work that women
could not do.

The “Built Like a Skyscraper” campaign was not subtle. It does not take much for 21st-
century scholars armed with theories of gender representation to argue that the
advertisements reflected male anxieties about the arrival of female workers in offices. The
phallic skyscraper, the unsheathed tip of the Woolworth Building, the rigid and erect
athletic male body — all sought to make explicit the masculinity of the men who worked in
offices; such masculinity was not to be questioned, including that of the men at higher levels
in the office hierarchy, who “thought” their way through the day.

Left: Advertisement for Aldex File Guides.

Right: Shaw-Walker catalog cover, 1920.
[Trade Catalog Collection, Hagley Museum
and Library, Wilmington, Delaware]

Left: Remington Rand pamphlet. [Collection

of Craig Robertson] Right: Art Metal
advertisement, 1940. [Courtesy of the Fenton
Historical Society, Jamestown, New York]
As the response to the problem of storing paper and information, the filing cabinet thus
emphasizes distinctive material affordances and economic and cultural priorities. These
include efficiency, exploitation of gendered labor, anxiety over information loss, and what I
have come to call granular certainty, or the drive to break more and more of life and its
everyday routines into discrete, observable, and manageable parts. This drive is evident in
the immediate context in which the filing cabinet emerged: the project of scientific
management, the manufacture of interchangeable parts, occupational specialization and
professionalization, and the logic of bureaucracy as described by Max Weber, who
emphasized clearly defined domains of authority while briefly noting the importance of the
14
file. Significantly, these affordances and power dynamics continue to exist in the “files,”
“folders,” “tabs,” and “desktops” that we use today to interact with digital information and
data.

The affordances of the filing cabinet as an information technology have produced new
15
relationships between power and epistemology. The distinct concepts of storage, filing,
information, and efficiency have been activated in certain institutional settings to establish
social dynamics and relationships, especially those of gender and labor. In this light there
are two crucial and overlapping points: first, the filing cabinet illuminates an important
moment in the genealogy of information; and second, the filing cabinet belongs to the
material history of efficiency. Indeed, the vertical filing cabinet brings to the fore a
commitment to particularization that shaped the use and conception of information at the
beginning of the 20th century.

The filing cabinet contributed to the rise of a popular nontechnical understanding of

information as something discrete and specific. Critically, it illustrates the moment in
which information gained an identity separate from knowledge, an instrumental identity
critical to its accessibility. In its separation from knowledge, information was granted
authority based on a set of ideas and practices that limited interpretation; in contrast, a
16
subject, someone who “knows” underwrites the authority of knowledge. In turn this
moment in the genealogy of information is tied to broader social and economic forces that
made efficiency — “saving time” — one of the defining problems of modern life. In this
historical period, filing technology provided a conceptual gateway for understanding
information as a thing that could be standardized, atomized, and stripped of context —
information as a universal and impersonal quantity. While this conception did not begin or
end with the filing cabinet, the file became a common way of making this information
comprehensible, as it continues to do in the present with the information and data
encountered through digital technology.

In Burlington, Vermont, on a weedy lot owned by the city, there stands a stack of eleven
17
metal file cabinets slightly more than 40 feet high. Constructed in 2002, the stack
contains 38 drawers; eight are partially open. The travel website Roadside America has
named the installation “The World’s Tallest File Cabinet.” Its creator, Bren Alvarez, a local
architect and gallery owner, has titled it “File Under So. Co., Waiting for…” Back then
Alvarez’s intention was to symbolize — and satirize — “the bureaucracy of urban planning.”
The 38 file drawers represented the 38 years that a local road project — then called the
“Southern Connector” — had been under review.

Alvarez got the file cabinets from a local business that was discarding them. Some were
vintage, with brass nameplates and handles on the outside and springs and levers on the
18
inside. Alvarez welded the cabinets together and used an interior steel post to position
them in the middle of the path of the proposed roadway; were the Southern Connector ever
built, they would have to be removed. Almost two decades later they remain in place, the
road project still under discussion — still “waiting for…”

Bren Alvarez, File Under So. Co., Waiting for

…, 2002. [Left: courtesy Tiny House Brewing
and Farmstead © via Flickr under License CC
Attribution 2.0; right: courtesy Brett Vachon
© via Flickr under License CC Attribution
2.0]

The sculpture has become a landmark, its image printed on T-shirts and shared widely
online. In 2019, a group of state university students and recent graduates organized a
“worship” service at the base of the cabinets; attendees confessed their “sins of
disorganization” and had their foreheads anointed with correction fluid. But that year also
saw the Burlington City Council finally approve a design and construction budget for the
road project, now called the Champlain Parkway; as the mayor declared, “The time for
debate, amendment, and appeal has long passed.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, state
and federal agencies once again delayed the project. Meanwhile Alvarez scouted a new
location for the tower on a friend’s property; when she took her relocation plan to the city
council office, she learned that because of the height of the sculpture she had to apply for
zoning variances. As of this writing, Alvarez is still waiting for approval while officials
19
attempt to determine if “The World’s Tallest File Cabinet” is too tall for its new location.

Alvarez’s installation succeeds as satire because now, in the early 21st century, the file
cabinet is associated with inefficiency. No longer an exemplar of productivity,
rationalization, and speed, it instead represents our collective failure to save time and
optimize labor. A file cabinet’s storage capacity now embodies the facility of bureaucracies
— impersonal and procedure-oriented — to produce paper, to delay, to leave us waiting. As
the cultural historian Ben Kafka argues, bureaucracy now functions as an all too handy
explanation for why people cannot get what they want; it is “the story,” he writes, “of how
20
paperwork, even when it works, fails us.” Today a cabinet jam-packed with files
symbolizes the particular anxiety that is provoked by our awareness that paper records can
21
create an alternative paper-based reality to which officials reflexively defer.

The file cabinet remains an icon, its meaning and symbolism reversed, because it remains
operational. If, for example, you work for the federal government and you want to get paid
in retirement, your paperwork must be processed, by hand, by an employee of the Office of
Personnel Management whose workspace is located deep underground in a former
limestone mine in northwest Pennsylvania. There your employee records will be located in
one of 28,000 (and counting) file cabinets. Today these paper documents are so precious
(and combustible) that hot meals (including pizza) are delivered daily to the site’s 600
workers because open flames and toaster ovens are banned in the lunchroom. Aboveground,
the excess that constitutes bureaucracy-as-paperwork is no less weighty. Several years ago,
at a regional office of the Veterans Benefits Administration in North Carolina, the
cumulative weight of file cabinets and paperwork threatened the structural integrity of the
six-story building. In this case, the backlog of claims was so great that there were some
22
37,000 files stacked two-feet high atop the cabinets.

Beyond governmental bureaucracies, the failure of file cabinets to contain paper pose a
different problem for a different set of office workers. Back in the 1970s and ’80s — just
before the rise of personal computing — piles of paper on the desks of managers and
executives became the main way to signify the new phenomenon of “information overload”
— a popular uptake of a concept that had emerged from social psychology and systems
theory. In those years, according to media scholar Nick Levine, a desktop piled high with
paper epitomized “the stressed-out white collar worker overwhelmed by paper and his or
her contradictory expectations to be at once a creative decision-maker and an information
23
processor. The transition from the file to the pile was part of a deeper change in
workplace hierarchies, as anxious executives were forced to confront the “information
processing” that had long been coded as clerical — i.e., women’s work. The arrival of the
desktop computer accelerated this change. Initially promoted as a kind of personal
assistant, the proliferation of computers meant that many high-level white-collar workers
no longer had somebody else to do their clerical chores.

At the same time, piles of paper on a desktop, if kept to a manageable height, could also be
understood as exemplary information management practice. In the 1980s and ’90s,
organizational researchers argued that a well-kept pile was a more efficient way to store and
process information than a file cabinet. It allowed a worker to find a document simply by
glancing at the edge of the pile, and noting whether the pile was organized by color or
thickness, or whether the most urgent projects were on top; or it provided a place to store
ideas that could not be easily categorized or that seemed important but had no immediate
application. Some pile-keepers were motivated too by a dislike of formal classification
found in a file cabinet. In the early 1990s, a team of researchers who interviewed workers at
24
Apple concluded, “Piling requires less mental effort.”

The focus on Apple employees was timely and appropriate. In those years research into the
use and organization of physical desktops was to a large extent a response to the
appearance, on computer screens, of icons symbolizing paper documents, manila folders,
25
and file cabinets — an attempt to improve or replace the “desktop metaphor.” In 1984,
Apple supercharged the metaphor with the launch of the successful and influential
Macintosh, in which the “desktop” organized a user interface that featured icons
representing files as paper documents stored in tabbed folders or discarded in a wastepaper
26
basket.
 Commodore Magic 1 desktop, 1983. [via
toastytech]

Apple was hardly alone in adopting the desktop metaphor. In 1983, Commodore
International introduced a ROM cartridge called Magic Desk I for its Commodore 64, one of
the early and relatively affordable home computers. Magic Desk extended the metaphor to
create a more detailed desktop than anything Apple would ever offer. The computer user
was given a desk with drawers and a typewriter, calculator, telephone, account book, and
Rolodex. Next to the desk was a three-drawer file cabinet with a clock on top of it. Most of
the icons were merely for show; only the clock, typewriter, and file cabinet were
operational. To save a document, you had to open a file drawer by using a joystick to position
a disembodied white hand with an extended index finger over the file drawer icon. Inside
the drawer were ten yellow lines placed vertically in a list; each line had a tab to simulate a
27
“folder” that you could select and name. Likewise, the Windows operating systems used
file cabinet icons throughout the 1990s. As an icon within a metaphor, the late 20-century
file cabinet was as efficient as the early 20-century filing cabinet.

Media scholars have attributed the triumph of the desktop metaphor to its provision of
28
intuitively clear guidelines. But the widespread adoption of the desktop metaphor also
clarified that early personal computers would become workplace technologies; in this sense
it underscored the naturalization of the modern office. Nonetheless there have been
pointed and pertinent critiques from technologists who argue that the desktop metaphor
has diminished the scope of possibilities —that information is too various and complicated
29
to be organized and categorized into individual files and folders.

In one especially caustic formulation, Ted Nelson, the information technology pioneer who
coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia, argued that the use of paper simulations in
30
computing is “like tearing the wings off a 747 and driving it as a bus on a highway.” The
dilemma, for Nelson, is that the compartmentalization of files ignores the complicated
overlaps between things; he wants computers to enable us to capture the overlaps. The
computer scientist Jaron Lanier has made a similar argument: “Our conception of files may
be more persistent than our ideas about nature. I can imagine that someday physicists
might tell us that it is time to stop believing in photons, because they have discovered a
better way to think about light — but the file will likely live on. The file is a set of
31
philosophical ideas made into eternal flesh.”
 From a 1921 issue of Filing and Office
Management.

File cabinets eventually disappeared from computer screens; they disappeared in the early
21st century when the logic of the desktop metaphor lost its monopoly on the user interface
— when cell phones and “Googlization,” which enabled keyword search, provided
alternatives to the location-based search-and-storage logic represented by icons of tabbed
32
manila folders. Once again, then, the file cabinet must be perceived as a distinctly 20th-
century technology — as a response to a particular moment in the evolution of capitalism,
when the volume of information dramatically increased and when that information was
recorded, stored, and circulated primarily on paper.

The effects of the evolution of capitalism on information are illustrated, perhaps

unexpectedly, by a comic strip from 1921. In the strip, which appeared in an issue of Filing
and Office Management, a male file clerk decides to quit after his boss refuses to raise his
salary. Before he leaves, in an act of defiance, he removes papers from a filing cabinet and
throws them wildly around the office. His boss then changes his mind, and the clerk gets the
33
news of his pay increase while surrounded by loose papers and files. I discovered this
image several years into my research. It stood out because the enterprising file clerk is
identified as “Mr. Google.” (That the image, which I found online, was marked as “digitized
by Google” made the discovery feel even weirder.)

I don’t want to over-stress the significance of the coincidence — but it does capture the ways
in which the concepts of “information overload” and “information management” have
shape-shifted over time. A century ago, the leading symbol of orderly information
management was the filing cabinet; by the turn of the millennium, it was Google search. In
the comic strip, Mr. Google sabotages the filing system by spilling papers out of their
“proper” locations. This results in a disorganized pile of papers — just the sort of pile (i.e.,
the web made up of pages) that Google promises to organize, via page rank, and to allow us
to access easily. The chaos Mr. Google creates is the chaos Google promises to manage. The
filing cabinet and the search engine are both organizing principles for the capitalist
management of information, both promising access to vast stores of information at the
touch of our fingertips.
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EDITORS' NOTE

This essay is adapted from The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, which
is being published this month by University of Minnesota Press. It appears here
courtesy of the author and the publisher.

NOTES

1. Quoted in Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 318. Previously Elihu Root served as secretary of
war in the administration of William McKinley, during which he was credited with modernizing

the U.S. Army. ↩

2. Milton Gustafson, “State Department Records in the National Archives: A Profile,” Prologue 2
(1970): 179. In 1910, the state department continue its modernization efforts by adopting a more

comprehensive decimal filing system. ↩

3. Terrence L. Uber, “Creating the Steel Chapel: A Study of Commercial Office Furniture Design in

the United States from 1876–1925” (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 2001), 258. ↩

4. John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 209–33; Allan Sekula, “The Body and the
Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–65; Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer
Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). For
analyses that foreground the materiality of filing systems, see JoAnne Yates, “From Press Book
and Pigeonhole to Vertical Filing: Revolution in Storage and Access Systems for
Correspondence,” Journal of Business Communication 19, no. 3 (1982): 5–26; Cornelia Vismann,
Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2008); Bruno Latour, The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat, trans.
Marina Brilman and Alain Pottage (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Markus Krajewski, Paper
Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929, trans. Peter Krapp (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2011); Shannon Mattern, “Indexing the World of Tomorrow: How the 1939 World’s Fair
Anticipated Our Current Obsession with Urban Data Science and ‘Smart’ Cities,” Places Journal

(February 2016); https://doi.org/10.22269/160202 ↩

5. Gerri Flanzraich, “The Role of the Library Bureau and Gaylord Brothers in the Development of
Library Technology, 1876–1930” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1990), 350–64; Uber, “Creating
the Steel Chapel,” 130–62, 240–88; Alexandra Lange, “White Collar Corbusier: From the Casier to
 the Cités d’affaires,” Grey Room, no. 9 (Fall 2002): 58–79. My research benefited from this

groundbreaking scholarship. ↩

6. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, eds., Signal Traffic: Critical

Studies of Media Infrastructure (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). ↩

7. American Institute of Filing, A Course in Correspondence Filing for Home Study (Boston: Library
Bureau, 1921), 13, Library Bureau Papers, Herkimer County Historical Society, Herkimer, New

York (hereafter Herkimer County Historical Society). ↩

8. Irene Warren, Marion C. Lyons, and Frank C. McClelland, Filing and Indexing with Business

Procedure (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1924), 46. ↩

9. For a relevant history of the Library Bureau, see Gerri Flanzraich, “The Library Bureau and Office

Technology,” Libraries and Culture 28, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 403–29. ↩

10. “History of Vertical Filing,” supplement, L.B. Monthly News, no. 24 (December 1916): 48; Estelle
Hunter, Modern Filing Manual (Rochester, N.Y.: Yawman and Erbe, 1941), 6. In the 1930s, Allen
Chaffee claimed that a filing cabinet prototype was exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and
had received a gold medal. Allen Chaffee, How to File Business Papers and Records: A Practical
Business Manual Dealing with Filing Systems and Equipment in Use Today (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1938), 4. No previous retelling of the Library Bureau origin story had suggested this, nor has
any subsequent archival evidence been found to support his claim. However, the catalog for the
Chicago fair suggests that a filing cabinet was exhibited there. According to the catalog, the
Library Bureau’s exhibits included a “card-case for records of charitable societies.” Quoted in
“Antique Filing Cabinets,” Early Office Museum. Given the origin of this “card case” in a
charitable society’s need to store records as well as the language then used to describe cabinets, it
is likely this is a reference to what would by the end of the decade be called a vertical filing

cabinet. ↩

11. For a list of patents issued to office equipment companies for vertical filing cabinets in the period
1900–1924, see Flanzraich, “Role of the Library Bureau,” 354a–d. On the difficulties involved in
pursuing a patent infringement claim, see Library Bureau, “Boston Salesmen’s Periodical

Meetings 1898–1899,” 227, Herkimer County Historical Society. ↩

12. “The Key on the Cover,” Office Appliances, November 1921, 13. ↩

13. Shaw-Walker, Built Like a Skyscraper (Muskegon, Mich.: Shaw-Walker, 1927), 4–9, Trade Catalog

Collection, Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.) ↩

14. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 957. See also
Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the Twentieth-Century Factory System in the

United States, 1880–1920, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). ↩

15. On affordances, see Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 14–16. ↩

16. Although scholars (including information historians) frequently use the terms information and
knowledge interchangeably, it is important to separate the two. For examples of the latter, see
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge: Harvard Business
School Press, 2002), 119–20; Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age,” in The Future

of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 103–38. ↩

17. By the early 20th century, the term file cabinet had largely replaced filing cabinet, especially in
American usage. In this section I use file cabinet when discussing cabinets from the mid-20th
 century onward; I revert to filing cabinet when referring to cabinets from the first half of the 20th

century. ↩

18. Susan Green, “Miles of Files: A ‘Connected’ Art Exhibit Puts Paperwork in Perspective,” Seven
Days, September 25, 2002; Pamela Polston, “WTF: What’s with the File Cabinet Tower on
Burlington’s Flynn Avenue?,” Seven Days, December 16, 2015. Green’s article describes the
sculpture being put in place in 2001, but all subsequent articles and interviews with Alvarez date

the work to 2002. ↩

19. Emily Corwin, “Will Burlington’s Champlain Parkway Ever Get Built?,” November 15, 2019,
Vermont Public Radio. Jordan Adams, “Very Cool Organizes a File-Cabinet ‘Worship’ Service,”
Seven Days, April 24, 2019. Aidan Quigley, “Federal Decision Delays Champlain Parkway

Construction,” November 26, 2019, VTDigger. ↩

20. Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2012), 78–79. ↩

21. Kafka, 117–18. For analyses of this anxiety in relation to the development of identification
practices, see Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2010); and Lauer, Creditworthy. ↩

22. David Fahrenthold, “Sinkhole of Bureaucracy,” Washington Post, March 22, 2014. Bob Brewin,

“VA’s Backlog of Paper Claims Could Cause a Building Collapse,” Nextgov, August 10, 2012. ↩

23. Nick Levine, “The Nature of the Glut: Information Overload in Postwar America,” History of the

Human Sciences 30, no. 1 (2017): 34–42; 45; https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695116686016 ↩

24. Richard Mander, Gitta Salomon, and Yin Yin Wong, “A ‘Pile’ Metaphor for Supporting Casual
Organization of Information,” in CHI ’92: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems, ed. Penny Bauersfeld, John Bennett, and Gene Lynch (New York:
Association for Computing Machinery, 1992), 627. See also the foundational article in desktop
organization research, Thomas Malone, “How Do People Organize Their Desks? Implications for
the Design of Office Information Systems,” ACM Transactions on Office Systems 1, no. 1 (1983):

99–112. ↩

25. Thomas Haigh, “How Data Got Its Base: Information Storage Software in the 1950s and 1960s,”
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31, no. 4 (2009): 21; Steven Johnson, Interface Culture:
How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (New York: Harper Edge,

1997), 42–50. ↩

26. Victor Kaptelinin and Mary Czerwinski, “Introduction: The Desktop Metaphor and New Uses of
Technology,” in Beyond the Desktop Metaphor: Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments,
ed. Victor Kaptelinin and Mary Czerwinski (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 1. Apple’s success

established the desktop metaphor as the way to present the personal computer as a workspace.

↩
27. Edward W. Briss, “The Integrated Software and User Interface of Apple’s Lisa,” in AFIPS ’84:
Proceedings of the July 9–12, 1984, National Computer Conference, ed. Dennis J. Frailey (New
York: Association for Computing Machinery, 1984), 319–28; Nathan Lineback, “Magic Desk I for
Commodore 64,” Nathan’s Toasty Technology Page. “Magic Desk I—Commodore 64 (NTSC)

[Mess] [Shortplay],” YouTube, posted January 4, 2016. ↩

28. Kaptelinin and Czerwinski, “Introduction,” 2. x ↩

29. Mander et al., “‘Pile’ Metaphor,” 627. More advanced computer users can use file aliases to store

documents in multiple places. ↩

 30. Ted Nelson, “The Unfinished Revolution and Xanadu,” ACM Computer Surveys 31, no. 4es

(December 1999): 5. ↩

31. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 13. ↩

32. Eric Freeman and David Gelernter, “Beyond Lifestreams: The Inevitable Demise of the Desktop

Metaphor,” in Kaptelinin and Czerwinski, Beyond the Desktop Metaphor, 43. ↩

33. King Features Syndicate, “Barney, the File Clerk, Gets Fired. Will He Get the Raise?” Filing and

Office Management, July 1921, 42, 43. ↩

 CITE
Craig Robertson, “The Filing Cabinet,” Places Journal, May 2021. Accessed 25 May 2021.

<https://placesjournal.org/article/the-filing-cabinet-and-20th-century-information-in-

frastructure/>

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Craig Robertson 

Craig Robertson is an associate

professor of media and
communication studies at
Northeastern University in Boston.

University of Minnesota Press 