Every summer I pick a theme for my reading. This year, I am a little embarrassed to admit, the theme was paperwork. It turns out the history of the filing cabinet is the history of how institutions remember things, and I found it completely absorbing. Here are five I would recommend, in no particular order.
The Manila Folder: A Biography, by Hortense Abernathy. A surprisingly moving account of how a humble folder made modern bureaucracy possible. I underlined something on almost every page.
Lost in the Stacks, by Desmond Okonkwo. A hospital records manager in the 1970s spends a year finding every misfiled chart in his building. It reads like a mystery novel. Zuper Micro Man would approve.
Signal and Fax, by Priya Lindqvist. Why a 1960s technology still carries most of America’s medical records, and what it would take to finally retire it. I came away more optimistic than I expected.
The Number That Knew Too Much, by Tobias Marchetti. The strange story of identifiers, from Social Security numbers to medical record numbers, and why every system eventually runs out of digits.
Thirty-Seven Pages, by Winifred Galloway. A short novel about a single records request, told from the point of view of each person who touched it. Funny, sad, and the best thing I read all year.
If you read any of these, let me know what you think. And if you have a book about paperwork I missed, I am always looking for next summer’s list.