Lorcan Dempsey laments his failure to find anything in Wikipedia on the Brown [sic] issue system; you remember, the one where one had cardboard pocket-like tickets, as many as one's borrowing entitlement, which were handed over to the library staff to borrow a book. They would take a card from inside the book, put it in the pocket, and file it as a record of the loan. The trouble is Lorcan spells it Brown, whereas it is attributed to Nina E. Browne (note the final e).
This is what Harrod's Librarians Glossary has to say on the matter:
"Browne Book Charging Systems. A system of book charging which is attributed to Nina E. Browne, an American librarian, who described it in 1895. It is, however, very little different from the method adopted by Mr. L.G.Virgo, Librarian of Bradford Public Library. The reader has a limited number of tickets, each of which is available for one book only at a time, and which he gives up when books are borrowed and which are handed back when the books are returned. This simple, reliable and speedy method was replaced in America by the Newark and Detroit methods and others based on them, but, until photo-charging was introduced [oh how my heart flutters, photo-charging! the method used in the first library I ever worked in, Child's Hill, in the London Borough of Barnet, under Mrs Howes and Frank Brudenell in 1978-TR] was the most universally used method in Great Britain. 'Reverse Browne' uses a pocket book-card and a card ticket: this was described by Jacob Schwartz in 1897 and has been in use for a number of years. Since World War Two other methods have taken the place of Browne, but two modifications of this system have enabled it to meet the demands of busier public libraries; these are the Cheque Book Charging Method and the Islington Charging System....[the entry goes on to describe the notorious Gravesend modification-TR]"
Harrod, Leonard Montague
The librarian's glossary of terms used in librarianship and the book crafts 3rd ed
London: André Deutsch, 1971
The interesting thing about Browne is that it left little information behind about a reader's or an item's habits or history. Also it was awfully slow and error-prone, for the consequences of a clumsy assistant or reader knocking a tray of cards onto the floor were catastrophic.
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